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This collection was made for two main purposes. Each provides valuable contributions to the reading of No-No Boy by John Okada and hopefully, encourages further research based around this subject. The first main purpose is to educate the audience on Japanese Internment camps. Many of these sources provide information embedded in a personal recount or retelling of times in the internment camps, as well as before and after. Knowing the history of the times prior to Ichiro returning home is important so as to know the culture and what Ichiro would have faced in terms of societal truth of his community. Also, in this collection, we hear from both sides. Not only are the stories of the people interned told, but we also hear an interview of the director of the program and his take on things, as well as some more factual information.
The second main purpose is to help the audience realize that Ichiro’s story is not representative of the whole story of the time. There were many opinions surrounding Japanese Internment and their return to their property and it can be dangerous to let one story represent the whole of a large and complex historical narrative. Knowing more about the period surrounding No-No Boy and Ichiro can give the reader a better understanding of what the main character is going through as well as what actual citizens from that time were going through and the discrimination they faced.

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Reflection from Japanese American National Museum Conference

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Reflection from Japanese American National Museum Conference

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This article provides interesting connections from the personal experiences and family history of the author and No-No Boy. The author's uncle is a part of a panel of no-no boys that were interned, her uncle specifically going to Tule Lake. One interesting point she brought was from a Tedtalk about how a single story representing a whole can be dangerous. Ichiro's story is not reflective of all Japanese-American no-no boys even though this novel is a staple in literature studies.

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"How do you as a storyteller account for traces of the erased, the denied or that flat out vanished?"-Junot Díaz
From Twitter:
July 15, 2013, 12:35PM: @Tulelakenps: Today, 70 years ago in 1943, Tule Lake was declared a Segregation Center, incarcerating all Japanese Americans deemed "disloyal".

*****

"Your name?"

I'm picking up my registration packet for the Japanese American National Museum conference, held in Seattle a few weeks ago. "Nimura, N-I-M..." I begin, and start to spell out my last name for the volunteer automatically, but then I stop. She's already flipping through the packets and tote bags. She hands me my name tag. "Are you affiliated with any camp?"

I look at the brightly colored strips of ribbon on the registration table, preprinted in gold lettering with the names of the camps and detention centers. Crystal City. Heart Mountain. Jerome. Gila River. Manzanar. I run my hand down the right-hand column of tags. There it is, an emerald green strip of ribbon. I pick it up and attach it to the back of my own name tag. I'm staring at the tag: there's my name, and under it, the emerald green strip with Tule Lake, where my father and his family were incarcerated for almost four years during World War II.

While I'm putting on the name tag, I feel conflicted. It's not because I'm ashamed of my family's history. Although "Tule Lake" became equated with "disloyal" and "unpatriotic" in some circles, my suburban childhood in a mostly White/Latino community sheltered me from much of the stigma within the Japanese American community. I guess it just feels strange to be choosing a tag, especially when I think about the numbered tags that the WRA assigned to Japanese Americans during World War II. I know that wearing a numbered tag for your government-mandated incarceration and wearing a tag for a conference are light-years apart. It's one thing to be labeled as an object, it's another thing to claim a label in the name of self-definition and community. I'm not trying to equate the two, but my body feels the discomfort.

I have been to Days of Remembrance, Bon Odoris, and Buddhist memorial services. I have been to the Wing Luke Asian Museum several times at its past and current locations. I taught Asian American literature and Japanese American history for years to college students. Once, I even spoke on behalf of a college granting honorary degrees to former Nikkei students. But to be (half) Japanese American in Seattle at this conference is something else. It's a conference of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians (as well as interested allies) from all over the world, gathered to commemorate the signing of the 1988 Civil Liberties Act granting Japanese Americans redress. To be here is to feel the collective weight of a particular history. Almost everywhere I look, the faces look like my family's. In some cases, the faces are my family: my cousin, my auntie and uncle. They are here for the conference.

