Otsuka and Her Other Works 3

Maureen Howard: I mean I think Julie had this particular material in mind because of her background. And she lives in New York but she was very much a West Coast girl during her education. And the story of the 1942—of the Japanese being removed from their homes—was enormously important to her and to us, that we not just keep it in mind but understand it and understand in some way the lives of these people, the disruption of their lives and the fact that this goes on. It’s not as though as it happened once in 1942 and went on until that war was over. It goes on, with Latinos and Arab-Americans. Julie Otsuka: I finished writing the novel in June of 2001, so I had no idea that it would resonate in the way that it has post-9/11 as a sort of cautionary tale about what can happen when the government starts singling out ethnic groups as being the enemy. I mean, I thought the book, if I were lucky, might be respectfully reviewed as an historical novel. But I think for many, many Japanese-Americans, 9/11 just brought back so many memories. I mean, it was just all so very, very familiar. You just had a group that overnight becomes the enemy. And I think it brought up a lot of unpleasant memories for many of the older Japanese-Americans. You have people being rounded up in secret and sent away to secret detention camps. I think being a dangerous enemy alien is not that unlike being an enemy combatant. And there’s just all these eerie parallels, and I always thought while writing the novel that this could never happen again, but it just seems like in so many ways we really never learn from history. And it’s odd. I’ve been traveling the country for years and speaking to many young people about the camps, but a lot of them have not heard about the camps, still. I think it’s not something that’s included in most American history books, and so some of them are surprised— they’ll say, “This is a work of fiction, right? It didn't really happen.” I’ll have to explain that, yes, it is a work of fiction, but it is based on a very big and often omitted historical truth.