John Okada

Novelist and writer

• Pronunciation: oh-KAH-dah
• Born: September 23, 1923
• Birthplace: Seattle, Washington
• Died: February 20, 1971
• Place of death: San Gabriel, California

John Okada, a second-generation Japanese American novelist, is well known for his only published novel, No-No Boy (1957). Based on his own time at a Japanese internment camp during World War II and his service in the US military, Okada eloquently wrote of the experiences and identities of Japanese Americans during and after World War II and offered insight into the racial dynamics of American society.

Area of achievement: Literature

Early Life

John Okada was born in Seattle, Washington, on September 23, 1923, to Japanese immigrant parents. His father, who came to the United States in the 1910s from a small town in Japan, was the owner of the Merchant’s Hotel in Pioneer Square, Seattle. Raised in a working-class and racially mixed neighborhood of Seattle, Okada attended Bailey Gatzert Elementary and Broadway High.

He was attending the University of Washington when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor shook the world. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that initially relocated, and then interned, some 120,000 ethnic Japanese Americans throughout the Pacific Coast region. The Okada family and many other Japanese Americans were interned at the camp in Minidoka, Idaho. Okada continued his education at Scottsbluff Junior College in Nebraska, once young Japanese Americans were allowed to leave the internment camps to attend schools.

In 1943, Japanese Americans at the internment camps were administered the so-called loyalty questionnaire, which the US War Department required all males of Japanese descent over the age of seventeen to fill out. Two of the questions drew the most attention as they were essential to the wartime recruitment of the interned nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans). The first question asked whether the reader was willing to serve in the US Armed Forces if called. The second asked if the reader would swear allegiance to the United States and forswear any allegiance to Japan or its emperor. Those who answered yes to the questions were drafted to fight in World War II in an all-Japanese combat unit, and those who answered negatively to those questions came to be called “no-no boys.” They were imprisoned for alleged disloyalty. Okada’s wartime experiences were reflected in his 1957 novel No-No Boy.

During World War II, Okada volunteered to join the US Army Air Forces, unlike his novel’s protagonist, Ichiro Yamada. After being trained for several months by the Military Intelligence Service, he was assigned to the Air Forces in Guam, where he translated Japanese language documents and propaganda materials. He was also involved in reconnaissance missions over Japan. He was discharged as a sergeant in 1946.

Life’s Work

After the war, Okada went back to the University of Washington for a bachelor’s degree in English. He then went on to Columbia University in New York to earn a master’s degree in English in 1949. While he was in New York City, he met Dorothy Arakawa, and they married in Seattle on June 24, 1950. The couple would go on to raise two children together.

While in Seattle, Okada attended the University of Washington and received his second bachelor’s degree, in library science. To support his growing family, he began working as an assistant at the Seattle Public Library. After receiving a position at the Detroit Public Library, Okada decided to relocate his family to Michigan. Unable to fulfill his hopes of devoting more time to writing, Okada quit the job and became a technical writer, working for Chrysler Missile Operations in Sterling Township, Michigan.

The Okada family had trouble getting adjusted to life in the Midwest, where they did not feel welcome and found themselves excluded from community activities. They eventually returned to Seattle, only to move to Southern California soon afterward. Okada completed his first novel, No-No Boy, in 1955, and it was published two years later. His novel did not receive much attention from the American public, and Japanese American communities, which still had bitter memories of the Japanese internment and World War II, rejected the book. Okada remained in obscurity for the remainder of his life. His achievement as a writer was not recognized until after his death.

Okada continued working as a technical writer, this time for Hughes Aircraft and then for Analog Technology in Southern California, while writing his second novel, about the issei (first-generation Japanese immigrants). John Okada died of a heart attack on February 20, 1971, in San Gabriel, California. He was forty-seven years old.

Okada’s second novel had been nearly finished by the time of his death, but it did not get any offers for publication. Dorothy, Okada’s wife, contacted the Japanese American Research Project at the University of California Los Angeles, to offer Okada’s manuscripts, notes, and letters. When the project, which was designed to collect materials in Japanese, rejected them, Dorothy burned all of the documents. Okada’s second novel was gone forever.

It was only in the mid-1970s that Asian American writers and scholars rediscovered Okada’s work and began to appreciate the literary and historical value of No-No Boy. Although No-No Boy was the only work that he left behind, John Okada is regarded as one of the first and most influential Japanese American writers of the twentieth century.

Significance

John Okada introduced Japanese American literature to the American public with his novel No-No Boy. One of the first nisei writers, Okada failed to earn recognition in his lifetime, but he has become an important literary figure since the mid-1970s when his book was rediscovered. Despite the initial rejection, his novel has attracted not only Japanese Americans who had lived through the wartime internment and postwar turmoil but also American readers who did not know this dark time in American history. His writing style moved beyond the dominant white narratives of the immigrant experiences; moreover, Okada’s worldview as an internee and war veteran added depth to his work. Okada and his fictional characters aptly embodied psychological troubles and social disparities Asian Americans had endured during the troubled times of American society.

Bibliography

Gribben, Bryn. “The Mother That Won’t Reflect Back: Situating Psychoanalysis and the Japanese Mother in No-No Boy.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 28.2 (2003): 31–46. Using psychoanalytic discourse, explains individual repression and societal oppression in Okada’s No-No Boy.

Kim, Daniel Y. “Once More, with Feeling: Cold War Masculinity and the Sentiment of Patriotism in John Okada’s No-No Boy.” Criticism 47.1 (Winter 2005): 65–83. Reads No-No Boy based on the Cold War sentiments of the 1950s.

Ling, Jinqi. “Race, Power, and Cultural Politics in John Okada’s No-No Boy.” American Literature 67.2 (June 1995): 359–81. Views No-No Boy as a Japanese American literary intervention in traditional American renditions of immigrant experiences and race relations.

Okada, John. No-No Boy. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1977. Okada’s only published work; includes an afterword by Frank Chin, the well-known Chinese American writer, and biographical information on Okada.

Sato, Gayle F. Fujita. “Momotaro’s Exile: John Okada’s No-No Boy.” Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Ed. Shirley Lim and Amy Ling. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992. Sato reads John Okada’s novel against the backdrop of the Japanese folk tale “Momotaro” and reconstructs the notion of loyalty and Japanese American subjectivity.