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Chapter 2
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
This chapter is told through the perspective of the boy. At the beginning of their internment, the boy thinks he sees his father in the faces of the other adult male prisoners. Everyone looks alike to him: black hair, slanted eyes, thin lips, yellow skin, high cheekbones. But whenever he calls out for his father, the men turn around and the boy realizes they are not his father. When he sees these strangers’ faces, he thinks that they all seem unknowable and inscrutable.
The boy’s description of the Japanese prisoners shows that he’s assimilated the prevalent racist beliefs about Japanese people. Using racially insensitive language, the boy expresses the stereotype that “all Asian people look alike.” Additionally, their perceived “inscrutability” was the exact reason why the U.S. government locked up innocent Japanese Americans citizens in the first place. Since the government could never know for sure the loyalties of these citizens (and it also considered them inherently foreign, alien, and “inscrutable”), it just incarcerated them all.
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The woman, the girl, and the boy are assigned a room in a barrack not far from the fence. There is a window above the boy’s bed, and when he looks out he sees the rows of barracks and the guard towers where soldiers carry machine guns. On the first day in the camp, his mother tells him to never touch the fences, and to never to say the Emperor’s name aloud. In defiance of his mother’s warning, the boy sometimes walks past the guard towers, pulls his hat down over his head, and whisper the Emperor’s name: Hirohito. Hirohito. Hirohito.
In Japanese culture of the time, the Emperor was considered divine like a god. The woman knows that if the guards hear the boy say the Emperor’s name, they will be suspicious that the boy and his family are allied with Japan and the divine Emperor. As a small act of resistance, then, the boy repeats the Emperor’s name as a way of holding onto his heritage and cultural identity even as the government tries to demonize it or strip it away.
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Most days in the camp consist of just waiting. Waiting for the mail, for news, for meals, for one day to end and the next to begin. The man scrubbing the dishes in the mess hall had formerly been a sales manager in an import-export business, the janitor had owned a small nursery, and the cook had always been a cook. One evening, the woman is carrying a bucket of water back to the barracks when she runs into her former maid, Mrs. Ueno. The maid immediately takes the bucket from the woman and helps her bring it to the barracks. The woman tells Ms. Ueno that she doesn’t work for her here, and that they’re all equals now, but the former maid doesn’t listen.
At night, the boy often wakes up, wondering where he is and why he’s there. He thinks he must have done something terribly wrong to get his family put in this place. Other times he thinks he’s still dreaming and that he’ll wake up to find his father making breakfast in the kitchen.
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Every few days, letters arrive from the father. Sometimes, entire sentences are cut out by the censors, but they are always signed, “From Papa, With Love.” The boy remembers his father as a small, handsome man with delicate hands. He was always polite and when he walked into a room he softly closed the door behind him. He knew which restaurants would serve their family lunch and which barbers would cut their hair. He said the best thing about America was the jelly doughnut.
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The boy thinks that the dust is everywhere. Dust gets into your hair, pants, bed, and even your dreams. One night, the boy writes his name in the dust on the table in their room in the barracks. The next morning, he wakes up to find that his name is gone.
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In early Autumn, farm recruiters arrive to sign up the prisoners up to help harvest crops. When the prisoners come back the following season, they say that they would never go out there again. They were shot at, spit on, and denied entrance to diners, theaters, and stores. They say that it is better inside the camp.
Every week the people in the camp hear new rumors. They fear that they will be sterilized, stripped of their citizenship, taken out to sea and executed, deported to Japan, or given over to the Chinese for safekeeping. The soldiers tell them that they were brought to the camp as a matter of national security, and as an opportunity to prove their loyalty.
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In a recurring dream, the boy always sees a wooden door. The door is the size of a pillow. Behind that door there is another door, and behind the second door there is a picture of the Emperor. No one was allowed to see the picture because the Emperor was divine, a god. In the dream, the boy is always about to open the second door when something goes wrong: the doorknob falls off, or he has to bend over to tie his shoe. Sometimes, a bell rings and he wakes up to find his father still absent.