Hours after I register, my Nisei auntie arrives at the conference, and sees my name tag. She's registered already, too. "Hey, how did you get a Tule Lake tag?" she jokes. "They ran out by the time we got there!" I start to rip mine off-"Here, you take mine. You've earned the right to wear it, much more than I have. " I marvel: somehow, we're able to joke about this. She waves her hand from side to side, dismissing it. "No, no, you wear it." The unspoken but understood subtext between us: she's worn it all her life.

I am feeling something close to vertigo, if that's what you call this feeling of history spiraling back towards me.

*****
On the first day of the conference, I go to a writers' panel featuring Naomi Hirahara, Juliet Kono, and Joy Kogaw a, chaired by my UW grad school professor Steve Sumida. I have read works by all of these authors. It is a wonderful thing to be there. I have been in silent conversation with these women for years now. After the panel, I introduce myself to Naomi Hirahara. "I've been wanting to hear more from the younger generations," she tells me and activist Sean Miura. "There's a growing number of emerging Korean American voices, and I'd like to hear more young Japanese American voices too." Sean and I agree. Sean phrases it best, though: "The Issei have immigration, and the Issei and Nisei have camp-I think we're still figuring out what our story is."

*****
Google the term "No-No Boy," and what comes up first is John Okada's novel, set in Seattle. (In Seattle today, the name "Ichiro" will probably bring more wistful sighs today about the former Mariner baseball player than about Okada's protagonist, Ichiro Yamada.) I believe that Okada wrote his book with some of the best social justice intentions: to tell the story of the marginalized in America, and to tell the story of the ostracized even within Japanese America. And then I think about the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie's "danger of a single story." In her wonderful TED talk, she speaks about the danger of master narratives: "Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. Okada's one story, his novel No-No Boy, has become synedoche for so many students of Japanese American history and literature: one part representing the whole. With a few exceptions, including my uncle's memoir, there are still so very few representations of the No-No Boys. Ostracized for so many years, their first-person narratives are still slowly emerging, well over half a century later.

*****
I used to wonder what my uncle Hiroshi Kashiwagi, a "No-No Boy" himself, has thought about Okada's novel. In the Asian American studies circles where I grew up, the novel is a canonical text, a crucible for "angry Asian man" anger, a touchstone. One day, I asked my uncle what he thought. Somewhat to my surprise, he confessed that he doesn't really care for the book.

On the second day of the JANM conference I begin to see and feel what my uncle means. I'm sitting with my auntie at my uncle's panel, "The Tule Lake Segregation Center: Its History and Significance." As the "poet laureate" of Tule Lake, my uncle's been asked to speak about his wartime experience on a panel about the Tule Lake confinement site. I'm there to hear my uncle: to support him, and to be with my auntie. The dull champagne beige hotel conference room, a combination of two smaller rooms, is packed; it's standing room only. The lights are depressingly fluorescent and dim. There are no windows.

Barbara Takei, the coordinator for the biannual Tule Lake pilgrimages, opens the session. She welcomes the panelists, telling them that we are delighted to hear their experiences. She talks about one of the most damaging and lasting crimes the U.S. Government committed against Japanese Americans: the division that the loyalty questionnaire created, which did not just create a false division between "disloyal" and "loyal," but between Japanese Americans and each other. Much of her passion lately, she says, lies in educating her own community about Tule Lake.

As Takei speaks, my aunt's body language changes: slumped shoulders, hand to face, massaging temples, a form of self-soothing. "Do you have any tissue?" she asks me. I search my purse, but I don't have anything. I offer to get up, but she tells me not to worry, she'll be all right. I don't know if she's just tired-she's just turned 80, after all, but I see something of the eight-year old child that was in camp. The eight-year-old who was the same age that my oldest daughter is now.

The panel description in the program says that it will cover the significance of the Tule Lake segregation center. However, it is a panel about No-No Boys and renunciants and their responses to the loyalty questionnaire. (This is a description, not a critique.)

