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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in When the Emperor was Divine, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism
The Model Minority
Imprisonment and Freedom
Social Class and the American Dream
Assimilation and Loss of Identity
Inscrutability and the Unknown
Summary
Analysis
In third person, the opening chapter follows the perspective of an unnamed, Japanese American character: the woman. In Berkeley, California, on a sunny day in the spring of 1942, the forty-year-old woman sees a sign in the post office window. There are signs just like this one plastered all over town, all of them having appeared overnight. She reads the sign from top to bottom and then goes home to pack.
After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the forced evacuation and internment of all people of Japanese ancestry living in the United States. The government feared that Japanese Americans would side with Japan during the war and engage in acts of sabotage and espionage against the United States. The chapter title refers to the official name given to signs just like the one the woman reads. These signs announced that the U.S. Army would deport all Japanese Americans to military camps, thus commencing Japanese American internment. From the start, the woman (like all the main characters) is unnamed. This highlights the universality of the story, but also suggests how white Americans saw all Japanese Americans as essentially the same—suspicious characters without individual identities.
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Nine days later, the woman is still not finished packing. She pulls on her white silk gloves and goes to the local hardware store to buy packing supplies. She brings a ball of twine and tape to the counter to pay, but the owner of the store, Joe Lundy, says that she can pay him later. As he says this, Lundy vigorously tries to clean a stain from the side of the register. He then gives the woman two candies for her two children. The woman wishes she had gotten to know the storekeeper better during all the years she has been coming to his store. She thanks Lundy by name before leaving for home.
Since white gloves were associated with the middle class at this time, the woman’s gloves reveal her class status. Though the woman’s economic class will shift over the course of the novel, this early scene firmly cements her initial role in the middle class. The stain is also the first major symbol to appear in the novel. As one of the United States’ greatest shames, Japanese American internment will mar, or stain, American history forever. While Lundy’s friendliness suggests that he does not believe the woman is a dangerous spy, his vain attempt to erase the stain symbolically suggests that all white Americans are “stained” by internment, even those who disagreed with the evacuations but did nothing to stop them.
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When the woman gets home, she finishes packing: she rolls up the Oriental rug in the living room, takes down the mirrors, and plants the tiny bonsai tree in the yard. She goes upstairs to pack up her son’s stamp collection, his comic books, and his toys. She only leaves out his baseball glove and his clothes so that he’ll remember to put them in his suitcase later. In the kitchen, she takes down a picture of Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners, which shows peasants bent over an endless field of wheat. She feels bothered by the picture and wants to tell the peasants to “Look up, look up!” She decides that she always hated the painting and throws it into the garbage.
The woman packs everything in her house into boxes and carries them into the sunroom. She locks the doors with two padlocks and then goes outside and lights a cigarette. The house is empty expect for the piano and the furniture that she can’t transfer to the locked room. Tomorrow, she thinks, she and her children will be leaving their home. She doesn’t know where they’re going, or for how long. From reading the sign outside the post office, the woman knows she can bring clothes and bedding but not much else. She cannot bring pets. She has given their cat to the neighbors. She caught the chicken, which had been running wild in the yard since the fall, snapped its neck, and served it for dinner.
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In the kitchen, the woman prepares some eggs and salmon in a bowl and lays it out on the front porch. She claps her hands a few times and an old white dog comes limping out of the trees. “Eat up, White Dog,” she says. The woman thinks about how the grass hasn’t been mowed for months. Her husband usually mowed, but she hasn’t seen him since he was arrested last December as an “Alien Enemy” and transferred to a detention camp at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.
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The woman puts on her gloves and with the twine she bought from the store, she ties the dog to the big tree in the backyard. She tells the dog to play dead and it rolls over. She then takes a shovel and brings it down swiftly onto the dog’s head, killing it. Beneath the tree, the woman digs a hole for the dog and drops him in along with her white gloves, which are now stained and no longer white. The woman feels very tired, and her back is drenched in sweat. She plucks a leaf from the tree and goes back inside the house.
When her children come home from school, the woman reminds them they’re “going on a trip” tomorrow. The girl, who is ten, says she knows. Like a typical American girl, the girl likes boys, candy, and Dorothy Lamour. She wears Mary Jane shoes and her favorite song on the radio is “Don’t Fence Me In.” The boy is seven and he wears a black fedora tilted to one side of his head. The hat was a present from his father, and he wears it everyday. The boy opens the door to the backyard and calls White Dog’s name, but the dog doesn’t appear. The boy says that the dog is getting deafer all the time, and then he heads back inside.
As they sit down for dinner, the girl looks into her spoon and asks the woman if anything is wrong with her face. The girl says that people stared at her all day. The woman says she looks fine, that she has a fine nose and a fine set of teeth. The girl then asks if her mother would tell if there were something wrong with her face. The woman responds by looking the girl in the eyes and saying she has the most beautiful face that she has ever seen.
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After the children go to sleep, the woman takes their pet macaw from the birdcage. The bird says, “Get over here,” and the woman thinks its voice sounds like her husband’s. She imagines her husband with an arm flung over his eyes, lying on a cot in a tent at Fort Sam Houston. The woman kisses the bird on its head before opening the window and placing it on the ledge outside. When she closes the window, the bird taps on the pane with its claw, and then flies into a tree. The woman takes a broom and goes outside, shaking the branches and yelling at the bird to leave. The bird flies off into the night.
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The woman takes a bottle of plum wine, sits down on the floor, and drinks. Without the bird in the cage, the house feels empty to her. After a few sips, she begins to laugh at the ridiculous emptiness of her house, but her laughter soon turns to tears. She wipes her mouth with a white cloth and her lips leave a dark stain. In a few hours, the three of them will go to the Civil Control Station near the First Congregational Church. They will pin their identification number to their collars, climb onto the bus, and “go to wherever it was they had to go.”
