Class Summary Session 2/21

     Class was about the second half of the book When The Emperor Was Devine. We started the class with the reading accountability, and Hanna’s research on the Japanese population in Hawaii. We also looked into some photographs that were taken during the war time, however, not published until later. The photographs were about the life of the Japanese population during the war. The photos also showed life of Japanese people in america, after the war was over. Some images show that the Japanese population in america were already aware of what was soon about to happen to them, much so that some of them put signs out of their shops saying “we are american too.”    
     Later, we were separated into groups to talk about passages, symbols and images in the book. We were tracing imagery and symbolism present in the book. For example the beginning of the book, where we see that the woman names some things and leaves other out, as the women’s name. This starts to create questions in the readers minds, in a place of no understanding; this puts us in the perspective of the Japanese people at the time. The place of no understanding shows the reader that we know as much as she knows, which is intentional.Some of the passages we looked at were:

1. The opening of the novel, page 7-9. In this passage, the woman is packing the family’s belongings because they are leaving on the next day. The passage shows how their family was a exactly like a common american family, having common things, such as plates and bowls, pictures hanging on the wall. It shows very little they had from their background culture, for example, the chopsticks, and what the woman’s mother had sent to them on their wedding. That shows how little they had of their background culture, how american they were and despite this fact, they still had to go through all of the war processes for Japanese.

1. “When the war is over,” freedom, pages 112-114: This passage only emphasises that for them, that the war is not over. The discriminalization of the japanese is not over. People are telling them that they are not welcome, and the fear is still strong, much so that the mother makes her kids sleep in their best clothes. They are not free from psychological trauma, not free to live in their house safely. This passage is in the chapter narrated by “WE” (the buy and the girl), represents that they have to be united, that it is them against the world outside.

Some of the images we talked about are:

1. Trees: The trees show up may times throughout the novel, the family has trees at their home, that gives them shadow and comfort, which they are soon to lose. Trees also represent security and instability for the family. Stability fading as they are taken away. The trees as seen as a safe place to the loss. Finally, trees also have deep routs and take a long time to grow, which represents longevity, and stability again, staying in the same place over a long time.

1. Horses : Horses also appear many times throughout the book. For the boy (naive boy), horses represent freedom. In another way, horses symbolise life. Horses represent the death of the boy’s innocence when he realises that they eat horse’s meat. He recognizes that freedom is over.

Finally, in the last part of class, we talked bout the ending of the book, and we came up with several thoughts about it, including: 

1. A sense of conformity, in which the family had to conform itself with the situation of being judged in a sense by their own neighbors just because they were a Japanese family. 

1. It flips the thought of american readers of “this could be my family,” because despite it being a common family, it was still not an american family. Therefore, it could not be an american reader’s family, americans were the ones that did that to them