The first panelist is Ben Nishimura. "I'm surrounded by educated gentlemen here," he jokes, poking a little fun at himself. But it's his ability to read and analyze that hits me hardest. As a former English professor. I've told my students that reading literature closely may not save their lives, but their ability to work with language and nuance will put some aspect of their lives to the test. As a case in point, the loyalty questionnaire: "I read that [questionnaire] several times," Nishimura says, "and I tried to analyze what the government was trying to do." The loyalty questionnaire was torturous: each answer meant keeping a family together or apart, being jailed separately or imprisoned, volunteering to serve in the armed forces for a country from behind barbed wire or not-and eventually being ostracized or included for decades in a tight-knit community.

"The government made me no-no, not me," says Morgan Yamanaka, the second panelist. He's referring to the designation of Tule Lake as a Segregation Center, branding all residents there "disloyal." He goes on to talk about being imprisoned at the Tule Lake jail, about being interrogated. And then darkness, a bright light, and "after that, nothing," he tells us. He has no memory of those crucial few hours. When he's released to be with other prisoners, he tells us about reuniting with his brother "who was physically beaten so that there were no marks." The absence of his brother's scars and the absence of his memory speak volumes.

And then there's my uncle, the third panelist. A 90-year old actor, poet and playwright, he's got a resonant voice-and he knows exactly how to use it. "I want to relate some of my background before camp," he begins, "as I feel it has some bearing on my responses to the loyalty questionnaire." He tells us about growing up in the country, attending a school where racial segregation, not academic ability, determined the level of education the students received. On the annual test about the U.S. Constitution, he says, he and another Nikkei student received the top scores. He was familiar with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He tells us about the doll his mother made in camp. She sent the doll to the ranch where his family had sharecropped for a living, to the ranch owner's wife. His mother received a scathing response from the owner's wife about "having nothing better to do than make dolls, while the rest of the country was struggling to get by." He tells us about his favorite teacher in high school, the one who coached him in public speaking. "I was her star student," he says. He wrote to her from camp, asking for guidance with a camp theater group. He received no response, and later saw that she was part of an"anti-Jap" agitator group. The group was agitating against the return of Japanese to his hometown."We were not only betrayed by the government," he continues, "but by people we trusted and respected.... And in the end, the decision was my own."

In the conference room, there are murmurs of sympathetic shock and dismay from the audience as the panelists speak. The panel's lasted for over an hour, but as far as I can tell, no one's getting up to leave. The silence in the room is tangible. It's shaped by the men telling these stories. It's a silence that receives and bears witnesses to the stories.

In the wake of that silence, I am thinking about Okada's No-No Boy, Ichiro. Ichiro makes his decision partly to please the Japanese nationalism of his controlling mother, partly because he is understandably angry at his imprisonment, and partly because he is confused. In one of the novel's most celebrated internal monologues, addressed to his mother, he muses that his two "halves" add up to nothing: "I wish with all my heart that I were Japanese or that I were American. I am neither and I blame you and I blame myself." Ichiro's reasons may not be inaccurate, I think. Surely there were so many among the thousands who were confused and bitter. But these panelists are telling the room a different story. They are telling the stories of careful readers, of thoughtful informed protest, of considered decisions by American citizens, of the multiple lenses that they brought to bear on writing two short simple responses.

For many, Okada's novel is the single story of the No-No Boys. But if No-No Boy is the single story, maybe it can become the gateway, not the destination, for other stories about Tule Lake and the No-No Boys. For me, Okada's novel is now the proverbial tip of the iceberg: a defiant pyramid above the water, but with so many hardened crystallized layers beneath the surface.

*****
If I am being very honest, sometimes I feel saturated with the stories of camp. I've read so many, I've studied so many, I've written and taught and spoken and thought about camp, and felt how the camp story is my story as well. I know that the very saturation is a recent privilege, since the Issei and Nisei did not speak about their experiences for decades after the war. I do know that the resulting narrative fatigue is very little to speak of, compared with what my family and my community endured. And yet, as I tell a friend about writing this piece, she wonders about my sense of saturation in camp narratives. She's an English professor at a rural Midwestern university. She's just finished teaching Miné Okubo's novel Citizen 13660 to this summer to her students. "They were blown away," she tells me. "None of them had even heard of internment."

