No-No Boy

by John Okada

  This formal repudiation of a shameful precedent is laudable and long overdue. But it does not make the majority’s decision here acceptable or right. By blindly accepting the Government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu and merely replaces one “gravely wrong” decision with another.*

  Other executive edicts have called for a zero tolerance policy toward those who enter the United States illegally, justifying the separation of families and the detention of children, even those seeking asylum at our borders. Throughout the nation, there are currently more than two hundred immigrant detention centers, detaining, at last count in 2017, a daily average of thirty-nine thousand individuals. No-No Boy is a cautionary tale. Rereading it, reliving the history of the incarceration of immigrant families based on racial prejudice, executive privilege, and the false assertion of military necessity, fills me with deep sadness. The stories of Okada and his contemporaries, including those of my parents and their siblings, are ones of injustice, of pain and loss, and of physical and emotional violence, with consequences that outlive that generation—a cruel history that, we should have learned by now, should never be repeated.

  As I suggested at the beginning of this essay, No-No Boy may be read as a test of character, questioning the rigid binary of loyalty—yes or no—and teaching us that what makes us human and complex, what constitutes character, are all the questions and cares that exist between yes and no—ethical and political choices, our best intentions, our social and cultural being, beliefs, courage, fears, failures, and compassion. 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

  To my wife, Dorothy

  Preface

  December the seventh of the year 1941 was the day when the Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor.

  As of that moment, the Japanese in the United States became, by virtue of their ineradicable brownness and the slant eyes which, upon close inspection, will seldom appear slanty, animals of a different breed. The moment the impact of the words solemnly being transmitted over the several million radios of the nation struck home, everything Japanese and everyone Japanese became despicable.

  The college professor, finding it suddenly impossible to meet squarely the gaze of his polite, serious, but now too Japanese-ish star pupil, coughed on his pipe and assured the lad that things were a mess. Conviction lacking, he failed at his attempt to be worldly and assuring. He mumbled something about things turning out one way or the other sooner or later and sighed with relief when the little fellow, who hardly ever smiled and, now, probably never would, stood up and left the room.

  In a tavern, a drunk, irrigating the sponge in his belly, let it be known to the world that he never thought much about the sneaky Japs and that this proved he was right. It did not matter that he owed his Japanese landlord three weeks’ rent, nor that that industrious Japanese had often picked him off the sidewalk and deposited him on his bed. Someone set up a round of beer for the boys in the place and, further fortified, he announced with patriotic tremor in his alcoholic tones that he would be first in line at the recruiting office the very next morning. That night the Japanese landlord picked him off the sidewalk and put him to bed.

  Jackie was a whore and the news made her unhappy because she got two bucks a head and the Japanese boys were clean and considerate and hot and fast. Aside from her professional interest in them, she really liked them. She was sorry and, in her sorrow, she suffered a little with them.

  A truck and a keen sense of horse-trading had provided a good living for Herman Fine. He bought from and sold primarily to Japanese hotel-keepers and grocers. No transaction was made without considerable haggling and clever maneuvering, for the Japanese could be and often were a shifty lot whose solemn promises frequently turned out to be groundwork for more extended and complex stratagems to cheat him out of his rightful profit. Herman Fine listened to the radio and cried without tears for the Japanese, who, in an instant of time that was not even a speck on the big calendar, had taken their place beside the Jew. The Jew was used to suffering. The writing for them was etched in caked and dried blood over countless generations upon countless generations. The Japanese did not know. They were proud, too proud, and they were ambitious, too ambitious. Bombs had fallen and, in less time than it takes a Japanese farmer’s wife in California to run from the fields into the house and give birth to a child, the writing was scrawled for them. The Jap-Jew would look in the mirror this Sunday night and see a Jap-Jew.

  The indignation, the hatred, the patriotism of the American people shifted into full-throated condemnation of the Japanese who blotted their land. The Japanese who were born Americans and remained Japanese because biology does not know the meaning of patriotism no longer worried about whether they were Japanese-Americans or American-Japanese. They were Japanese, just as were their Japanese mothers and Japanese fathers and Japanese brothers and sisters. The radio had said as much.

  First, the real Japanese-Japanese were rounded up. These real Japanese-Japanese were Japanese nationals who had the misfortune to be diplomats and businessmen and visiting professors. They were put on a boat and sent back to Japan.

  Then the alien Japanese, the ones who had been in America for two, three, or even four decades, were screened, and those found to be too actively Japanese were transported to the hinterlands and put in a camp.

  The security screen was sifted once more and, this time, the lesser lights were similarly plucked and deposited. An old man, too old, too feeble, and too scared, was caught in the net. In his pocket was a little, black book. He had been a collector for the Japan-Help-the-Poor-and-Starving-and-Flooded-Out-and-Homeless-and-Crippled-and-What-Have-You Fund. “Yamada-san, 50 American cents; Okada-san, two American dollars; Watanabe-san, 24 American cents; Takizaki-san, skip this month because boy broke leg”; and so on down the page. Yamada-san, Okada-san, Watanabe-san, Takizaki-san, and so on down the page were whisked away from their homes while weeping families wept until the tears must surely have been wept dry, and then wept some more.

