Family Ties That Bind

When The Emperor Was Divine has its foundations in color and its criticisms highlighted through the many shades of prejudice associated with color.
"Nobody will look at you," the sister says to the boy as they enter the concentration camp, "if your face is too dark." "Nobody's looking at me anyway," replied the boy." His sister is showing her young age here. She assumes darker is a horrendous plight, a handicap, perhaps because she has succumbed to whatever views her mother, her peers, and her country might have told her about darker skin - but from the boy's younger, more immature, more fresh-faced perspective, color does not matter. Apparently, color matters very little to the Japanese-Americans the family is surrounded by, because nobody pays attention to the boy even when his skin eventually darkens from the skin. He’s as much a prisoner as everyone else is regardless of whether his skin is a leathery tan or an ivory white. Excusing the white horse imagery, the boy's impressions have yet to be completely destroyed by whatever influences American culture would normally exert on him, and it shows in the way he describes everything throughout his chapter. Look at his description of one of the camp’s guards: "He had brown hair and green eyes, or maybe they were blue, and he had just come back from a tour of the Pacific." While the boy’s offhanded statement about the guard’s eyes may imply reverse racism – for example, him assuming that all white people have light eyes – I see this more as a devil-may-care expression. Color simply doesn’t matter to a child when they haven’t been indoctrinated to believe color has certain connotations within a society.

Likewise, color extends beyond uniting people together. It also tears people apart from one another. "The boy did not have a best friend but he had a pet tortoise that he kept in a wooden box filled with sand right next to the barrack window" furthers previous claims that, despite every Japanese-American being in the camp for roughly the same reason - "they all looked alike, black hair, slanted eyes, high cheekbones, thick glasses, thin lips, bad teeth" - they are all bitterly alone in their struggles. All the family has is each other, if that, but even if they don’t, at least the desert’s dust prevents one static constant.

"Always, he would remember the dust. It was soft and white and chalky, like talcum powder. It made your nose bleed. It made your eyes sting,” says the boy. Not everything white is a positive thing, and it takes away your persona. Your cultural identity. “It took your voice away,” the boy says. It literally prevents you from speaking out. The whiteness strips you of everything that makes the boy, everything that makes a person who they are, everything that makes you, 'you'. However, the color is simply a symbol for cultural degradation. Otsuka is not implicating all white people, or even white people in any capacity, small or large, as the catalyst for bastardizing the family's values. In fact, Joe Lundy and the soldier on the train are portrayed sympathetically; they're as much victims of a "whitewashed" culture as the Japanse-Americans are. I mean, just look at what the dust is, as well as what it does. Dust is cultureless, homogenized, ugly. It's beyond the realm of human color. It's the basic element of so many greater sums, dirt and sand and grains, yet those small specks of dust are all it takes to completely wash away any trace of the boy's presence in the desert. "One evening, before he went to bed, he wrote his name in the dust across the top of the table. All through the night, while he slept, more dust blew through the walls. By morning his name was gone," notes the narration. Like all traces of the family getting removed from their home after they are imprisoned, and the father’s forced removal in his slippers and bathrobe, identity is a fragile entity prone to being erased by forces beyond the family’s control.

"The shoes were black Oxfords," begins the boy as he describes a paternal heirloom he took to the camp. Remember the umbrella the boy was unable to fit into his suitcase when he was packing? He never mentioned bringing along his father's shoes instead of the umbrella. The umbrella would've been a far practical object for the boy to take along, yet he must have felt his father's shoes were the more important heirloom to bring along than a thing which grants purely physical comfort during times many people find discomforting. It's a willing disregard for practicality. However, he anticipated the shoes would be more useful to him, reminding him of his father and boosting his "mental climate" better than any umbrella ever could. And unlike his sister, he does not blame his father for being absent in the family's life. "You know what bothers me sometimes? I can't remember his face sometimes," complains the girl to her brother. "Me." It bothers /her/ that /she/ can't remember what /her/ father looks like. The sister is only thinking about her father in relation to herself. Although the family's circumstances may lend some sympathy to the girl's way of thinking, it's still selfish for her to see her father as paternal object, especially when the boy does not let his situation interfere with his adoration for papa. While the boy continuously wonders how Papa (notice how he only refers to the father as "papa" rather than "his/her father" like the girl does?) is doing throughout his chapter, the girl defers to papa as "her father" only. The boy's seethingly obvious lack of age - he's only eight years old at the beginning of the novel - has this bizarre way of making him more mature than both his mother and sister. He does not need a father figure present in his life to know he's loved when all he needs to do is close his eyes and reminisce. To hold his father's shoes is enough reassurance. "He took them out of his suitcase and slipped them over his hands and pressed his fingers into the smooth oval depressions left behind by his father's toes and then he closed his eyes and sniffed the tips of his fingers. Tonight they smelled like nothing." Though the days when the father used to refer to the boy as his “absolute numero one” (this co-opting of a Spanish phrase by a Japanese-American family strikes me as ironic) are over, the boy still has not forgotten the face of his father like his sister may have, and his father’s lessons – “when to leave the boy’s mother alone and how best to ask her for ice cream,” for example – are not something even dust can erase.