Even today, long after all supposedly “scientific evidence” to the contrary has been thoroughly debunked and discredited and disproven, the majority of Americans still believe there is such a thing as “race.” In reality, the only physiological differentiation between human beings of different “races” are physical expressions: skin pigment, eye shape, hair color. But that’s not the same thing as what is really meant by “race” because if you produced a comprehensive genetic description of three people representing what are commonly viewed as three different races, even an expert wouldn’t be able to pick out which was which. Trite as it may sound, the inescapable truth is that everyone is the same inside and thus racism is entirely an expression of prejudice based upon what a person looks like. Not what they act like, not what they think not, not their intellectual abilities or lack therefore, not their propensity toward any certain behavior, but just how they look. The history of America is one constructed upon a solid belief that “race” actually exists and is about something more than what a person looks like, but that is a myth. It has always and only been about people who look differently from “us.”
How this myth applies to slavery is well known if not fully understood. When the Emperor was Divine illustrates how the myth was a fully functioning aspect of the government during World War II in the treatment of those of Japanese descent who were full U.S. citizens. Not Japanese citizens merely living here, but U.S. citizens with the right to vote, and who paid their taxes, and who pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States in many cases, not merely a cloth flag. The lesson begins with the names of the main characters. They do not have names. They are the Woman and the Girl and the Boy and the Father. This decision not to endow them with the fundamental component of identity—a name—is not one made randomly. The point is to underline that for Americans at that time, those forced into Japanese-American internment camps were all the same. They had no real identity other than being suspected of maintaining allegiance to a country most had never even seen.
The internment camps were built and sold on the premise that there was solid evidence to suspect American citizens of Japanese descent of potentially engaging in sabotage, espionage and treason against the country following the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese air force. It is true that American territory (though not an actual state) was attacked by a foreign enemy. But America would declare war on Germany at the same time as it declared war on Japan. Despite this, not a single internment camp was built to house German-Americans. Over the course of her novel following one single family’s experiences throughout the entirety of being rounded up, imprisoned and finally released, the author consistently demonstrates how the historical record proves just one thing: the Japanese-Americans were targeted for “special” treatment because they didn’t look like the rest of American whereas German-American and Italian-Americans did look like the rest of American and were the one who actually received very special treatment.
The character of the Boy is the key figure here. His is the narration which covers the period actually taking place inside the internment camp. While there, he reacts with rebellion and subversion as might be expected from someone whose freedom has been ripped away for no reason. Having tasted that bitter fruit, freedom tastes even sweeter when it is returned, but it comes with a bitter aftertaste: assimilation comes much easier. And it is the Boy—who is himself fully of Japanese descent—who uses the loaded term “inscrutable” to describe the other residents inside the internment camps. It is that “inscrutability” that lies at the heart of the phony conceptualization of scientific differentiation which masks the simple physical-based racism expressed toward the Japanese. Just as white tried to rationalize the truth that their racism toward blacks was based on how they looked by buying into phony science that their intellectual inferiority made them a “slave race” so was their what seemed a perfectly valid rationale for racist attitudes toward Japanese. Ironically, it was just the opposite: they were too clever to be trusted.
The final image of the book is that of the Father answering his own rhetorical question, “Who am I?” His answers include the florist, the judo teacher, dry-goods salesman before narrowing to Shinto priest and then narrowing again to the one called Jap before finally having the last word on the matter that says it all: he’s "the one you don’t see because we all look alike."