  By now, the snowball was big enough to wipe out the rising sun. The big rising sun would take a little more time, but the little rising sun which was the Japanese in countless Japanese communities in the coastal states of Washington, Oregon, and California presented no problem. The whisking and transporting of Japanese and the construction of camps with barbed wire and ominous towers supporting fully armed soldiers in places like Idaho and Wyoming and Arizona, places which even Hollywood scorned for background, had become skills which demanded the utmost of America’s great organizing ability.

  And so, a few months after the seventh day of December of the year nineteen forty-one, the only Japanese left on the west coast of the United States was Matsusaburo Inabukuro who, while it has been forgotten whether he was Japanese-American or American-Japanese, picked up an “I am Chinese”—not American or American-Chinese or Chinese-American but “I am Chinese”—button and got a job in a California shipyard.

  Two years later a good Japanese-American who had volunteered for the army sat smoking in the belly of a B-24 on his way back to Guam from a reconnaissance flight to Japan. His job was to listen through his earphones, which were attached to a high-frequency set, and jot down air-ground messages spoken by Japanese-Japanese in Japanese planes and in Japanese radio shacks.

  The lieutenant who operated the radar-detection equipment was a blond giant from Nebraska.

  The lieutenant from Nebraska said: “Where you from?”

  The Japanese-American who was an American soldier answered: “No place in particular.”

  “You got folks?”

  “Yeah, I got folks.”


  “Where at?”

  “Wyoming, out in the desert.”

  “Farmers, huh?”

  “Not quite.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Well, it’s this way . . .” And then the Japanese-American whose folks were still Japanese-Japanese, or else they would not be in a camp with barbed wire and watchtowers with soldiers holding rifles, told the blond giant from Nebraska about the removal of the Japanese from the Coast, which was called the evacuation, and about the concentration camps, which were called relocation centers.

  The lieutenant listened and he didn’t believe it. He said: “That’s funny. Now, tell me again.”

  The Japanese-American soldier of the American army told it again and didn’t change a word.

  The lieutenant believed him this time. “Hell’s bells,” he exclaimed, “if they’d done that to me, I wouldn’t be sitting in the belly of a broken-down B-24 going back to Guam from a reconnaissance mission to Japan.”

  “I got reasons,” said the Japanese-American soldier soberly.

  “They could kiss my ass,” said the lieutenant from Nebraska.

  “I got reasons,” said the Japanese-American soldier soberly, and he was thinking about a lot of things but mostly about his friend who didn’t volunteer for the army because his father had been picked up in the second screening and was in a different camp from the one he and his mother and two sisters were in. Later on, the army tried to draft his friend out of the relocation camp into the army and the friend had stood before the judge and said let my father out of that other camp and come back to my mother who is an old woman but misses him enough to want to sleep with him and I’ll try on the uniform. The judge said he couldn’t do that and the friend said he wouldn’t be drafted and they sent him to the federal prison where he now was.

  “What the hell are we fighting for?” said the lieutenant from Nebraska.

  “I got reasons,” said the Japanese-American soldier soberly and thought some more about his friend who was in another kind of uniform because they wouldn’t let his father go to the same camp with his mother and sisters.

  JOHN OKADA

  1

  Two weeks after his twenty-fifth birthday, Ichiro got off a bus at Second and Main in Seattle. He had been gone four years, two in camp and two in prison.

  Walking down the street that autumn morning with a small, black suitcase, he felt like an intruder in a world to which he had no claim. It was just enough that he should feel this way, for, of his own free will, he had stood before the judge and said that he would not go in the army. At the time there was no other choice for him. That was when he was twenty-three, a man of twenty-three. Now, two years older, he was even more of a man.

  Christ, he thought to himself, just a goddamn kid is all I was. Didn’t know enough to wipe my own nose. What the hell have I done? What am I doing back here? Best thing I can do would be to kill some son of a bitch and head back to prison.

  He walked toward the railroad depot where the tower with the clocks on all four sides was. It was a dirty-looking tower of ancient brick. It was a dirty city. Dirtier, certainly, than it had a right to be after only four years.

  Waiting for the light to change to green, he looked around at the people standing at the bus stop. A couple of men in suits, half a dozen women who failed to arouse him even after prolonged good behavior, and a young Japanese with a lunch bucket. Ichiro studied him, searching in his mind for the name that went with the round, pimply face and the short-cropped hair. The pimples were gone and the face had hardened, but the hair was still cropped. The fellow wore green, army-fatigue trousers and an Eisenhower jacket—Eto Minato. The name came to him at the same time as did the horrible significance of the army clothes. In panic, he started to step off the curb. It was too late. He had been seen.

  “Itchy!” That was his nickname.

  Trying to escape, Ichiro urged his legs frenziedly across the street.

  “Hey, Itchy!” The caller’s footsteps ran toward him.

  An arm was placed across his back. Ichiro stopped and faced the other Japanese. He tried to smile, but could not. There was no way out now.

