Connections Crowd Applauds Author

Julie Otsuka told a near-capacity crowd at Utah State University's Kent Concert Hall that she didn't write her novel, When the Emperor was Divine, as a political statement. "I needed to write about it because no one in my family wanted to discuss it," the 43-year-old author told students and community guests. "I sensed a great deal of repressed hurt and anger."

 

She was visibly moved by the standing ovation she received from freshmen students and community members at the conclusion of her talk, in which she detailed her experience in writing a fictional account of a Japanese-American family forced into an internment camp during World War II.

 

Otsuka's book, published in September 2002, follows a San Francisco family whose father is suddenly arrested and whose mother and two children spend three years in the Topaz internment camp near Delta, Utah. Many of the challenges faced by the book's family mirror the experience of Otsuka's mother, uncle and grandparents, who were sent into detention following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

 

The author's Aug. 27 lecture highlighted the summer literature experience of Utah State's Connections course for entering freshmen. Connections, initiated three years ago and coordinated by the university's Honors program and Academic Resource Center, is designed to ease new students' transition to Utah State. In addition to the shared literature experience, the course introduces critical college study skills, time management techniques and test-taking strategies. It also promotes awareness of the campus community and the development of a support network of classmates, faculty and staff to ensure a successful beginning to the higher education experience.

 

Otsuka said she's surprised at how few college students are aware of the government's relocation of some 120,000 Japanese-Americans to remote camps in seven states during World War II. She noted that other than the David Guterson's bestselling book, Snow Falling on Cedars, which was later made into movie, and her own novel, little has appeared in the popular media or schoolbooks detailing this chapter of American history.

 

"I think the story is important and is one that still has not been told enough," she said.

 

Why, asks Otsuka, are slavery, racial discrimination and other skeletons in America's closet included in most history books, while the internment of Japanese-Americans is glossed over or omitted? She suspects a partial explanation is the internment of Japanese-Americans is a story of failure, whereas the story of America's ultimate triumph over slavery represents American progress.

 

Otsuka notes that the reluctance of those who endured internment, including her mother, to share their experiences also contributes to the silence.

 

"Many Japanese-Americans had a great deal of shame at having been accused by their own government of being disloyal," she said.

 

She added that internment camp dwellers were reluctant to discuss their trials in light of revelations of what Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.

 

"In their culture it would have been poor taste to discuss injustices committed against them when others' suffering was much worse."

 

Otsuka's book, which she spent five and a half years writing, 'evolved organically," she said. "I wrote the first chapter as a short story and thought, 'This is odd. Where did this story come from?'"

 

She wrote "Train," another short story, which became the novel's second chapter. Realizing that her stories were developing into a novel was terrifying, she said. "I'd never written a novel before. I didn't know if I could do the story justice. But I felt compelled to continue."

 

Otsuka started doing research to give herself confidence, she said, and pored over memoirs, diaries, letters and drawings by internment dwellers.

 

In keeping with the novel's whispering tone, Otsuka thought she would end the book quietly. "But I felt I was channeling someone else's anger," she said. "The result is a slow build-up of nerves."

 

Otsuka's book concludes with a chapter called "Confession" written in the fictional father's voice that she describes as "highly sarcastic - the voice of all men unfairly accused."

 

Her publishers in the United States and United Kingdom told her the final chapter was too harsh and she considered "lopping it off."

 

But Otsuka stuck with it. She decided that the story "could not simply fade away" as so many historical accounts have done.