Theme Of Inhumanity In Otsuka's When The Emperor Was Divine

War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War by John W. Dower centered around the war in Pacific in World War Two in which the two main antagonists were narrowed to United States and Japan, rather than Allied and Axis Power. The author divided the book into four parts. Part one classified the war as a race war and provided proof and explanation supporting this argument. Part two and part three explored and explained the roots of the racism, sentimentalism that Americans held against Japanese, and vice versa, respectively. Part four summarized the casualties as well as circumstances that countries faced postwar, and explained how extreme prejudices had dispersed so quickly immediately at war end.

Japanese American families were sent to internment camps located at a desert in Utah almost in less than 24 hours during World War ll. It was supposed to be luxurious and a dream, yet it was the complete opposite. In the book, When the emperor was divine, Julie Otsuka describes each character and their stories through different points of views. She tells their story by recounting each of the main character's emotional experiences while showing the life of Japanese Americans and how they were labeled in others eyes. Otsuka writes not only about the venture of being taken to an internment camp, but how each character changes in the process. Through each person comes a story and why they changed into somewhat the opposite of their

He was finally free, no joy filled his heart but abandonment was drowning it. How dangerous is indifference to humankind as it pertains to suffering and the need for conscience understanding when people are faced with unjust behaviors? Elie Wiesel is an award winning author and novelist who has endured and survived hardships. One of the darkest times in history, a massacre of over six million Jews, the Holocaust and Hitler himself. After the Holocaust he went on and wrote the internationally acclaimed memoir “Night,” in which he spoke out against persecution and injustice across the world. In the compassionate yet pleading speech, ¨Perils of Indifference,¨ Elie Wiesel analyzes the injustices that himself and others endured during the twentieth century, as well as the hellish acts of the Holocaust through effective rhetorical choices.

Because many people easily empathize with animals, novelists sometimes use animals as symbols in their writings to enhance the emotional connection with the reader. In When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka uses wild and domestic animals to symbolize the confinement her main characters face. White Dog is a symbol of how the main characters leave their innocent past behind as they go to the internment camp. The freedom of the wild horses symbolizes the confinement of the protagonists. The tortoise represents the hope the characters can find, even in confinement.

Julie Otsuka’s novel When the Emperor was Divine leads the reader through the journey of one family that represents many as they are placed in an internment camp for the crime of being Japanese. Otsuka brings to light the persecution of Japanese-Americans through her use of symbols prominent throughout the book. Some of the most important being the symbol of stains, their family dog, and horses. Each has a double-meaning pointing towards the theme of widespread racism. Racism that led many Japanese-Americans into believing that they were guilty.

The novel when the emperor was divine by Julia Otsuka shows the lives of a Japanese family during World War II, and the struggles they endure. These struggles were shared among many Japanese families in the U.S. during this time. The hardships this family faces change their personalities drastically and plays with there grasp on the real world.

Throughout the history of mankind, many genocides have occurred around the world because there is much hatred among specific kinds of people. A genocide is the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. An example of a genocide in Germany is the Holocaust where Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, showed the Jews’ experience from the horrors, tortures, and killings in the death camps. At the same time, a mass execution was happening in Nanjing, China, where the Japanese soldiers were slaughtering and torturing thousands of the Chinese. Both the Jews from Night and the Chinese in the “Nanking Massacre” had suffered the elements of cruelty from execution methods and their torture such

The Japanese-American author, Julie Otsuka, wrote the book When the Emperor was Divine. She shares her relative and all Japanese Americans life story while suffering during World War II, in internment camps. She shares with us how her family lived before, during, and after the war. She also shares how the government took away six years of Japanese-American lives, falsely accusing them of helping the enemy. She explains in great detail their lives during the internment camp, the barbed wired fences, the armed guards, and the harsh temperatures. When they returned home from the war they did not know what to believe anymore. Either the Americans, which imprisoned them falsely, or the emperor who they have been told constantly not to believe, for the past six years imprisoned. Japanese-Americans endured a great setback, because of what they experienced being locked away by their own government.

