Thanks for participating in On the Same Page in Shawnee County! This guide was created to help you lead your own When the Emperor Was Divine discussion group. We have collected materials on Japanese internment camps to increase your understanding of the history surrounding When the Emperor Was Divine. This guide also includes some questions to get the discussion started. All you need now is to gather together a group of friends, coworkers, or family members and start talking!

Japanese Internment

Japanese internment. Japan's surprise attack on the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941, caused the United States to enter World War II. It also stirred hostility against Japanese people in the United States. Many Americans associated Japanese Americans with the Japanese pilots who had destroyed U.S. Navy ships.

In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized military commanders to designate military areas from which "any or all persons may be excluded." The military chose to establish curfews for Japanese Americans, to remove all people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast and southern Arizona, and to confine them in detention camps until their loyalty could be determined. About 110,000 Japanese were confined in 10 detention camps scattered over seven states: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. They lost their homes and their jobs as a result.

Today many scholars believe these restrictive measures against Japanese Americans were both unnecessary and discriminatory. However, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the curfew in 1943 and the evacuation order in 1944, both on grounds of military necessity. But in another decision in 1944, the court ruled that holding admittedly loyal U.S. citizens in detention camps against their will was unlawful.

About 800 young Japanese Americans from the camps volunteered and served in the U.S. armed forces during the war. Most of them were part of the U.S. Army's 442nd Regimental Combat Unit. The unit fought bravely in Europe and suffered many casualties. Public opinion changed as Japanese Americans showed their loyalty to the nation.

In 1948, Congress passed the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act. The law authorized a maximum payment of $2,500 to individual Japanese Americans as compensation for what they had lost while confined.

In 1980, Representative Norman Y. Mineta of California and Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii sponsored a bill that resulted in the establishment of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. After holding numerous hearings across the country, the commission recommended that the president offer a national apology to Japanese Americans. It also called for a compensatory payment of $20,000 to surviving Japanese Americans who had been in the camps. These and other commission recommendations became law under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

Shortly after the United States entered World War II, approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans and resident aliens on the West Cost were rounded up and sent to internment camps in desolate parts of the West. They were held there like prisoners for two or three years, their only crime being of Japanese descent. Their incarceration was not only racist, but illegal and unethical.

After the Japanese air force's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, hysteria swept over much of the western United States. Rumors flew that the Japanese were planning a land invasion or were going to bomb San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, who was in charge of the security of the western United States, did nothing to calm the situation; in fact he inflamed it by recommending to the U.S. War Department that "alien subjects of enemy nations" be moved to the interior of America. This euphemism for the Japanese found a friendly ear in Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, who strongly backed DeWitt and shared his belief that American citizens with Japanese ancestry would always be loyal to Japan.

DeWitt reported that ethnic Japanese were signaling to ships in the Pacific Ocean, but when the Federal Communications Commission investigated, it found that no signals had occurred. DeWitt also charged that the Japanese-Americans were committing espionage and sabotage, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) could find no evidence of any subversion, and no documented evidence for it has been found to this day. However, by the end of December 1941, as the hysteria mounted, the ethnic Japanese were ordered to surrender their cameras, binoculars, short-wave radios, and any weapons they owned. The State Personnel Board of California decreed that no person whose ethnicity was that of a country at war with the United States could be hired for the state's civil service. The army designated 12 restricted areas in which "enemy aliens" had to observe a curfew and remain within five miles of their homes, except when traveling to or from work. Congressmen from the western states wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt advising that the Japanese be removed, and DeWitt testified before a congressional committee that the need for this was urgent.

Although the War Department, U.S. Naval Intelligence, and the FBI were unable to verify the allegations that the ethnic Japanese were a threat, Roosevelt gave in to the political pressure and on February 19, 1942, signed Executive Order 9066, which permitted the U.S. Army to relocate and intern whomever it considered dangerous. DeWitt established a military area in the western half of Washington, Oregon, and California and ordered, "in the interest of military necessity," that all persons of Japanese ancestry be removed from it.

Japanese-American families were given only a few days' notice in which to sell their homes, businesses, farms, fishing boats, and cars. Many suffered severe financial losses. They were herded into fairgrounds and racetracks where they were held for months while barracks were hastily constructed in 10 camps scattered from the swamps of Arkansas to the mountains of Wyoming and the deserts of California. The camps were surrounded with high barbed-wire fences, and in the watchtowers at the corners, army guards stood day and night with machine guns aimed inward. More than 60 percent of the prisoners were American citizens, and of the 40,000 who were under the age of 19, 99.3 percent were native-born.

