When the Emperor Was Divine

At the beginning of this chapter, which constitutes most of the remainder of the book, the family arrives in the camp, where it was “Utah. Late summer. A city of tar-paper barracks behind a barbed-wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain high up in the desert. The wind was hot and dry and the rain rarely fell and wherever the boy looked he saw him” (49). The boy mistakes all the men for his father: “[He] thought he saw his father everywhere. Outside the latrines. Underneath the showers. Leaning against the barrack doorways. Playing go with the other men in their floppy straw hats on the narrow wooden benches after lunch” (49).

The boy, the girl, and the mother are assigned a room in a barrack, close to the fence. The conditions are rough: there “was no running water and the toilets were a half block away” (50). The camp rules are designed to restrict the bodies and the minds of the people in the camp: “The rules about the fence were simple: You could not go over it, you could not go under it, you could not go around it, you could not go through it. And if your kit got stuck on it? That was an easy one. You let the kite go” (61). The rules that extended to the language restricted both the way people said things—“Here we say Dining Hall and not Mess Hall; Safety Council, not Internal Police” (61)—as well as their access to books in Japanese. There were also rules about spirituality: “No Emperor-worshiping Shintos allowed” (61).

His mother gives the boy strict advice, admonishing him not to touch the fence, not to look at the sun, and to “[n]ever say the Emperor’s name out loud” (52). The boy “tried not to say the word. But sometimes it slipped out anyway. Hirohito. Hirohito. Hirohito. He said it quietly. Quickly. He whispered it” (52).

The girl writes letters to her friends “on the other side of the fence” (54) and tells them she is enjoying herself. The mother tries to keep everyone occupied: “Mostly, though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin” (54). The boy listens through the wall beside his bunk, and this way, gets to know Mrs. Kato in the bunk next door, an elderly woman who talks to herself. She is senile and does not know where she is, commenting to the boy: “There’s something strange about this place, but I can’t figure out what it is [...] Everyone here seems so serious” (55).

The family receives censored letters from their father, who is still at a camp in the south. The boy clings to his father’s memory, touching his old shoes, and thinking back to the night the FBI took him. The mother appears to be struggling with her memory, asking her children whether they had a stove in their home, and whether the children had seen a pair of earrings that the boy doesn’t remember her ever wearing.

The seasons change, and winter comes to the camp. Conditions remain difficult: “The winter seemed to last forever. There were outbreaks of flu and diarrhea and frequent shortages of coal. They had been assigned only two army blankets per person and at night the boy often fell asleep shivering” (92). The family battles sickness.

As the spring weather and the heat returns, an Army recruiter comes to the camp: “The summer was a long hot dream [...] The boy tossed pebbles into the coal bucket. He peered into other people’s windows. He drew pictures of airplanes and tanks with his favorite stick in the sand” (103). The boy continues to long for his father. The section ends with him imagining that his father arrives at the camp, daydreaming that his father will ask him to tell him what it’s been like to be there.