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No-No Boy Reading Order
John Okada's No-No Boy (1957) is a debut novel following Ichiro Yamada, a Japanese-American young man who returns to Seattle after spending two years in prison for refusing to serve in the US Army during the Second World War (having already spent time in a Japanese-American internment camp). Initially neglected on publication, it was rediscovered by the Asian-American literary movement in the 1970s and is now recognized as the defining Japanese-American novel of the internment era.
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No-No Boy
Complete No-No Boy Book List
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No-No Boy
John Okada·1957·The complete novel. Entirely standalone.
No-No Boy — Frequently Asked Questions
Who were the "No-No Boys" in Japanese-American internment?
In 1943, the US War Department and the War Relocation Authority administered a loyalty questionnaire to all interned Japanese Americans over seventeen years of age. Questions 27 and 28 asked whether respondents were willing to serve in the US armed forces and whether they would swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and forswear any allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Those who answered 'no' to both questions — the 'no-no boys' — were branded as disloyal and faced additional penalties: transfer to the high-security Tule Lake Segregation Center, loss of citizenship, or incarceration. Approximately 8,000 people answered 'no' to one or both questions; their reasons varied enormously. Some refused on principle — they felt that a government that had imprisoned them without cause had no right to demand military service; others refused because they were Buddhist or Shinto and the loyalty oath conflicted with their religious beliefs; others refused because they feared their families in Japan would suffer if they renounced their Japanese citizenship; still others simply refused out of exhaustion and despair. The no-no boys were treated as traitors by many Japanese Americans who had answered 'yes' and served in the military (including the famous 442nd Regimental Combat Team), and the division between 'yes-yes' and 'no-no' respondents created deep rifts in Japanese-American communities that persisted for decades.
Why was No-No Boy initially ignored?
No-No Boy was published in 1957 by the Charles E. Tuttle Company, a publisher based in Tokyo that specialized in books about Japan and the Far East — an unusual publisher for a novel in English about Japanese Americans, and one that gave the book almost no exposure in the American literary market. The book received almost no reviews, sold poorly, and was out of print almost immediately. Part of the reason for its neglect was the subject matter: the 1950s were not a moment in American culture when Japanese-American writers could count on a mainstream audience for work that was critical of the United States government's treatment of Japanese Americans, especially in the context of the McCarthy-era suppression of dissent and the ongoing Cold War. Part of the reason was also within the Japanese-American community itself: the no-no boys were a painful and shameful subject for many Japanese Americans who had served in the military and were trying to prove their loyalty; a novel that sympathetically portrayed a no-no boy was not welcome. Okada died in 1971, before the novel's rediscovery. In the early 1970s, the writers' group Combined Asian American Resources Project (CARP) — which included Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong — tracked down Okada's widow and secured the rights to republish the novel; it appeared in 1976 from the University of Washington Press and has been in print ever since.
How does No-No Boy portray Japanese-American identity in the postwar period?
No-No Boy is organized around Ichiro's inability to fit into any of the available categories for Japanese-American identity in the immediate postwar period. He is not American enough for the veterans who served and resent him; he is not Japanese enough for the Issei (first-generation immigrants) who expected him to maintain his Japanese identity; he is not a simple rebel or political hero but a confused and guilty young man who made a decision he is no longer sure was right. The novel's portrait of the Japanese-American community in Seattle is as unflinching as its portrait of Ichiro: the veterans who feel entitled to contempt for the no-no boys, the mothers who clung to the fantasy that Japan had won the war, the young men who are trying to build lives in a country that imprisoned them. Okada refuses the comfort of a political argument that would make Ichiro simply right or simply wrong; instead he shows a community shattered by the war and by the loyalty questionnaire and trying to put itself back together with the inadequate materials of anger, denial, and mutual resentment.
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