earticle

영어

Anti-Japanese hysteria swept the United States and Canada after Pearl Harbor, and much of it was directed toward Japanese Americans. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 of February 19, 1942, almost all of the Japanese Americans had to be relocated from their home to one of 10 internment camps. As Japanese Americans, they underwent racism and the hardship of being forced to abandon their freedom and identities during the period of their internment. Julie Otsuka tells a story of a Japanese American family’s ordeal in the internment camp in When the Emperor was Divine. The characters in the novel suffer from oppression on many levels and show symptoms of trauma even if they are not diagnosed pathologically. Otsuka has a strong psychological desire to retell the internment story and give a voice to the silenced internees during the World War II. As this paper shows, rewriting history in today’s context is not to trivialize the event and demean the suffering and sacrifice of those who actually underwent the experience, but to heal the suffering from trauma and secure the safety of the present and the future.