Reader's Guide

About the Book
About the Author
Questions for the Reader
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About the Book

Julie Otsuka's quietly disturbing novel opens with a woman reading a sign in a post office window. It is Berkeley, California, the spring of 1942. Pearl Harbor has been attacked, the war is on, and though the precise message on the sign is not revealed, its impact on the woman who reads it is immediate and profound.

It is, in many ways she cannot yet foresee, a sign of things to come. She readies herself and her two young children for a journey that will take them to the high desert plains of Utah and into a world that will shatter their illusions forever.

They travel by train and gradually the reader discovers that all on board are Japanese American, that the shades must be pulled down at night so as not to invite rock-throwing, and that their destination is an internment camp where they will be imprisoned "for their own safety" until the war is over.

With stark clarity and an unflinching gaze, Otsuka explores the inner lives of her main characters — the mother, daughter, and son — as they struggle to understand their fate and long for the father whom they have not seen since he was whisked away, in slippers and handcuffs, on the evening of Pearl Harbor.

Moving between dreams, memories, and sharply emblematic moments, When the Emperor Was Divine reveals the dark underside of a period in American history that, until now, has been left largely unexplored in American fiction.

(Excerpt from Penguin promotional materials.)

Historical Background

Between 1901 and 1907, almost 110,000 Japanese immigrated to the United States, drawn by promises of ready work and worsening economic conditions in their homeland. Although many originally came as dekaseginin — "temporary sojourners" — work was plentiful and some of the newcomers stayed on and started families. These were the issei — Japanese of the first generation. Their children were called nisei.

Very quickly they encountered antagonism. Although Japanese made up less than two percent of all immigrants to the United States, newspapers trumpeted an "invasion." The Asiatic Exclusion League pressed for legislation to halt all Japanese immigration. Politicians ran for office on anti-Japanese platforms. In 1924 Congress passed the National Origins Act, which banned all immigration from Japan.

Following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, hostility turned into paranoia and paranoia was codified into law. Japanese who had lived in America for thirty years found themselves accused of spying. The day after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Treasury Department ordered all Japanese-owned businesses closed and all issei bank accounts frozen. The government had already compiled lists of Japanese whose loyalties might be suspect, and more than a thousand businessmen, community leaders, priests, and educators were arrested up and down the West Coast.

Japanese homes were searched for contraband. Their telephone service was cut off. One newspaper columnist wrote: "I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. . . . Herd 'em up, pack 'em off and give 'em the inside room in the badlands . . . let 'em be pinched, hurt, and hungry."

In February 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which empowered the government to remove "any and all" persons of Japanese ancestry from sensitive military areas in four western states. Those affected by the order had only days in which to evacuate. They were compelled to sell their land and businesses for a fraction of their value, or to lease them to neighbors who would later refuse to pay their rent. All told, some 120,000 Japanese Americans were deported from their homes to hastily built camps such as Tule Lake and Manzanar, where they lived behind barbed wire for the duration of the war.

Neither Germans nor Italians living in this country were subject to similar restrictions, and recently declassified documents reveal that the Japanese population was never considered a serious threat to American security. In all of World War II, no person of Japanese ancestry living in the United States, Alaska, or Hawaii was ever charged with any act of espionage or sabotage. As one nisei later wrote, the victims of Executive Order 9066 were people whose "only crime was their face."

In 1988, the U.S. government formally apologized to Japanese citizens who had been deprived of their civil liberties during World War II.

This information was gathered from Lauren Kessler, Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese-American Family. New York, Random House, 1993.

About the Author

Born in Palo Alto in 1962, Julie Otsuka lived in California until she left for college. She earned her BA from Yale University in 1984 and her MFA from Columbia University in 1999. New York City is her current home.

After pursuing a career as a painter, she turned to fiction at age 30. One of her short stories was included in Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops 1998, edited by Carol Shields. When the Emperor Was Divine is her first novel, started as part of her thesis at Columbia. She began the first chapter with no idea that it would evolve into a whole novel.

The subject material is very personal for Otsuka because her own family was interned during WWII. Her grandfather was arrested by the FBI the day after Pearl Harbor and her mother, then 11 years old, and her uncle and grandmother were sent to Topaz, Utah for the duration of the war. Otsuka says that rather than using her own family stories for material, she did a lot of research because her mother doesn't have clear memories of camp. She would tell small, humorous stories about being interned, but otherwise "camp" was not mentioned. Otsuka says of her novel: "I wanted to write a novel about real people... their experience is universal not only for Japanese Americans, but for people of any ethnic group. All throughout history people have been rounded up and sent away into exile. The predicament of the family in my novel... is that of ordinary people caught up in the extraordinary."

