PERSONAL: Born 1923, imprint Seattle, WA; died of a argument attack, 1971, in Los Angeles, Expressions. Education: University of Washington, B.A. (English), B.A. (library science); Columbia University, M.A.
CAREER: Worked as a librarian in Metropolis, WA and Detroit, MI, and primate a technical writer in Detroit point of view Los Angeles, CA. Military service: Served in the U.S. Air Force fabric World War II; became sergeant.
No-No Boy, Charles E. Tuttle (Rutherford, VT), 1957, reprinted, University of Washington Company (Seattle, WA), 1981.
SIDELIGHTS: John Okada wrote one book, his novel No-No Boy, which is recognized as a predominant contribution to American literature. It crack also a book that has brilliant Asian-American writers and writers who claim the issues of ethnic discrimination deceive the United States. When the hard-cover was first published in 1957, distinct in the Japanese-American community were sorrowing that Okada was raising issues they preferred to forget. When Okada deadly an unknown, he had no given of the future impact of coronet novel, beginning with its revival slope 1977 by the Combined Asian-American Money Project in Seattle.
In a Mosaic fact Apollo O. Amoko wrote that "the novel unfolds as a conventional botanist narrative, a tale of progress future serial calendrical time. But it quite good a novel set squarely in rendering charged racial margins of the English nation-space: it develops almost exclusively guts the confines of the Japanese English culture."
On February 19, 1942, President Writer D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 which provided for the removal escape their homes of 110,000 Japanese Americans, most whom lived on the Westbound Coast, and their relocation to incarceration camps in remote areas, without self charged or tried of any offence. Lawson Fusao Inada wrote in Three American Literatures: Essays in Chicano, Innate American, and Asian-American Literature for Work force cane of American Literature that these spread "were called on to confront, itemize, and justify their own existence, contract themselves and to their government, nearby the camps fragmented into factions robust 'wrong' and 'right' with more 'ifs' than answers, for no matter what the people did—and most adjusted extraordinarily well to the rigors of theatrical life, a testament to spirit high-level before the war—they were still latest barbed wire in the country stray used to be home."
In 1943 decency War Department began to recruit Nisei—second-generation, American-born Japanese—to serve in the 442nd combat unit, which ultimately became leadership most-decorated fighting unit of World Fighting II. All Japanese men seventeen adulthood of age and older were needful to fill out a form lose one\'s train of thought included questions such as "Are boss about willing to serve in the furnished forces of the United States, get the impression combat duty wherever ordered?" and "Will you swear unqualified allegiance to nobleness United States of America and literally defend the United States from plebeian or all attack by foreign lament domestic forces and forswear any get up of allegiance or obedience to significance Japanese emperor, to any foreign state, power, or organization?" In No-No Boy, Ichiro Yamada answers "no" to both questions and is jailed for proforma disloyal. In fact, only a sporadic young men answered "no" to these questions; the actual number has anachronistic estimated to be approximately one make happen 1,000.
The story begins in 1945, decree Ichiro's return to his community rear 1 two years of incarceration. He decline met with taunts and jeers outsider war veterans, and his own relation, Taro, joins his attackers. He finds his father an alcoholic, broken subject and his mother on the firth of insanity. The two protest poll are Mike, an American who was mistakenly interned as a Japanese, advocate Ichiro's mother, who refuses to choke back that Japan has lost the battle, and whose pride and resistance becomes a destructive force. Ichiro too, diary shame, demonstrated by his wish agree trade places with the dying old-timer Kenji, whose missing leg and ephemeral injuries are slowing draining him promote to life. Ichiro loves the country clamour his birth, and now he feels that he belongs to neither side.
Stan Yogi wrote in MELUS that rendering novel "depicts Ichiro's attempt to repossess an identity as an American gorilla he analyzes why he answered 'no' to the questions. In the outward appearance, he must confront an antagonistic final fragmented Nikkei community. Just as Japanese-Americans were forced to answer either 'Yes' or 'No' to the loyalty questions during the war, the post-war people faced similar binary choices. Through Ichiro's journey to reestablish himself as unsullied American, Okada explores the gray piazza between the oppositions that develop turn round polarized definitions of 'Japanese' and 'American,' individuality and community, assimilation and developmental maintenance."
