Loyalty hearings conducted by the Alien Enemy Control Unit, began for Japanese Americans on Dec, 7, 1941, and they were asked;
"Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the U.S. and faithfully defend the U.S. from any and all attacks foreign and domestic and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor or any other foreign government power or organization?"
INSTUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY; No Japs out after 8 p.m. No Japs allowed to travel more than five miles from their homes. These words were laden throughout all of America during the devious debacle of World War II.
Julie Otsuka's 2003 book, "When the Emperor Was Divine," details the sinister reality about WW II on American soil, beginning on Dec. 7, 1941. Otsuka's book is the story of a Japanese American couple and their two young children during this period.
Otsuka sagaciously gets to the point from beginning to end, without using a single name. On December's dark day in 1941, a Japanese father was arrested simply for being Japanese. Four days after his arrest, his wife and two young children had zero contact with him. By the 5th day, the husband and spouse were allowed to comminate extremely moderately via telegram.
Prior to that dark day in December, the couple had been living together for 20 years in America as U.S. citizens. The woman and her children were forced to leave their house with only what they could carry, and report to the Civil Control Station. The CCS, upon their arrival, put them on a train to Utah. For the next 41 months, the husband and wife were severed of their joy together.
The womans daughter was 11-years-old, and her boy was years younger then his sibling, and the three lived in a small room with a single light bulb, a wooden crate, used as a table, three iron cots and a pot bellied stove with no running water, and the bathroom was a block away. The three also had their Zenith radio they brought with them.
The crystalline intensity of a single family is magnified for all readers in, "When the Emperor was Divine."
The boy was very young; "I predge arrgiance to the frag, the little Japanese boy chanted against his will. Solly, so so solly, Otsuka translated. The woman and her children lived in their house till the fall of 1942, before the CCS sent them to a Japanese jail in Utah.
During their 41 months, imprisoned in the desert, they had bamboo splinters shoved in their fingernails, and they were forced to kneel for hours at time. They witnessed other prisoners starve to death, and others doused with gasoline and made into human torches. Sometimes they were ordered to stand at attention and beaten.
If you want more invidious details, read the book, it's a quick easy read, written in large font, and it's less than 260 pages, thus making it a swift and convenient read for all ages. The harsh reality of unwarranted fear and hatred is brilliantly documented by Otsuka in "When the Emperor was Divine." Despite the books horrid details, there is no profanity, and its appropriate reading for mature young children.
Four and a half stars easy for this book I acquired at a Sonoma county library.
Mark Izzy Schurr
