Eyes Of The Emperor

Graham Salisbury’s Eyes of the Emperor is a young adult novel based on actual events that took place during WWII. In 1994, Salisbury published Under the Blood Red Sun, a novel about a Japanese-American boy living in Hawaii at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. Eddy Okubo, a minor character in that earlier story, is the sixteen-year-old protagonist of Salisbury’s 2005 Eyes of the Emperor. Feeling a sense of duty to serve his country as war ravages Europe, Eddy, the American-born son of Japanese immigrants, modifies his birth certificate to enlist in the army. However, it’s a time of increasingly hostile American sentiment towards the Japanese, and Eddy discovers his country does not respect his service or even his humanity.

Eddy lives in Honolulu with his father, Koji, his mother, and his younger brother, Herbie. Koji, a boatbuilder, is proud to be Japanese and believes his sons should honor their heritage, too. However, it is 1941, and Japan has allied itself with the war efforts of Germany and Italy, souring American-Japanese relations. Anti-Japanese grumblings are growing in Honolulu, and vandals burn a boat Koji has just completed for a client. This spurs Eddy to surreptitiously join the army to affirm his American loyalty. When Koji learns of Eddy’s enlistment, he considers it a betrayal of his Japanese ancestry and stops speaking to his son.

Then Japan attacks Pearl Harbor while Eddy is home on leave. Koji, aggrieved by his homeland’s ignominious action, belatedly gives Eddy his blessing, telling him, “You go. Fight for your country.” Eddy reports to Schofield Barracks where he’s been assigned with his older Japanese-American friends Chik Matsumura and Cobra Uehara, but they’re now the subjects of suspicion and humiliation. Calling them “Japs,” Lieutenant Sweet, their commanding officer, confiscates their guns and orders them to dig trenches while their “white” counterparts continue regular training exercises.



As Cobra tells Eddy, the army doesn’t regard them as soldiers: “What they see is Japs. What they see is enemies.” Accordingly, Lieutenant Sweet re-locates the Japanese-American soldiers to tents on the beach where they’re instructed to guard against enemy submarines. However, they themselves are under the surveillance of armed “haole” (white) troops prepared to shoot them for any misconduct. While on beach watch, one of Eddy’s fellow soldiers rescues a stranded Japanese submarine pilot, who feels such shame at being captured that he pleads to be shot.

Despite the degradation he suffers in the army, Eddy remains committed to defending his country and his identity as an American. His resilience is boosted by the presence of Captain Parrish, Eddy’s former high school teacher who has been summoned to service from the National Guard. Parrish, although haole, disagrees with Sweet’s racist views and makes efforts to improve the treatment of the Japanese-American soldiers.

After five months, Eddy’s unit is transferred to Camp McCoy in Wisconsin. He and his friends have never before left Oahu; their introduction to the mainland includes glimpses of Japanese-American civilians incarcerated in detention centers. At Camp McCoy, Eddy and his friends endure boot camp, but for the first time, their direct superiors are of Japanese ethnicity. Their unit is designated the 100th Infantry Battalion.



After completing boot camp, Eddy and twenty-five other Japanese-American soldiers are flown under cover of night to Ship Island off the coast of Mississippi. The site of Fort Massachusetts, built during the Civil War and later used to quarantine yellow fever victims, Ship Island is brackish and barren. Eddy and his companions are told they will participate in a top-secret mission on neighboring Cat Island.

While Ship Island continues to be their base for room and board, the soldiers are ferried daily to jungle-like, alligator-infested Cat Island where hundreds of dogs have been gathered to be weaponized against the Japanese. Following a Swiss advisor’s suggestion that ethnic Japanese have a distinct “scent,” the Roosevelt administration has organized a covert operation to determine if dogs can be trained to track and attack Japanese soldiers. Unbeknownst to them, Eddy and his friends were selected to serve as bait in this experiment.

On Cat Island, Eddy is paired with a dog named Kooch. The soldiers are instructed to engage the dogs in running and chasing, but then the activity takes a disturbing turn. If the dogs approach them in a friendly fashion, the soldiers are told they must repel them with whips and slingshots to instill in the dogs negative associations with the Japanese. The soldiers are forced to hide from the dogs in the underbrush and endure attacks and dog bites, but Eddy participates in the humiliating exercise with forbearance, true to the pledge of service he made to his country. He also holds no grudge against Kooch, understanding that the dog is simply doing his job and knowing that “it ain’t going to be Jap blood [… Kooch] smells, no. What he going smell is just me, just my scent. Human scent.”



Eddy is right. As it turns out, the Japanese “don’t smell no diff’rent from […] anybody else.” The dogs can’t distinguish between soldiers on the basis of different ethnicities, and after four months, the experiment is judged a failure. Eddy and the other soldiers reunite with the 100th Infantry Battalion in Europe, where Parrish, now a major, expresses his respect for their loyal service. This is reward enough for Eddy who thinks, “All I ever wanted from this army, or even from this country – everything was in that look. Respect. All the rot I had to go through before that moment was worth it, just for that one thing. Now we were equals.”

Graham Salisbury was inspired to write his novel after reading Japanese Eyes… American Heart: Personal Reflections of Hawaii’s World War II Nisei Soldiers (1998), which contains a first-hand account by Japanese-American veteran Raymond Nosaka of his experiences on Cat Island. To bolster the historical accuracy of his novel, Graham interviewed Nosaka, as well as eight other veterans involved in the ill-advised experiment, and also toured the island sites. Kirkus Reviews praises Eyes of the Emperor as “psychologically complex, historically accurate, and unforgettably gripping.”