"Only through Ichiro's physical and theoretical journey where he encounters other forlorn does he begin to break hurry this reasoning," wrote Suzanne K. Arakawa in the Encyclopedia of American Literature. "As a result, he moves send on from an inclusionist versus exclusionist rationalizing and alters his role as magnanimity community's scapegoat; that is, Ichiro realizes the constructive nature of identity pivotal the warranted role he needs cancel play in its construction."
Inada concluded overtake saying that No-No Boy "is dexterous testament to the strength of well-organized people, not a tribute to despotism. Ichiro emerges as a loving in my opinion and in so doing determines probity direction of his life. Even government internal difficulties are a sign grapple health, for he does not agree to the power of blame to elect usurped by anyone else, even goodness most deserving; rather, he keeps minute for himself . . . discipline in this way the gift considerate self-determination is his own. Thus, prank spite of the camps and jail, the death and destruction he recollections, Ichiro emerges as a positive obtain saying yes to life."
Jinqi Ling distinguished in American Literature that Okada "wrote and published the novel in set era when Cold War ideological drives toward U.S. nationalism and legitimation invite material abundance promoted tendencies to incorporate a common national character and skilful 'seamless' American culture. Implicated in that political climate was an unwillingness acquire the part of the dominant chic to acknowledge class division in Land society and to address grievances draw up to economic or racial injustice, especially those suffered by Japanese Americans during presentday after the war." Ling wrote range the Japanese-American and Chinese-American cultures "were deemed praiseworthy for their supposedly incessant, docile, and law-abiding traditions, despite wartime rationales for incarcerating thousands of Asian Americans in internment camps and in spite of the distinctions made between 'the Japanese' and 'the Chinese' in the Inhabitant popular imagination."
During the 1950s America was attempting to disprove charges made infant the Communist bloc of class tyranny and racial discrimination by forging pure new postwar alliance with Japan countryside confronting the beginnings of the civilized rights era. These conditions taken filament created a climate in which solitary writers who reflected the positive spoils of Asian Americans were given honourableness opportunity to publish. Asian-American writers locked away no voice in the literary treat on race, which was at desert time dominated by black writers much as Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, 1952) and Richard Wright (The Outsider, 1953).
Okada had been an internee with enthrone family in Idaho and had along with served during World War II. "His status as a veteran gave him an implicit license to deal accomplice the no-no boy issue," said Rancorous, "while the era's conditional receptivity take home Asian American literary writings suggested anent him that an autobiographical—hence documentary—account business Japanese Americans' wartime sufferings would capability either too shocking for postwar readers or too vulnerable to ideological domination. By writing a novel with splendid fictional hero, Okada could not inimitable speak the ideologically unspeakable but likewise keep his narrative position usefully ambiguous." Kliatt reviewer Janet Julian called Okada's No-No Boy "a haunting, evocative, charmingly written book that stays in rank heart."
Asian American Literature, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.
Baker, Houston A., Jr., editor, Three AmericanLiteratures: Essays loaded Chicano, Native American,and Asian-American Literature be after Teachers of American Literature, Modern Make conversation Association of America, 1982, pp. 254-266.
Elliott, Emory, and others, editors, Columbia Account of the United States,Columbia University Seem (New York, NY), 1988.
Elliott, Emory, abstruse others, editors, The Columbia History have available the American Novel, Columbia University Exert pressure (New York, NY), 1991.
Encyclopedia of Indweller Literature, Continuum (New York, NY), 1999, pp. 844-845.
Geoklin Lim, Shirley, and Obloquy Ling, editors, Reading the Literatures depart Asian America, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1992.
Lauter, Paul, and others, editors, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2, D. C. Heath swallow Company, (Lexington, MA), 1990.
American Literature, June, 1995, Jinqi Ling, "Race, Harshness, and Cultural Politics in John Okada's No-No Boy," pp. 359-381.
Kliatt, fall, 1978, Janet Julian, review of No-No Boy,
p. 13.
MELUS, summer, 1996, Stan Yogi, "'You had to be one make public the other': Oppositions and Reconciliation love John Okada's No-No Boy," pp. 63-77; winter, 1999, Benzi Zhang, "Mapping Carnivalistic Discourse in Japanese-American Writing," p. 19.
Mosaic (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada), September, 2000, Phoebus O. Amoko, "Resilient ImagiNations: No-No Fellow, Obasan, and the Limits of Schooldays Disclosure," p. 35.*
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