Camp provides me with a link of empathy, even a small one, to other minority communities and communities of color who continue to feel the weight of history every day in their bodies. I'm writing this essay not long after George Zimmerman's trial and verdict. I am also trained as a scholar of African American and multicultural literature, which means that I have also studied history. Camp is where my social justice roots begin, in the difficult telling of difficult stories that are not often told.

What is it to inherit the history of camp, to reckon with it? How do we ensure that the most important parts of its legacy, the painful and the beautiful, remain alive? What is it to be born into a Japanese American post-camp generation, including the younger Sansei like myself and on through the Yonsei and Gosei?

I'm starting to wonder if this is our story: the inheritance and the reckoning. And the vertigo.

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Of No-No Boy and No-No Boys: At the Seattle 2013 JANM Conference

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Tamiko Nimura goes in search of the story of her story of the story of Japanese Americans, past, present and future.

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In this song by Fort Minor, it is a rap about Japanese internment, following one specific family who we learn is a refection to the singer's family when they were interned. It has a simple beat that is typical of the 2000s and clips of Japanese-Americans telling their stories mixed into the track.

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In this podcast transcript; two different stories are told, one bearing a remarkable similarity to the story Ichiro faces in No-No Boy. After a quick summary of Japanese-American internment, the two launch into their stories. The first answered no to the first question but for the second question that labeled so many young Japanese-american men as no-no boys, he left it blank and wrote underneath that he would answer once his civil rights were returned. This was taken as a negative answer and he was taken to a special camp with other no-no boys. The second answered no and then yes to the infamous questions and after being drafted and not responding, was taken to Federal prison for three years and three months.

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Japanese-American 'No No Boys'

A patriotic suspect

(Dorathea Lange)

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Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II were given a questionnaire on which two questions were of particular importance:

War Relocation Authority newsreel

(U.S. War Relocation Authority (WRA))

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Question #27 asked: "Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?"

Question #28 asked: "Will you swear unqualified allegiances 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 other foreign government, power or organization?"

Feeling betrayed by their native country, many young American-born Japanese boys answered "no" to both questions. They were segregated into a special camp and considered potential enemies of this country. The name given them was the "No-No Boys."

Bill Nishimura: My name is Bill Nishimura. Number 27: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered? I answered "No."

Number 28, I answered in blank and wrote a note underneath stating that when my civil rights is restored I will answer this question.

They assumed that was negative -- and so people who answered "No, No" at that time, they were sent to Tule Lake. I wasn't really happy to go there because I didn't want to be called a disloyal. I was still an American and I was just fighting for my civil rights. When I got to Tule Lake, I was just startled -- fenced all around the camp, so many guard towers. "Oh, so this is the segregation center" I thought.

On the war's end, my concern was being deported to Japan. The greatest news while I was in camp was this announcement, the government they said "If you wish to go to Japan, well we won't stop you, but we're not forcing you to go to Japan." I thought to myself, "Uncle Sam still has a warm heart for me."

Gene Akutsu: My name is Gene Akutsu. I answered the questions 27 as "No" and question 28 as "Yes."

They decided to activate the draft in January, I guess it was, and by April I was one of the first to be called in for induction, which I didn't follow. Then the FBI came and off I went. Three years, three months at the Federal Prison in McNeil Island.

The times that used to get to me was in the daytime -- I'd hear the seagulls. I used to get melancholy over that 'cause when I was young, we always lived right close to the sound here, so we hear the seagulls all the time and those thoughts would drift through my mind, in and out.

I got out in 1946. When my mother passed away, I refer to that as a wartime casualty. When my brother and I made it back home, we found out that the church members had told her "Don't come to church any more." One day it all got to her and she took her life.

If she had only lived one more year longer, we would have had a clearance from the president saying that we are all okay and you have all your citizenship back -- that's all she was living for.

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Japanese-American 'No No Boys' : During World War II, Japanese Americans put into internment camps were given a questionnaire. How they answered those questions would determine their quality of life behind the fences -- and the answers to two questions in particular about military service changed the lives of the so-called "No No Boys."

