The Boy
In 1942, 122,000 Japanese Americans were forced from their homes in California, western Oregon and Washington, and southern Arizona in the single largest forced relocation in U.S. history. Many would spend the next three years in one of ten relocation centers across the country run by the newly-formed War Relocation Authority. Others, like Otsuka’s father figure, would be held in facilities run by the Department of Justice and the U.S. Army. Few photographs exist of the internment camps because of prohibitions against owning cameras, but vivid descriptions—verbal and visual—exist to give us a picture of life “inside,” very much in keeping with the narration offered by Otsuka’s youngest narrator.
Topaz Relocation Center.
The camp consisted of 19,800 acres, nearly four times the size of the more famous Manzanar War Relocation Center in California. Topaz was located approximately 15 miles west of Delta, Utah. Surrounded by desert, it was an entirely new environment for internees, most of whom came from the San Francisco area. It was built at an altitude of 4,580 feet above sea level, and was arid and subject to dust storms and wide temperature swings during night and day. This is how the camp is seen through the eyes of Otsuka's characters:
"At Topaz the bus stopped. The girl looked out the window and saw hundreds of tar-paper barracks sitting beneath the hot sun. She saw telephone poles and barbed-wire fences. She saw soldiers. And everything she saw she saw through a cloud of fine white dust that had once been the bed of an ancient salt lake. The boy began to cough and the girl untied her scarf and shoved it into his hand and told him to hold it over his nose and mouth. He pressed the scarf to his face and took the girl’s hand and together they stepped out of the bus and into the blinding white glare of the desert." ("When The Emperor Was Divine", p 48)
