Ratings

Content Ratings based on a 0-5 scale where
0 = no objectionable content and
5 = an excessive or disturbing level of content

Guide to Rating System

LANGUAGE

VIOLENCE

SEXUAL CONTENT

ADULT THEMES

Ratings Explanation

Language:  The ethnic slurs “Jap” and “Chink” are mentioned; signs that read “No Japs Allowed” posted on businesses.

Violence:  Knowing her dog will starve to death once the family is taken away, a woman kills her dog by hitting him on the head with a shovel and buries him. Japanese-Americans are spat upon and shot at; bricks are thrown through the windows of a train that is carrying Japanese-Americans to the internment camps. A Japanese man is shot dead by a guard at the camp.

Sexual Content:  Brief mention of a girl lying naked with a guard in the back of a truck at the camp. A girl talks about getting her period. Lewd magazines are found in the family’s abandoned house; descriptions of naked men and women and positions they are photographed in.

Adult Themes:  An adolescent girl starts smoking. An unwanted baby is found in the trash. Japanese-Americans are treated like enemies and forced to leave their homes and jobs to live in internment camps until the end of World War II.

Synopsis

It was December, 1941, and the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor. In only a matter of weeks, signs were posted all over the Pacific coast informing people of Japanese ancestry to pack their bags and prepare to leave.  They had been “reclassified”, and overnight went from being fellow American citizens to the slant-eyed enemy (people of Chinese ancestry wore pins or signs that read “I am Chinese” to differentiate themselves from the Japanese). They were relocated to one of several internment camps strewn across the United States until the war ended. Forced to abandon their well-kept homes and gardens, their jobs and places of business, their schools and neighborhoods, they left with all the worldly belongings they could pack in one small suitcase and went to live behind barbed wire fences in shabby barracks in the desert.  Many lost everything they had, and returned three or four years later to nothing, forced to start their lives over and live with the taint of anti-Japanese sentiment that would linger until long after the war had ended. When the Emperor Was Divine tells the story of one such family who was relocated from Berkeley, California to Topaz Mountain, Utah. The story shifts points of view from the quiet, docile mother to those of her two bewildered young children and finally the kindly father who, suspected of being a spy for the Japanese, is yanked by the FBI from his home in the middle of the night in his slippers and sent to live in a prison camp in New Mexico. Eventually the war ends and the reunited family returns to a vandalized home and the scalding looks of once neighborly neighbors. They will never be quite the same again.

I picked up this gem of a novel because I was intrigued to read something about what was never taught to me out of history books growing up. The internment of over 100,000 Japanese Americans, most of whom were American citizens, is one of those incidents in American history that for many years had been quietly swept under the rug. Ms. Otsuka brings it into the light, and her lyrical prose and stark details make this book shine; she never over-dramatizes but writes with restraint and simplicity. The characters never whine about the injustice in their lives (as would clearly–perhaps rightfully so–happen today), they just continue to gaman suru, or persevere, as the Japanese do. What results is luminous and poetic, not tragic or heavy. Well worth reading and recommended (high school and older.)