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This poem written by a young Nisei in a Japanese internment camp represents a certain opinion of the Japanese-Americans who were interned that they were doing their part for the safety of America. This poem praises those Japanese-American young people who are going abroad to fight for the ideals that America stands for. It is so interesting to read this poem that is so proud and loyal to the American way of life that it literally written from an internment camp where the rights of so many American born citizens were taken away.

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He doesn't know the world at all Who stays in his nest and doesn't go out. He doesn't know what birds know best Nor what I want to sing about, That the world is full of loveliness. When dewdrops sparkle in the grass And earth's aflood with morning light, A blackbird sings upon a bush To greet the dawning after night.

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Executive Order 9066 was the order signed into law by former President Franklin D. Roosevelt. According to the article, this order was the greatest violation to civil rights this country has ever seen. Not only were those with Japanese ancestry interned but also those with German and Italian ancestry including Jewish refugees.

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Pearl Harbor provided the excuse for the detention of the Japanese Americans during World War II, but Executive Order 9102 and 9066 were the legislation that really were the catalyst to the ultimate internment of the Japanese. The Japanese resentment that loomed since immigration grew even more with Pearl Harbor and help influence FDR's ultimate decision.

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In these former military men reflections, they explore the situations in which Japanese-Americans were hastily force into internment camps. The two gentlemen speaking provide personal experiences that allow the viewer to connect and realize what it was to experience that time in the United States.

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The Pearl Harbor attack caused a wave of nationalist resentment that had long-reaching effects on the Japanese-American population.

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This article describes much of the backlash and anti-Japanese rhetoric that was talked about and expressed in No-No Boy. Specifically, it talks about the different leagues organized to fight the return of the Japanese and the media battle following the order that allowed all Japanese removed from their homes in Seattle and all over the west coast to return.
On a more personal note, it is so crazy to read about such racist sentiment at large in a community so close to home and not that far in the past. It is good to learn about the social justice issues in the area you live in so that you can become more aware and considerate.

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After Internment Japanese American's Right to Return

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After Internment: Seattle's Debate Over Japanese Americans' Right to Return Home

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In this opinion piece which appeared in the New York Times, explains the story of a no-no boy who was similar to Ichiro. This man in the article started an organization against Japanese interment called Play Fair Committee. They stated how the members were willing to join the military and fight for the constitution and Bill of Rights, but only once their rights spelled out on those two documents were returned to them. I believe this was similar to the stories of other characters in No-No Boy.

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Courage takes many forms. Frank Emi, who died in California on Dec. 1, age 94, had the steadfast kind, well suited for lonely struggles and ostracism.

He was a young Japanese-American man sent to an internment camp in Wyoming after Pearl Harbor. He could have gotten out by signing a loyalty oath and enlisting in the Army, proving his patriotism the way so many other Japanese-Americans did - honorably, irrefutably, with their blood, limbs and lives.

Mr. Emi marched in exactly the opposite direction. After receiving draft notices in the camp, he and six other young men created the Fair Play Committee. In March 1944, they signed a declaration challenging the internment policy and their conscription as shameful affronts to the Constitution and American ideals.

"We, the members of the FPC, are not afraid to go to war," they wrote. "We are not afraid to risk our lives for our country. We would gladly sacrifice our lives to protect and uphold the principles and ideals of our country as set forth in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, for on its inviolability depends the freedom, liberty, justice, and protection of all people, including Japanese-Americans and all other minority groups.

"But have we been given such freedom, such liberty, such justice, such protection? NO!!"

Mr. Emi and the six other original signers all refused to serve. More than 300 people in 10 camps joined them. All were prosecuted. Other Japanese-Americans mocked them as the "no-no boys." The Japanese American Citizens League denounced them as seditious. But Mr. Emi, who spent 18 months in a federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., was right to speak out.

After the war, Mr. Emi worked as a postal clerk and for the State of California. In the 1980s, he joined the fight for redress for Japanese-Americans who were deprived of their property and freedom.

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human rights and human rights violations

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Courage takes many forms. Frank Emi, a defiant World War II internee, had the steadfast kind.