Three FBI agents had come for the father after midnight, months before. They had taken him out of the house while he was still in his slippers. The next day, the woman lit a bonfire in the yard and burned all the letters from their family in Japan, the kimonos, and photographs of their uncle who had been a general in the Emperor’s army. She burned the Japanese flag and the records of Japanese opera. For the children’s lunch, she packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches rather than rice balls. She told them to say they were Chinese, not Japanese.
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The only thing the boy knew about China was that people wore their hairs in long braids, hobbled on broken feet, and that they were so poor they ate dogs. One day before they left for the camps, a white man had stopped the boy on the street and asked, “Chink or Jap?” The boy answered, “Chink,” and ran away as fast as he could. Only when he got far enough away did he turn around and yell, “Jap! I’m a Jap!” But the man was already gone. A few days later, the signs appeared saying all Japanese had to pack up their things and leave.
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Whenever the boy thinks of his father, he imagines him at sundown leaning against a fence in a camp for dangerous enemy aliens. He likes to think of his dad as an outlaw, wearing boots and riding a big horse. Then the boy feels ashamed that the FBI agents led his father away in his bathrobe and slippers, and the image of his father as a cowboy disappears.
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In late November, the army plants full-grown trees at the camp. As the woman looks at the trees from the barrack room window, she says that the soil is too alkaline and the trees will be dead by winter. She then tells the boy that she lost an earring on the train. She says that sometimes things disappear and there’s no getting them back. She then turns back to the window and says she had no business wearing those earrings, “no business at all.”
In winter, the temperatures drop to ten degrees. One day, the boy taps the girl’s arm while she is looking at her reflection in the mirror. He asks her where the army gets the meat they serve in the mess hall. Annoyed at being disturbed, the girl puckers her lips and says the army rounds up the wild horses, like the ones the boy saw on the train, and shoots them. Over the last few months, the girl has been spending less time with family. She eats all her meals with her friends, smokes cigarettes, explores the camp past curfew, and ignores the boy when he is around.
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While the girl withdraws from the family, the woman withdraws almost completely into herself. The woman spends all day inside, staring at the stoves for hours with an opened book on her lap. At times she stares at her hands, as if surprised to see them still there, and then says that she doesn’t know if she’s awake or asleep. Worried for his mother, the boy tries to comfort her by telling her that she is awake.
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One day, the woman says she cannot bear the endless waiting. She hangs a white sheet around her cot and sleeps away the days, dreaming of her childhood in Japan. When she is awake, she lies on the cot and tells the boy of her dreams. For the first time in months, the boy thinks he sees his mother smile when she tells him of the bamboo fishing poles her father used when fishing for trout.
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In February, a team of army recruiters arrive looking for volunteers to join the military. They give out a loyalty questionnaire to everyone. When one man says he is not willing to serve in the armed forces wherever he is ordered, he is sent with his wife to a different camp for the “disloyals.” In response, the woman tells the children that they shouldn’t cause trouble because the “nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” Loyalty, disloyalty, allegiance, and obedience are just words for her. She tells them that the most important thing is staying together, and staying in their home in America.
All the trees die at the beginning of spring, and soon afterward a man is shot dead near the barbed-wire fence. The guard on duty said the man was trying to escape, but a friend of the dead man says otherwise—the friend claims to have seen a rare flower just outside the fence where the man was shot, and believes that the man had just been reaching out to pick the flower. At the funeral service for the man, the boy wonders what would have happened if the man had picked the flower: exploding ships, columns of black smoke, planes falling out of the sky.
When the following summer arrives, street signs with the names of trees appear throughout the camp. Seeing the signs suddenly appear, the woman tells the boy and girl with resignation that it doesn’t look like their family will be leaving anytime soon. The girl responds that at least they now know where they are.
During the heat of the summer, the boy traces an SOS in the ground, but before anyone could see it, he wipes the letters away. Late at night in his cot, the boy imagines his father arriving at the camp with a single white pearl, asking whom it belonged to. Then the boy imagines sitting next to his father on his cot. Pulling out his pipe, his father would lean back in the cot and ask the boy to tell him everything he had missed.