Julie Otsuka was a winner of the sixth annual Asian American Literary Award in 2003 and a 2004 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. Ernest Hemingway is her favorite author and biggest early influence, and she also enjoys the works of Richard Ford, Rick Bass and Cormac McCarthy. Otsuka's current project is a novel that continues the exploration of some themes found in When the Emperor Was Divine.

"I wrote a good part of Emperor in my neighborhood café. I have a favorite seat, way in back in the corner, and I've been sitting there for years. Writing is an extremely lonely pursuit, and there's something comforting about being out in a public place, surrounded by people you know and see every day — the waitresses, the other regulars who are also working on books or screenplays or musical scores of their own. Everyone's in there just making stuff up. And eating pastry, too, of course."

"I had no idea when I started writing 'Evacuation Order No. 19' — the first chapter of my novel — that it would turn into something larger. I'd never written anything serious before, only comic fiction, and had never intended to take on the subject of the war. But the character of the woman in the story simply took up residence, one day, in my head: I saw her standing alone on a street, reading the evacuation notice for the first time, and then I followed her home to see who she was, and what she might do after that."

"I came to New York to be a painter, and failed. My background in the visual arts, however, has definitely influenced the way I work — the process of painting is not all that different from that of writing. You wake up, go to your studio or your desk, you sketch out a scene, it's all wrong, you make it a little warmer, a little cooler, it's still wrong.... Because I'd failed as a painter, I felt that I had nothing to lose when I began writing, which made it easier, somehow."

"About the Book" and "About the Author" information excerpted from: Barnes & Noble and GoldenSea.com and materials provided by the author.

Questions for the Reader

When the Emperor Was Divine gives readers an intimate view of the fate of Japanese Americans during World War II. In what ways does the novel deepen our existing knowledge of this historical period? What does it give readers that a straightforward historical investigation cannot?
Otsuka skillfully places subtle but significant details in her narrative. When the mother goes to Lundy's hardware store, she notices a "dark stain" on the register "that would not go away" [p. 5]. The dog she has to kill is called "White Dog" [see pp. 9-12]. Her daughter's favorite song on the radio is "Don't Fence Me In." How do these details, and others like them, point to larger meanings in the novel?
What is the point of the author's sprinkling allusions to cultural Americana — J. C. Penney's, a painted wooden Indian (!), comic books — before we find out why the mother has killed the family dog and is packing.
In general the novel's style might be described as understated, even when events and associated feelings are obviously painful. How does the final chapter, "Confession," differ in tone and content? The first person has not been used previously: we see events through the eyes of the mother, the daughter, the son or a collective "we." Who is the "I" of the Confession? Is this an effective ending for the novel?
Why does Otsuka refer to her characters as "the woman," "the girl," "the boy," and "the father," rather than giving them names? How does this lack of specific identities affect the reader's relationship to the characters?
Much of When the Emperor Was Divine is told in short, episodic, loosely connected scenes — images, conversations, memories, dreams, and so on — that move between past and present and alternate points of view between the mother, daughter and son. Why has Otsuka chosen to structure her narrative in this way? What effects does it allow her to achieve?
When the boy wonders why he's in the camp, he worries that "he'd done something horribly, terribly wrong. . . . It could be anything. Something he'd done yesterday — chewing the eraser off his sister's pencil before putting it back in the pencil jar — or something he'd done a long time ago that was just now catching up with him" [p. 57]. What does this passage reveal about the damaging effects of racism on children? What does it reveal about the way children try to make sense of their experience?
In the camp, the prisoners are told they've been brought there for their "own protection," and that "it was all in the interest of national security. It was a matter of military necessity. It was an opportunity for them to prove their loyalty" [p. 70]. Why, and in what ways, are these justifications problematic? What do they reveal about the attitude of the American government toward Japanese Americans? How would these justifications appear to those who were taken from their homes and placed behind fences for the duration of the war?
In the atmosphere following the war, in which many Americans were tortured in Japanese prison camps, the son and daughter find themselves caught between self-hate and an ultra-polite "How to Behave in the Outside World" attitude. Do you see any connection between these opposed feelings and attitudes? Do you see any parallels in our culture now? Have you experienced them yourself?
After the family is released from the camp, what instructions are they given? How do they regard themselves? How does America regard them? In what ways have they been damaged by their internment?
Anybody can profile. The boy in this novel knew a few things about China (p.76) and can perform a caricature of a Chinese boy (p. 87). Then and now, comedians can provide other examples. What does our laughter mean, if we laugh? If it comes, what does our laughter come from?
When it comes to our view of other citizens of the planet, what is the difference between fear and hate? Or isn't there any?
Which basic rights do you believe should be protected by law? Under what conditions, if any, might it be justifiable to violate a citizen's legal rights?
Can you give an example(s) of recent legal decisions that might be considered unjust and of current situations in which government is mistreating people?

Reader's Guide

About the Book

Historical Background

About the Author

Questions for the Reader

Related links and information