Approximately, 17,000 Americans each year feel that the name they were given does not match their identity. The name a person is given is who they are, it is a way for the world to acknowledge them. At the start of World War II, the American government took a series of drastic measures aiming at Japanese Americans in the U.S., all Japanese Americans, no matter who they were, adults, women, or children, had been suspected spies. More than 120,000 Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps. This essay aims to study the comparison of the named and nameless characters in When the Emperor was Divine, through the analysis of their loss of identity. This analysis will also vividly show the suffering of the Japanese Americans during this time.
At first, the four main characters are all nameless but with the appellation---the father, the son, the daughter and the mother. Generally speaking, if authors want their writings to be understood easily, they always choose to set names for the characters, which also can avoid confusion. But in this novel, the author must mean to express a special meaning through the nameless main characters. On one hand, it is thought that the experiences of this nameless Japanese American family is not a single example but the epitome of what all Japanese American encountered at that time. Nearly 120,000 Japanese American were taken from their homes in the spring and early summer of 1942 and incarcerated in concentration camps by the United States government.(Roger Daniels, 3) On the other hand, what is more significant, the namelessness of the characters also indicates the loss of their identities. Because they are Japanese Ameican, they are different from the real American natives in their habits, w...
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...e, so they can be any Japanese at that time and their encounters are just a part of what all Japanese have experienced during World War Two. The second one is that having a name is a basic human right, and being deprived of the right to own a name is the most obvious symbol of their loss of identity. The author means to set the main nameless characters to attract the readers' attention and describe the hardship of Japanese Americans in the U.S at that time. This nameless application expresses that the war hurts the American Japanese deeply and also
evokes the readers' sympathy for the Japanese.
Works Cited
Otsuka, Julie. When the Emperor was Divine.(New York: Anchor Books,2002)
Daniels, Roger. Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. (New York: HILL and WANG, 1993)
Seeman, M V. Name and Identity. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7190867
Beasley, W. G. The Japanese experience: a short history of Japan. Los Angeles: Berkeley, 1999.
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