No-No Boy
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Acclaim for John Okada and No-No Boy
“Iconic . . . Thinking back to writers like . . . John Okada, it is clear that genius is too often unrecognized in its day.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer, in an op-ed for The New York Times
“A daring book . . . a close literary kin to Richard Wright’s Native Son . . . There is no other novel like it about Japanese Americans in the postwar period. . . . a cautionary tale . . . of the incarceration of immigrant families based on racial prejudice, executive privilege, and the false assertion of military necessity . . . Over a half century later, Okada’s novel challenges us once again with the question of character, asking us, as individuals and as a society, what are we made of.”
—Karen Tei Yamashita, from the Introduction
PENGUIN CLASSICS
NO-NO BOY
JOHN OKADA (1923–1971) was born in Seattle, Washington, and was interned during World War II at the Minidoka War Relocation Center before joining the U.S. Air Force and earning the rank of sergeant. After the war, he finished his undergraduate degree at the University of Washington and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University. His first and only novel, No-No Boy, was published in 1957. Okada died of a heart attack at the age of forty-seven, leaving behind a wife and two children.
KAREN TEI YAMASHITA was a National Book Award finalist for her novel I Hotel, which won the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. A recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, she has been a U.S. Artists Ford Foundation Fellow and a University of California Presidential Chair for Feminist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. She is a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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First published by Charles E. Tuttle 1957
This edition with an introduction by Karen Tei Yamashita published in Penguin Books 2019
Introduction copyright © 2019 by Karen Tei Yamashita
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Okada, John, author. | Yamashita, Karen Tei, 1951– author of introduction.
Title: No-no boy / John Okada ; introduction by Karen Tei Yamashita.
Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2019. | “First published in the United States of America by Charles E. Tuttle 1957.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2018053781| ISBN 9780143134015 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525505792 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / War & Military. | FICTION / Cultural Heritage.
Classification: LCC PS3565.K33 N6 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018053781
Cover art based on the artwork of M. Kuwata
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Contents
Acclaim for John Okada and No-No Boy
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction by KAREN TEI YAMASHITA
Dedication
Preface by JOHN OKADA
NO-NO BOY
Introduction
At the end of war, those who survive return. Storytellers understand that the conclusion of a crisis is not where stories end but where they begin, and that the test of character is what happens after. In 1945, in the aftermath of World War II, Japanese Americans returned from American concentration camps to resume life in West Coast cities like Seattle, and John Okada wrote the novel No-No Boy to understand what happened and why. Okada wrote of the reentry into civil society of young second-generation, or nisei, men who had served in the U.S. military and, more particularly, through the character of Ichiro Yamada, of draft resisters who spent the war in prison. In so doing, he probed the intense center of the Japanese American community’s internal conflicts—confusions of loyalty and rights of citizenship, racial self-hatred and shame, the immigrant’s agony of failure and loss of a future, prescriptions of silence and resistance. Sons were killed in war; others lost their citizenship. Friendships and family relations were irreparably severed. Japanese Americans from the Pacific coast returned to segregated communities, impoverished by wartime loss of property and businesses, with bleak prospects for work, and confronted with prejudice: to many Americans, Japanese faces were indistinguishable from the enemy. Japanese Americans were free yet still confined, forced by circumstance into uneasy and often divided association.
No-No Boy is a daring book, and, I would say, a test of and testament to character. There is no other novel like it about Japanese Americans in the postwar period. Okada was courageous in writing it at a time when stigma and hostilities within the community were still raw on the surface. The war had ended, but it was psychologically and hauntingly ever present. When the novel was first published, in 1957, the Japanese American community turned away from it because what the novel had to say hurt. And Okada died, in 1971, never knowing the impact or legacy of his work.
It has been more than forty years since the republication of No-No Boy in 1976 and more than sixty years since its original publication. Much has been written about the work and its author. Most recently, Frank Abe, Greg Robinson, and Floyd Cheung joined forces to edit John Okada: The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of “No-No Boy”; this critical text, along with Ruth Ozeki’s foreword, Lawson Fusao Inada’s introduction, and Frank Chin’s afterword to the 2014 edition, adds rich layers to Okada’s biography and the history and context of his seminal novel. While my task here is not to rewrite what has already been said, there are, to my mind, four significant parts of the historical record that bear highlighting.
On December 7, 1941, Imperial Japanese Navy aircraft bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, initiating America’s entry into World War II. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal by the military of 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry and resident alien Japanese from states along the Pacific coast and southern Arizona, arresting, transporting, and distributing these people to concentration and prison camps. Okada and his family were removed from Seattle to a concentration camp, the Minidoka Relocation Center, in south-central Idaho.