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This is a student's essay analyzes No-No Boy and the juxtapositions within the novel. It connects different aspects that I had not connected yet such as the juxtaposition of Mrs. Yamanda and Kenji, both their lives and their deaths.

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Disclaimer: This work has been submitted by a student. This is not an example of the work written by our professional academic writers. You can view samples of our professional work here.

Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of UK Essays.

Published: Mon, 5 Dec 2016

Right from the beginning of John Okada's No No Boy there is the juxtaposition of the Japanese-Americans returning from internment camps at the end of World War II and the Japanese-Americans that pledged themselves to the U.S. Military returning from service overseas. Ichiro Yamada, the protagonist, is facing a personal dilemma of national identity. He blames his stubborn Japanese heritage for him getting locked up, and the Americans were the ones that did the locking. His parents speak only Japanese in defiance to American influence. Despite being born and raised in America, Ichiro claims to be a Japanese nationalist and is consequentially imprisoned. His mother claims that the entire family is wholly Japanese, although Ichiro has never been to Japan. This generational conflict that's common in immigrant families is the spur for Ichiro's identity crisis throughout the novel.

The one exception to the hostility of the generational split lies in Ichiro's friendship with Kenji. Kenji is a decorated war hero that was rewarded for his military efforts with material possessions from the federal government. He doesn't condemn Ichiro for his decision. He instead provides Ichiro a valuable glimpse at the extravagant reward of assimilation, but the image is tainted with the gangrenous injury he sustained in the service. Kenji's character is polarized by that of Freddie. He is an old friend of Ichiro's and a fellow No No Boy that is determined to run from his problems with society and his family instead of dealing with them rationally like an adult.

Okada associates everything maternal in the story with Japanese loyalty. Ichiro blames his Japanese nationalist mother as the reason that he became a No No Boy in the first place. She is a nationalistic elitist in every sense of the word. She refuses to learn English during the thirty years that she lives in Seattle and doesn't even believe the numerous reports that mighty Japan has lost the war to the Americans. To her, assimilation equals death. By contrast, Ichiro's example of successful integration, Kenji, has a superb family life without a mother. When Mrs. Yamada finally comes to terms with Japan's loss in the war, she drowns herself in the bathtub. The rest of the family is relieved from the alleviated expectations. Ichiro identifies his mother early on as the solitary force preventing him from reproachfully integrating into popular American culture, but her death provides a passing of the torch in Japanese nationalism and he soon finds out that his problems are of his own making.

When Ichiro comes back to Seattle, things are not what he expects. Since he was so abruptly rounded up and shipped off to an internment camp, "to proveâ€¦that they weren't American enough to be trusted," he anticipates discrimination among mainstream culture, but he is met with what is developing into the most accepting era in American history (p. 153). The civil rights movement is just around the corner. The hostility that he expects from white Americans doesn't happen. The only bullying he meets is at the hands of other Japanese-Americans.

Every powerful white man that Ichiro runs into receives a good impression from him. His old Professor Brown urges him to come back to the university. Mr. Carrick offers him a job on the spot at an engineering office in Portland. Both of them are very sympathetic for what he has endured and disagree with the injustice of the whole affair, yet Ichiro rejects all them. He could assimilate if he wanted to, but he doesn't because he is convinced that since he once rejected the United States that he is forever intolerable to it. He could have been an engineer in Oregon and ascend the social ranks. No longer would he have been a lower-class immigrant, but a shining member of the middle class. Instead, he chooses to maintain his social immobility and cultural isolation. This was a common feeling during this time, as Kenji puts it:

"They bitched and hollered when the government put them in camps and put real fences around them, but now they're doing the same damn thing to themselves." (p. 164)

Post-war Japanese-Americans are forcing segregation upon themselves. Most Americans, at least in this novel, prove entirely compliant in moving forwards from the past from which they came. They are willing to bring cultural diversity into their schools and workplaces, but the Japanese-Americans seem insistent on continuing their oppression.