  “I’m Eto. Remember?” Eto smiled and extended his palm. Reluctantly, Ichiro lifted his own hand and let the other shake it.

  The round face with the round eyes peered at him through silver-rimmed spectacles. “What the hell! It’s been a long time, but not that long. How’ve you been? What’s doing?”

  “Well . . . that is, I’m . . .”

  “Last time must have been before Pearl Harbor. God, it’s been quite a while, hasn’t it? Three, no, closer to four years, I guess. Lotsa Japs coming back to the Coast. Lotsa Japs in Seattle. You’ll see ’em around. Japs are funny that way. Gotta have their rice and saké and other Japs. Stupid, I say. The smart ones went to Chicago and New York and lotsa places back east, but there’s still plenty coming back out this way.” Eto drew cigarettes from his breast pocket and held out the package. “No? Well, I’ll have one. Got the habit in the army. Just got out a short while back. Rough time, but I made it. Didn’t get out in time to make the quarter, but I’m planning to go to school. How long you been around?”

  Ichiro touched his toe to the suitcase. “Just got in. Haven’t been home yet.”

  “When’d you get discharged?”

  A car grinding its gears started down the street. He wished he were in it. “I . . . that is . . . I never was in.”

  Eto slapped him good-naturedly on the arm. “No need to look so sour. So you weren’t in. So what? Been in camp all this time?”

  “No.” He made an effort to be free of Eto with his questions. He felt as if he were in a small room whose walls were slowly closing in on him. “It’s been a long time, I know, but I’m really anxious to see the folks.”

  “What the hell. Let’s have a drink. On me. I don’t give a damn if I’m late to work. As for your folks, you’ll see them soon enough. You drink, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but not now.”

  “Ahh.” Eto was disappointed. He shifted his lunch box from under one arm to the other.

  “I’ve really got to be going.”

  The round face wasn’t smiling any more. It was thoughtful. The eyes confronted Ichiro with indecision which changed slowly to enlightenment and then to suspicion. He remembered. He knew.

  The friendliness was gone as he said: “No-no boy, huh?”

  Ichiro wanted to say yes. He wanted to return the look of despising hatred and say simply yes, but it was too much to say. The walls had closed in and were crushing all the unspoken words back down into his stomach. He shook his head once, not wanting to evade the eyes but finding it impossible to meet them. Out of his big weakness the little ones were branching, and the eyes he didn’t have the courage to face were ever present. If it would have helped to gouge out his own eyes, he would have done so long ago. The hate-churned eyes with the stamp of unrelenting condemnation were his cross and he had driven the nails with his own hands.

  “Rotten bastard. Shit on you.” Eto coughed up a mouthful of sputum and rolled his words around it: “Rotten, no-good bastard.”

  Surprisingly, Ichiro felt relieved. Eto’s anger seemed to serve as a release to his own naked tensions. As he stooped to lift the suitcase a wet wad splattered over his hand and dripped onto the black leather. The legs of his accuser were in front of him. God in a pair of green fatigues, U.S. Army style. They were the legs of the jury that had passed sentence upon him. Beseech me, they seemed to say, throw your arms about me and bury your head between my knees and seek pardon for your great sin.

  “I’ll piss on you next time,” said Eto vehemently.

  He turned as he lifted the suitcase off the ground and hurried away from the legs and the eyes from which no escape was possible.

  Jackson Street started at the waterfront and stretched past th
e two train depots and up the hill all the way to the lake, where the houses were bigger and cleaner and had garages with late-model cars in them. For Ichiro, Jackson Street signified that section of the city immediately beyond the railroad tracks between Fifth and Twelfth Avenues. That was the section which used to be pretty much Japanese town. It was adjacent to Chinatown and most of the gambling and prostitution and drinking seemed to favor the area.

  Like the dirty clock tower of the depot, the filth of Jackson Street had increased. Ichiro paused momentarily at an alley and peered down the passage formed by the walls of two sagging buildings. There had been a door there at one time, a back door to a movie house which only charged a nickel. A nickel was a lot of money when he had been seven or nine or eleven. He wanted to go into the alley to see if the door was still there.

  Being on Jackson Street with its familiar store fronts and taverns and restaurants, which were somehow different because the war had left its mark on them, was like trying to find one’s way out of a dream that seemed real most of the time but wasn’t really real because it was still only a dream. The war had wrought violent changes upon the people, and the people, in turn, working hard and living hard and earning a lot of money and spending it on whatever was available, had distorted the profile of Jackson Street. The street had about it the air of a carnival without quite succeeding at becoming one. A shooting gallery stood where once had been a clothing store; fish and chips had replaced a jewelry shop; and a bunch of Negroes were horsing around raucously in front of a pool parlor. Everything looked older and dirtier and shabbier.

  He walked past the pool parlor, picking his way gingerly among the Negroes, of whom there had been only a few at one time and of whom there seemed to be nothing but now. They were smoking and shouting and cussing and carousing and the sidewalk was slimy with their spittle.