Symbolism In Otsuka

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From December 7th 1942 till September 2nd 1945 the Japanese were viewed as the enemy of the American people but the Japanese-Americans were also viewed as the enemy. The raid on Pearl harbor occurred on December 7th of 1942 and from that day till 1945 the javanese-american were feared to be spies for Hirohito. The supreme court ruled that the Japanese Americans on the west coast should be interned in order to protect the american people. Executive order 9066 ordered the internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans. Otsuka uses the journey of one Japanese-American family consisting of a boy a girl and a mother to connect the world to the struggles these people faced. Otsuka uses the motif of white to symbolize the progression …show more content…
The boy imagines the sheets that his mother hung up on the clothes line inside the camp. He thinks about these white sheets flying over the borders of the fence and into freedom. “He imagined a line of white sheets sailing up into the air and beyond the fences.”(98). This shows how the white represents freedom because it is escaping over the walls which is something he can’t do. He’ll always dream of being like those sheets until he has the ability to freely leave the camp. The sheets represent freedom because the can leave and not have any consequences but even if the boy escapes he will be hunted. To the boy his final goal is to achieve freedom and his imagination is at the moment the only way he can achieve this. There is a recurrence of this boy's hopes which is displayed when he daydreams of his father returning home still clad in the white robe he left in. He imagines that his father has walked all the way from his prison camp. “He’d open the door and see his father standing there in his white flannel robe all covered with dust.”(105) His father has achieved freedom he has left his camp and has come to rescue his family. The white of hi robe is used to represent this freedom. Yet even though he is free the burden of the internment still hangs heavy on his shoulders and will continue to follow him around which is represented in the dust on his white
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