In 1943, incarcerated Japanese Americans were required to fill out registration forms, labeled “loyalty questionnaires,” used to determine eligibility for military service. Question 27: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered? Question 28: Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?* Japanese Americans, considering their status as “non-alien citizens” denied due process, or, if born in Japan, “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” hotly debated whether to answer yes or no; those who answered in the negative were branded as “no-nos.” In his novel, Okada recreated the complicated, violently embittered, and painful divisions that openly seethed during the war and the postwar period
s, and that, I would argue, continue to haunt our communities.
The story of the republication of No-No Boy is also the story of the birthing of Asian American literature. In 1971, a few weeks after Okada’s death, four young writers—Jeffrey Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong—rummaging around in used-book stores, found an old copy of No-No Boy. This was the literary legacy they had hoped to uncover. They eventually published an anthology of Asian American short fiction, Aiiieeeee! (1974), featuring an excerpt from the novel, and in 1976 republished the entire novel. “Discovering” No-No Boy—the novel, its nisei author, and its subject matter—defined a literary moment of political protest and cultural recuperation.
In 1976, the same year as No-No Boy’s republication, Michi Nishiura Weglyn published Years of Infamy, a detailed history of the internment of the Japanese and the suppression of the government findings that Japanese Americans presented little security risk in the event of war. From these years on, community organizations mounted a campaign for redress, initiating, in 1981, congressional hearings on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, and culminating in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided an apology and payment of $20,000 to each surviving detainee.
In 1976, when No-No Boy was republished, I was in São Paulo, Brazil, just out of college and researching the history of Japanese Brazilians, comparing stories of two immigrant diasporas in the Americas, north and south. In the first few pages of No-No Boy, the protagonist’s Japan-born, or issei, mother reads a notice she’s received from Brazil that speaks of Japanese victory in World War II and the eventual arrival of ships to return loyal Japanese to the homeland. During my research, I learned about the divisive stories of kachigumi versus makegumi—postwar belief in a victorious versus a defeated Japan—and the lies about the anticipated arrival of Japanese ships. Brazilian Japanese sold their farms and businesses, cashed in cruzeiros for worthless yen, checked into hotels at the port of Santos, and congregated nightly in bars in celebration of victory and return. To American readers and to the novel’s protagonist, Ichiro, his mother’s belief in Japanese victory is insane, but in my Brazilian travels, I knew that entire communities believed this propaganda and that the consequences for Japanese Brazilians had been deadly. The Shindo Renmei, a nationalist organization composed of Japanese immigrants, denounced as traitors and assassinated twenty-three fellow Japanese Brazilians. In 1976, when I first read No-No Boy, I might have felt the strange serendipity of reading this passage about Brazil—Okada’s distant nod to me. Yet in the following years, as the movement for redress of the wrongs committed against the Japanese in America gained momentum, it became evident that any Japanese nationalist sentiments would be interpreted as signs of disloyalty, and stories of no-no were likely suppressed in favor of the military heroism of infantry units such as the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a segregated group composed of Japanese Americans. No-No Boy provides insight into the tensions and negotiations that accompanied the redress movement.
In the character of Ichiro Yamada, Okada conflated the position of draft resisters and of those who renounced American citizenship. Nisei draft resisters argued that, considering the illegality of their imprisonment, they would, as American citizens, comply with the draft if given freedom; denied freedom, they spent the war in prisons. They might have answered yes-yes to the loyalty questions, but only on the condition of freedom for themselves and their families. Although there were those with Japanese nationalist sentiments, like Ichiro’s mother, who responded no-no, many others who responded no-no may have done so in anger and protest, or in a panic to keep their families together. These no-no respondents were removed to Tule Lake, a designated segregation prison, and, under the duress of incarceration, they signed declarations to renounce their American citizenship and to face possible deportation to Japan. In No-No Boy, Ichiro is a draft resister, and while he hasn’t renounced his American citizenship (technically his position is “no-yes”), through the nationalist eyes of his mother, he has. While this may be confusing to the reader, Ichiro embodies the conflict of identity between filial duty and loyalty to nation. While draft resisters felt strongly that their protest was legally justified, Okada’s representation of their unwelcome homecoming in 1945 was probably true: The community named them all no-no despite their complicated reasons for answering the loyalty questions in the ways they did. It was not until 1968 that the last of the more than five thousand “renunciants” were legally able to restore their American citizenship. Considering the precarious status of these members of the community, I can understand the quiet reception of No-No Boy upon its publication in 1957. Critics have suggested that Okada’s narrative is unreliable, but his third-person narration moves from character to character, within a constellation of the communal, reflecting the psychic interior of a conflicted and divided community, and gifting, through this storytelling, I believe, a communal reconciliation.
