The story “When the emperor was divine” was very different than most of the stories we read this semester. The difference being in the ending, unlike the other stories we’ve read this story doesn’t have a particular ‘happy ending’. In my opinion this fact made the story seem a lot more realistic. One factor that made the story even more real to the readers was the fact that it’s based off of a true event, and also it depicts life so well, with the fact that there is never really a defined happy ending. “When the emperor was divine” talks about a tragic and secretive time in American history.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese, and people of Japanese decent living in the United States were sent to live in internment camps. Just like those in the holocaust except they were work camps, or death camps, they were just places sectioned off specifically for the Japanese. The story focuses on a family consisting of a mother, father, daughter, and son. Although the family and many others were not tortured or beaten, they suffered something of equal damage.
Their freedom was ripped away, and they were deemed different no matter how ‘Americanized’ they had become. I don’t think anyone came out of the internment camps completely alive. I believe a piece of them left once they entered. They all lost a sense of themselves and its evident throughout the text. They were ostracized because of the way they looked and their ancestry. When leaving the camps in my opinion, the lingering question for every Japanese person in the camps was “who am I now?”
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