There was a second scandal within this scandalous episode. In 1942, three young Japanese-American men were arrested and clapped in jail for violating the curfew or being in a "military area." They appealed their convictions all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost. More than 40 years later, the men were still trying to clear their names, and their cases were reopened. Much research revealed that in 1943 and 1944, U.S. government lawyers had fraudulently concealed from the Supreme Court documents that contradicted their contention that the order to intern Japanese-Americans had been required for military necessity and the threat of disloyalty. One of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, Peter Irons, declared this was "a legal scandal without precedent in the history of American law. Never before has evidence emerged that shows a deliberate campaign to present tainted records to the Supreme Court."

During the war, few Americans were aware that thousands of their fellow citizens had been imprisoned without trials and were languishing in bleak camps. It was a well-kept secret, but over time the truth began to surface. In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford publicly proclaimed that the wartime detention of the Japanese-Americans had been wrong. In 1980, Congress appointed a prestigious panel to investigate the entire matter. The report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied, assailed the action as a "grave injustice, which was unwarrented by anything remotely resembling military necessity. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions," the commission found, "were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."

Afterward Congress debated legislation providing for restitution and apologies for the Japanese-American internment survivors. In 1988 a bill cleared both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives calling for apologies and $20,000 tax-free payments to each of the approximately 60,000 survivors of the World War II internment camps. On August 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the bill, saying that "no payment can make up for those lost years, so what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor, for here we admit wrong." The blot on American history will remain, nonetheless.

Kohn, George Childs. "Japanese-American internment camps." The New Encyclopedia of American Scandal. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2001. Facts On File, Inc. American History Online. <www.factsonfile.com>.

Topaz

Topaz was the site of one of 10 American concentration camps that housed Japanese Americans forcibly removed from the West Coast states during World War II. Some basic data on Topaz is presented below in tabular form:

Official name: Central Utah Relocation Center
Location: Millard County, Utah, near Abraham, 140 miles south of Salt Lake City
Land: Mix of public domain land, land which had reverted to the county for non-payment of taxes and land purchased from private parties
Size: 19,800 acres
Climate: Temperatures ranged from 106 degrees in summer to -30 degrees in winter; located at an elevation of 4,600 feet, the region was subject to a constant wind that resulted in frequent dust storms
Origin of camp population: Mostly from Alameda (3,679), San Francisco (3,370), and San Mateo (722) Counties
Via "assembly centers": Nearly all (7,676) came from Tanforan " Assembly Center"
Rural/Urban: Overwhelmingly urban
Peak population: 8,130
Date of peak: March 17, 1943
Opening date: September 11, 1942
Closing date: October 31, 1945
Project director(s): Charles F. Ernst (9/42 to 6/44) and Luther T. Hoffman (6/44 to 10/45)
Community analysts: Oscar F. Hoffman and Weston LaBarre
JERS fieldworkers: Doris Hayashi and Frederick Hoshiyama
Newspaper: Topaz Times (September 17, 1942–August–31, 1945)
Percent who answered question 28 of the loyalty questionnaire positively: 89.4
Number and percentage of eligible male citizens inducted directly into armed forces: 472 (7.3 percent)
Miscellaneous characteristics: Topaz featured an organized protest against the registration questionnaire, in which a petition was circulated demanding the restoration of rights as a prerequisite for registration. Issei (Japanese immigrant) chef James Hatsuaki Wakasa was shot to death by a guard on April 11, 1943. The literary and arts magazine Trek was produced here.

Discussion Questions

1. 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?
   
2. Why does Otsuka choose to reveal the family's reason for moving–and the father's arrest–so indirectly and so gradually? What is the effect when the reason becomes apparent?
   
3. 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." The dog she has to kill is called "White Dog." 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?
   
4. 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?
   
5. When they arrive at the camp in the Utah desert–"a city of tar-paper barracks behind a barbed-wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain"–the boy thinks he sees his father everywhere: "wherever the boy looked he saw him: Daddy, Papa, Oto-san." Why is the father's absence such a powerful presence in the novel? How do the mother and daughter think of him? How would their story have been different had the family remained together?
   
6. 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." What does this passage reveal about the damage racism does to children? What does it reveal about the way children try to make sense of their experience?
   
7. 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." 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?
   
8. 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?
   
9. 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?
   
10. When they are at last reunited with their father, the family doesn't know how to react. "Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father's place." Why do they regard him as a stranger? How has be been changed by his experience? In what ways does this reunion underscore the tragedy of America's decision to imprison Japanese Americans during the war?
    
11. After the father returns home, he never once discusses the years he'd been away, and his children don't ask. "We didn't want to know. . . . All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget." Why do the children feel this way? Why would their father remain silent about such an important experience? In what ways does the novel fight against this desire to forget?
    
12. When the Emperor Was Divine concludes with a confession. Who is speaking in this final chapter? Is the speech entirely ironic? Why has Otsuka chosen to end the novel in this way? What does the confession imply about our ability to separate out the "enemy," the "other," in our midst?