Aging

Image: "JP19" by beziaczek

In the novel When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka, we see all three characters begin to rapidly age while living in the internment camps. Life in the camps takes both a mental and physical toll on all of them. The characters transformations become very disctinct as we see the daughter hurrying to grow up, while we see the mother wasting away.


The chapter is told from the perspective of the son. I think out of the three characters he is the one who changes the least, mostly due to the fact he is still a child. The most notable thing we can see in this chapter is how the boy begins to lose his innocence due to events around him. These events range from hearing the neighbors having sex, to attending the funeral of a man who was killed by one of the guards. He also begins to grow a deeper understanding and appreciation of his Japanese heritage while living there. In the beginning he describes how he thinks he sees his father everywhere because all of the men "all looked alike. Black hair. Slanted Eyes. High Cheekbones. Thick glasses. Thin Lips. Bad teeth. Unknowable. Inscrutable. That was him, over there. The little yellow man." I could not believe this paragraph when i read it, I realize he is describing that the Japanese men have similar features, but the way he phrases that they all have "bad teeth" and refers to them as "little yellow men" I find shocking, and honestly racist. He sees people of his own heritage through what he believes is a white perspective, and takes no pride within his ethnicity. As the chapter progresses however you begin to see him begin to embrace aspects of the Japanese. His mother warns him to never say the name of the Japanese emperor, however whenever he walks past a guard he will mutter his name is spite. He also takes an interest in listening to his mother tell him stories of when she was a child in Japan. Although he is still heavily influenced by American culture, you begin to start to see that strip down as he ages and embraces new ideas.


The daughter also has a drastic change from when she first arrived. Before this chapter we see that she has a bit of an attitude about her (like most children at her age do) however as time passes in this chapter, I start to see her begin to shed her image as a little girl and try and mature into a teenager much faster than she naturally would have. He tells us that she now "left the barracks early in the morning and did not return until long after dark...She ate all her meals with her friends. Never with the boy or his mother. She smoked cigarettes. He could smell them in her hair." This girl cannot be older than twelve or thirteen at this time, yet the idea that she is smoking and always out at night really bothers me. She acting more like a sixteen year old, and not like the child that she still really is. Her brother also tells us that "when the girl undressed...she asked him to turn away." Which I see as a sign that she no longer views herself as a child, but a young woman. Although I don't think the boy understands what she means by this, she tells him "Any day now she'd be bleeding. It'll be red." Although it is completely possible for a girl her age to get her period, I wonder if the conditions she has to endure in the camp caused her body to mature faster. We also begin to see the camps begin to take a mental toll on her, because she always wears her fathers watch, even though it is frozen on 6:00, which is the time that they got off of the train. Even through she is not present much in the day time, she is often the one who comforts her brother at night, and we see her begin to take on a more motherly role in their relationship.


Out of all of the characters, the mother is the one who is most affected by life in the camps. Her face has started to wrinkle and her hair has begun to turn gray. Worse than that however her mental state has begin to deteriorate. We begin to see her mind wandering to insignificant events, she asks her son thinks like "Did I leave the porch light on or off?" and "Did I remember to turn the stove off...Did we even have a stove?" She also is deeply effected by the loss of her husband, one day while talking to her son she mentions that she thinks she lost an earring while on the train. She tells him "Maybe it's just gone. Sometimes things disappear and there's no getting them back. That's just how it is." She also begins to not leave their room much, and every time the dinner bell rings she asks "Who's there?" because "In her mind there were always men at the door. We just need to ask your husband a few questions." She has stopped putting on this strong unemotional face in front of her children and is beginning to mentally break down and mourn her separation from her husband. This takes an inconceivable mental toll on her well being. She begins also to reminisce about her youth and her life in Japan, and how when she was young and had met their father how she could never be apart from him. I cannot imagine what this experience must be like for her going through it without her husband. I truly sympathize for this woman, and even as we see her sanity start to drain and her body start to age, we can still see her strength throughout her experiences. 


I unfortunately do not think any of these characters will be the same people they could have been if they did not go into the camps. Their experience there has taken away much from them, and made them stronger human beings at the same time. I am incredibly curious to continue reading and see how their adjustment to life after the war goes.