At the end of Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor was Divine, the family finally reunites with the father but regards him as a stranger because of all the years that he was gone. The father was arrested when the children were at a young age and still developing. If a young child doesn't not encounter someone often they will usually forget them. When the father arrives the boy expects his father to be the same man that he was when he left, “He liked to draw for us. He liked to sing for us. He liked to laugh. The man who came back on the train looked much older than his fifty-six years. He wore bright white dentures, and he’d lost the last of his hair”(89). After their father was taken away, the children had to hold on to the only memories they …show more content…
The father that returned was not the same affable person who drew and entertained the children. The children simply could not understand what their father had gone through while imprisoned and had false expectations of him. When they were younger they admired their father because they could see no flaw in his personality or actions, but after the internment camps they lost their naïveté and could not regard the man that returned as their father. This reunion underscores the tragedy of the American's decision to imprison Japanese Americans because it shows how a family can change drastically when you separate and imprison them. When the father returned from imprisonment he had trouble adjusting to the post-war environment, “He was suspicious of everyone: the newspaper boy, the door-to-door salesman, the little old lady who waved to us every day as we passed by her house on our way home from school. Any one of these people, he warned us, could be an informer.”(90). The U.S. Government imprisoned many Japanese-Americans, like the father, who's only crime was being Japanese. After the war the father was suspicious of everyone, because in his eyes every American was a potential