Eyes of the Emperor

Eyes of the Emperor by Graham Salisbury is the story of Japanese American soldiers in WWII.

Okubo and his friends are Japanese American living in Hawaii. Eddy Okubo joins the army even though he is only 16. He alters his birth certificate so he can enlist. His goal is to join his two best friends who have been drafted.

When Japan attacks Hawaii, however, Okubo and his friends (along with all other Japanese American soldiers) are isolated and guarded with machine guns. Once the guns are taken away, officers say what a mistake it was - but it is really a hint of what is to come.

Soon Okubo's group is off to Mississippi for training. But it is not the soldiers who are being trained. Some man has come up with the theory that Japanese people smell different than others and has set up a training program for attack dogs. Okubo is the bait.

Although this is an important story to tell - the repeated attack on groups of Americans when we are at war with their ancestral lands - Salisbury's treatment of the group is spoiled by an attempt to use dialect, which comes across making the Japanese American characters sound stupid. (All he did was leave words out of each sentence.) Hopefully, anyone picking up this book will be led to better accounts of the US treatment of Japanese American during WWII.

Salisbury, Graham. (2007). Eyes of the Emperor. New York: Random House.