Early in the novel, Ichiro cites the guilt of his disloyalty to the United States as a reason for not accepting any of these offers. He hasn't fought for the country and doesn't feel like he's earned such lavish opportunities, so he leaves them for truly Americanized people to capitalize on. This reverence exhibited by Ichiro for American culture and those that it approves counteracts his attempts to remain loyal to his Japanese ancestry. He externalizes his need to be devoted to Japan onto his mother, but it doesn't end when she dies. He realizes that her strict codes of Japanese loyalty were not the only thing keeping him from assimilating. Ichiro turns down another promising job offer at the Christian Reclamation Center where the owner had already hired another No No Boy.

It is no coincidence that Mrs. Yamada's suicide is juxtaposed with Kenji's death. The chapter in which both events are contained is the turning point in the novel. Mrs. Yamada dies because of her refusal to integrate into American society and Kenji dies from gangrene in an injury he suffered during his attempts to integrate into American society. The two extreme examples of national identity can no longer survive. Kenji tells Ichiro on his death bed that ethnic differences should be transcended to blur the lines of racial distinction, and therefore prove categorization difficult. Ichiro seems to take Kenji's advice to heart when he plans on becoming a true American with a house and a wife and kids, only to put himself on trial moments later for his treasonous intentions. He has also inherited the voice of his mother in his brain in addition to Kenji's - a rampant incompatibility. These opposing viewpoints eventually begin to balance each other out, and Ichiro realizes that he is neither Japanese nor American.

Ichiro began the novel concerned with improving his public image, and he gradually changes his concern to self-respect. The problem with his initial mindset is that self-esteem is determined by the will of the state. Nations create their own hegemonic value systems in this way to establish cultural standards. The notion of free choice is illusory. It is misery to continually cater to the evaluations of anonymous strangers. To project the lives of others onto oneself is to completely hide one's own personality. Ichiro is ashamed of his disloyalty to America. He acts as if every white American thinks that he is a traitor for not demonstrating himself to the country, but his fixation is evidence that he cares more on the matter than any white character in the story. With the deaths of his mother and Kenji, Ichiro becomes startlingly aware of the importance of his self-respect, since he no longer has his mother to blame his problems on or Kenji to live out his Americanized daydreams. Ichiro begins to resist integration because, to him, it would mean forfeiting his identity in lieu of conformity. He concerns himself only with his own opinions and thinks independently of the cultural groups which surround him, as Kenji suggested he do.

The symbolism of Ichiro's altered ideals is apparent when comparing the start and end scenes of the novel. It starts with Ichiro walking out into the downtown Plaza as he contemplates his own path of nationalism, and ends with Ichiro ducking down a dark narrow alley. That path less travelled is precisely the path that Ichiro has chosen to take in his life. He chose not to blaze the beaten paths of American ideals or Japanese elitism that everyone seemed to be treading on, but rather a small hidden passageway tucked in between the two avenues.

Throughout the novel, Emi remains an image of normalized American domesticity, and yet another failed opportunity at Americanization for Ichiro. Much like his wasted job offers, Ichiro thinks that he doesn't deserve Emi because her husband is in the military. When she devotes herself to him, they go out dancing and Ichiro fancies the thought of being with a woman that other men want. His fixation on the men that find her attractive rather than the attractive girl herself gives the scene masculine undertones. Emi alone is not enough to sway Ichiro to commit himself to her, but the sheer interest of other men provokes Ichiro think that he has a real catch on his hands. This is a prime example of Ichiro succumbing to the opinions of the general public in America instead of listening to his own self-respect and his own opinions.

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Looking At John Okadas No No Boy English Literature Essay

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In 1943, a radio interview with Dillion S. Meyer was on the air in regards to the Japanese Internment. Meyer was the director of the War Relocation Authority. This is interview, he describes the conditions of the camps and the people living within them. When the interviewer likens their situation to American prisoners of war in Japan, Meyer is quick to point out that many of these Japanese-Americans were in fact American citizens.

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In a 1943 radio broadcast, Dillon S. Meyer, director of the War Relocation Authority, conveys his disapproval of the Japanese internment camps, which he has