Otsuka recounts WWII history
Aggie freshmen sprinkled with a few clumps of senior citizens and Logan community members filled the Kent Concert Hall.
It was a Saturday morning and USUs academic year was not begin for at least another two days. What brought this diverse group together? It was a common reading experience and the first convocation for the 2005 USU academic year.
Julie Otsuka, author of When the Emporer was Divine, spoke for an hour about why she wrote the book, the process it took to finish it and the response readers have had.
“I started writing at the age of 30 because I’d failed as a painter. It was never my intention to write a book about the internment camps, let alone write anything. I only wrote short stories, comedy – to amuse my boyfriend,” Said Otsuka.
The book is largely based on Otsuka’s mother’s experiences in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. It took Otsuka five and a half years to complete the final manuscript.
“I guess that the war surfaced in my psyche. There was a lot of silence in my family – sadness and anger that had been repressed. Writing the novel was a way of me trying to figure out the silence,” Otsuka said. “I wrote it just to get it out of my system, thinking that I would then return to comedy. It was a terrifying moment when I realized that I had a novel on my hands. I didn’t know if I could do the novel justice, if I could do my people justice. All these doubts and I’d never written a novel.”
For many students, reading Otsuka’s story was the first time they had ever heard much about the Japanese internment camps.
“We teach our young people about slavery and segregation because they were great evils that we overcame, where as the internment camps were an embarrassment and a failure to the great American progress,” Otsuka said.
Otsuka finished her speech by reading the last chapter of her book aloud and answering questions from the audience. After studying the book, many students were interested to know about the symbolism found in the novel. Otsuka’s response was followed by a standing ovation.
“Writing is a mysterious process – I work intuitively. People point out the symbolism in my book and I honestly didn’t think any of it through. I think symbols work deep in your subconscious.”
“The best part was learning that the symbolism in the book was not pre-conceived. It just came together naturally with the flow of the book,” said Theron Winsor an undeclared freshman.
“Meeting with Julie Otsuka was very cool. She answered some of the questions that I had and wasvery approachable” Laura Ferguson, a freshmen majoring in elementary education, said.
-amcconkie@cc.usu.edu