In the memoir Night, the narrator Elie Wiesel recounts the moment when he was informed and then later thrown into the horrors of Hitler's wrath. When Moshie the Beadle came back he proclaimed “Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns” ( Wiesel 6). This shows inhumanity because the nazis are killing kids in front of their parents. They are able to kill without hesitation or remorse. As the author describes his experiences, many other examples of inhumanity are revealed. Two significant themes related to inhumanity discussed in the book Night by Elie Wiesel are the loss of faith and the loss of compassion.

Mitsuye Yamada in her thirty-six line poem “To the Lady” (1243) tries to address the question which was asked from the lady in San Francisco about the injustice the Japanese Americans experienced in the United States concentration camps during World War II. She asked “why did the Japanese Americans let the government put them in those camps without protest?” (Yamada 1243) As Mitsuye think about the question, she rewrite her experience in an imagery conversation with the lady from San Francisco.

In Julie Otsuka’s novel When the Emperor was Divine, a Japanese family living in America is taken to an internment camp due to suspicions of treason. From the point at which their father is taken away to their return home, the family has their identity eroded. Otsuka represents this loss of the family’s identity through their fear of being different, and their names.

Through both the book Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell and Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, the issue of human degradation due to unjust or socially inequitable practices is used to connect with the values and beliefs of their respective audiences. This is done through the use of a despotic government controlling its populace, the guilt and paranoia following an action labelled as wrong, or actually wrong, and using women as a driving force for a man’s actions.

The root of discrimination founds on the lack of similarities. Everyone is different in some ways, but dehumanization allows exploitation of the differences for self interest and satisfaction. Human history is littered with tainted footprints of prejudice and discrimination, and they all contain one thing in common: dehumanization.Dehumanization is a psychological process that makes individuals and groups seem to not deserve moral consideration by viewing them as less than human. All human have fundamental rights that should not be violated, and innocent people should not be subjects to violence and brutality. In Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner, excessive violence and ethnic conflicts question moralities. Hosseini is able to reflect how these real-world issues are revolved around dehumanization. The novel highlights genocide, violence, and violation of human rights, and most importantly, how these terrible deeds originates from one psychological process: Dehumanization. Dehumanization is the cause of violence and discrimination because it asserts superiority, assuages guilt, and denies individuality; ultimately, it is the cause of human rights violations.

The inspiration for my project came from the book When the Emperor was Divine by the manner of a quote by which it showed stereotyping “So go ahead and lock me up. Take my children. Take my wife. Freeze my assets. Seize my crops. Search my office. Ransack my house. Cancel my insurance. Auction off my business. Hand over my lease. Assign me a number. Inform me of my crime. To short, too dark, too ugly, to proud (Otsuka 143)”. Although we, as a county, have gone a tremendous way in the area of racial issues, segregation and stereotyping, we still have tremendous work to be done in the area of stereotyping others still. The book When the Emperor was Divine shows the perspective of someone with a different culture, showing that not everyone is the same as one another, but we are similar in abounding ways.

Lina Vilkas is like any other any other fifteen-year-old Lithuania girl. She enjoys painting, drawing and she gets crushes on boys. Until one night in June of 1941 Soviet secret police officers barge into Lina’s home and she gets arrested alongside her mother, Elena, and ten-year-old brother, Jonas tears her family from the comfortable life they've known. Her father Kostas has been arrested earlier, and they don’t know where he is. The family is given a small amount of time to pack all of their belongings before loaded onto a bus full of other arrested civilians. They are then ordered onto trains and placed there for six weeks with very little food to eat. With them are school teachers, librarians, stamp collectors, and even a young mother, Ona and her newborn child. Lina meets a handsome boy her age on the train named Andrius. Though, in the beginning, she has a rocky relationship with him over time they develop feelings for each other. Lina and Jonas go looking for their father and soon find him in another train car, and he gives them some words of encouragement. They are then separated, and Lina, Jonas, and Elena, including the rest of their train car, end up in Siberia, where the NKVD try to sell them to local villagers as slaves. As they are not bought, they are instead brought to a labour camp where they’re instructed to do backbreaking work and in return only receiving three hundred grams of bread a day. The Vilkases are demanded to live in a tiny shack with an