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No-No Boy is about nisei men: Ichiro; his high-school-age brother, Taro; his draft resister buddies—rebellious Freddie and diffident Gary—and nisei veterans like Eto, Bull, the wounded Kenji, and the absent Ralph. Though there is a single female nisei character, Emi, this is, well, a “guy’s book.” It’s not just that a bunch of guys claimed the “discovery” of the novel or that it’s about men returning from war and incarceration to reclaim their masculinity; its very texture of realist noir, its perceptions and frustrations, read masculine, carving spaces of worth out of secondary citizenship and the misogyny toward a symbolic motherland. The anger in this novel, with its raw encounters of race—aggressively violent or ironically masked—and the intense narrative interiority of a racialized self, makes it, I believe, a close literary kin to Richard Wright’s Native Son. The demeaning designation “boy” in the title is significant. While rooted in a particular historical moment, No-No Boy is also a story of young men who make choices in wartime and who, upon returning, whether as conscientious objectors or wounded soldiers, discover that home is not the same home that it was before.
Okada was himself a nisei veteran of World War II, though his was a covert war of military intelligence in the Pacific; as an interpreter and spy, he was prohibited from speaking or writing about his experience. The role of the writer is in some respects that of an interpreter, perhaps even that of a spy, who reveals the secrets of one’s community. To have made the choice to expose the deep insides of Japanese America was not, I assure you, easy. Although he found early mentorship at the University of Washington, Okada was largely self-taught, and he worked in solitude in Detroit and Southern California, without the support of an artistic community. Struggling to raise a young family by working as a librarian and then a technical writer for military defense and aerospace projects, he is purported to have written the draft of a second novel—about his parents’ generation, the issei. But in 1971, at age forty-seven, he died of a heart attack, and his wife, Dorothy, destroyed that draft, all of his papers and research, and even his childhood photos. No one can say why families keep or toss what the dead leave behind; maybe Dorothy knew better. Research has since uncovered a high school essay, a short play, several short stories, and a satirical essay, but there remains little of an Okada archive to trace a literary life, the single novel of which arguably initiated an Asian American literary renaissance.
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In the context of this history, I’d like, finally, to draw on a larger landscape of race and immigration in America. In 1941, civil rights and labor union leader A. Philip Randolph proposed a “march on Washington” to protest discrimination in the defense industry and the military. To avert such a protest, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination in the defense industry but stopping short of extending this to the military. The defense industry provided jobs along the Pacific coast, and African Americans migrated west for work and settled in the emptied neigh
borhoods of Little Tokyo and Japantown. In the military, African Americans and Japanese Americans were segregated. In the aftermath of war, veterans of color returned home to resume another war: the domestic one of race and Jim Crow. No-No Boy captures not only the uneasy homecoming of Japanese Americans—hardened by confinement, harboring hostilities, suspicious of others—but also the many complications within the community and on the margins—among Chinese Americans, African Americans, and whites. Despite the dark representation of the raw antagonism of the times, the novel makes a declaration, I believe, of Okada’s democratic idealism, participating in a longer history of movements for social justice and civil rights.
On May 9, 1942, when Japanese Americans from East Bay Oakland and Berkeley—my family included—reported to the Tanforan Assembly Center to comply with Executive Order 9066, a twenty-two-year-old nisei named Fred Korematsu stayed behind with his Italian American girlfriend. By the end of the month, Fred had been arrested, sent to jail, and convicted of violating military orders. In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled in Korematsu v. United States to uphold his conviction, establishing a dangerous justification for the mass incarceration of a group of people based on military necessity that remained the law of our land for nearly seventy-five years. Like the young men in No-No Boy, Korematsu was a rebellious kid following his instincts; after the war, he paid the consequences: following a felony conviction, he was shunned by the Japanese American community and kept a low profile. There is more to this story, but in June 2018, fourteen years after Fred’s death, the Supreme Court finally overturned its decision on Korematsu v. United States, while, in the same opinion, upholding the Muslim travel ban, another executive order, issued by President Donald J. Trump, and calling for, in his words, “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissenting opinion, wrote: