-One book produced by an Asian-American,
it would be this book.
-In World War II, solely because of their race,
Japanese-Americans endure expulsion from their homes,
four years in American concentration camps,
and a return to broken communities,
yet no postwar literature gave voice to their quiet anger
at unjust imprisonment.
In the 1950s, John Okada decides he must write that book.
-He felt it was up to him to tell that story.
It's a remarkable decision for somebody to say, "You know,
I think I'll write a novel about Japanese America,
and I don't know of another Japanese-American work
out there, but I'm going to write this --
I'm going to write this novel."
-This book is about what an American is and what America is.
So, it's a story about building that larger,
more encompassing America.
♪♪
-There he is. John Okada. -Right here.
-1943. M-I-S.
-Yes. That's it.
-4-B. Row 90. -Row 90.
♪♪
-I just wondered why my father never brought the book up
when we were growing up.
He never discussed it. He never mentioned it. Not once.
-Well, he never really discussed
that background with me,
him being a Japanese-American
and having spent time in the internment camps.
-I think most people know more about my father than I do,
and I think because they research and research.
-John Okada was born in Seattle,
a nisei, or second generation Japanese-American.
Friends remember his bright, shining eyes.
Others believe he felt inferior,
possibly due to his short stature.
He has just started at the University of Washington
when all persons of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast
are rounded up and incarcerated.
Okada is sent to the camp at Minidoka, Idaho.
The government demands answers to two questions
on a loyalty oath --
Are you willing to serve in the armed forces
of the United States wherever ordered,
and will you forswear any form of allegiance
or obedience to the Japanese Emperor?
Young men who defy the government
are branded "no-no boys".
-There was probably some that were eligible for the draft,
but refused to answer yes, yes to both questions
because of the injustice that was involved.
-Okada answers by enlisting in the Army Air Force.
He volunteers to fly dangerous missions
over Japanese-held islands,
translating intercepted radio messages.
But the novel he writes after the war
centers on a young man who refuses to be drafted from camp.
Ichiro Yamada, returning home.
♪♪
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.
-Ichiro's sort of the conscience of the community.
You know, he made a decision
and he made it a very personal decision.
He could have gotten out of the draft by a physical condition,
but he didn't choose that route.
He chose to stand up for what he really believed in,
and he believed that volunteering for the draft,
when a country has taken away his civil rights is wrong.
And so, he chose to go to prison.
-The government stripped us of our constitutional rights,
reclassified us as enemy aliens, and put us in camp,
and now they needed more men.
They imposed a draft into the camps,
and the draft resisters thought that that was wrong.
-And I just couldn't see myself,
you know, going along with that.
-The sentence for refusing to go was three years,
three months, and a $200 fine.
-They told me that there's a chance that I may get
killed or beat up.
-You know, if I go to jail.
We were going to be put into a federal penitentiary
where there's a lot of pretty rough character.
So, I tell them, "That's a chance I'm taking."
-"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."
-I don't know for sure, but my understanding of the book
was based on Jim Akutsu, who resisted from Minidoka.
-Well, actually, if you read "The No-No Boy",
some of that did happen.
-"Ichi." That was his nickname.
"Hey, Ichi." The caller's footsteps ran toward him.
-He's changed. The things that Japanese-Americans believe in
have changed and become hard-edged.
He's the No-no boy and he runs into the vet, right?
And so, the lines are drawn.
-"When'd you get discharged?"
"I -- that is -- I never was in."
Eto slapped him goodnaturedly on the arm.
"No need to look 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.
"I've really got to be going."
The round face wasn't smiling anymore.
It was thoughtful.
The eyes confronted Ichiro with indecision,
which changed slowly to enlightenment
and then to suspicion.
He remembered. "No-no boy, huh?"
"Rotten, no good bastard."
"I'll piss on you the next time."
-He's not writing only about a draft resister.
This no-no boy is emblematic of all Japanese-Americans
who felt that this history of theirs
somehow not just tainted them,
but made them less than or other than American.
-And it's interesting that, at least in my experience,
after camp was really difficult too,
because in a sense, we re-immigrated
to America from camp
and we had to adjust to this society
that had changed because of the war,
and we always had this feeling
of having snuck back into America.
-Because all of Japanese America was punished,
It means that they must have done something wrong.
So, it's kind of backwards logic.
"Because I was punished, I must have done wrong.
What did I do wrong?"
And that's Ichiro's question.
And of course, the answer was,
"You were born the wrong race."
♪♪
-My father had lost everything.
All the people that had Japanese hotels,
you know, in my father's area,
they all had to sell their business
and they had to sell at a time where no one wanted to buy.
-And for most, it was a complete economic disaster,
losing all that the issei had worked,
the first generation had worked all those many decades,
and that level of comfort that they thought
that they would finally have in their retirement,
completely wiped out.
-Okada feels an urgency
to capture the Japanese-American experience.
He says, "I should regret
if their chapter in American history
should die with them.
Only in fiction can the hopes and fears and joys
and sorrows of a people be adequately recorded."
One piece of the story falls into place
at his father's new hotel.
He meets Jim Akutsu, a draft resister
who lives in back of his father's shoe repair shop.
-John would ask my brother Jim
what was his reason and anything to do with the reason
why he had refused to go to the service.
-We do know that that John Okada sat in
Jim Akutsu's shoe repair shop
and listened to stories from his contemporaries,
and he put these stories in his book.
-There was so much misunderstanding,
you know, that's going on,
and number one, that's a misunderstanding
between the resisters and the non-resisters,
including the vets.
-So, it was no sooner he came out of the federal penitentiary
that he was confronted with a number of people,
and they threatened to beat him up and all that.
-There is a false sense that the government
seems to have imposed on the community
that there are loyals and disloyals,
and there is only one path to this loyalty.
So many veterans tell me how many of their friends
did not return,
and in their minds, someone that did not serve
resisted,
were one and the same with cowards
that could have served and maybe their friends would be alive.
-In New York, for graduate school,
Okada meets a minister's daughter.
They return to Seattle to start a family.
Seattle provides Okada with the setting for his novel,
but he leaves his job at the public library
for a better one in Detroit.
-Sometime in the 1950s.
he didn't mention that he was writing a book.
He wouldn't mention any details.
-He complains of a lack of time to write.
He takes a job as a technical writer
for the Chrysler missile program.
"Perhaps," he says, "I have been endowed
with a larger capacity for normalcy than most people.'
-I never said anything to him when he was writing.
I just left him alone.
I didn't ask John, "Do that for me.
John, carry that for me. John, this."
I never, I never, ever, ever, ever said that.
[ Typewriter clacking ]
He said, "Oh, I've finished." That's all that he said.
I remember that very well.
"Oh, I finished." That's what he said.
-America in the '50s has no interest in hearing
about Japanese-Americans
or the consequences of wartime incarceration.
-Published the first,
and then you wonder, "Are these people going to buy this book?"
Just realistic. He had to try to shop this around.
And of course, the other publishers,
they didn't know what to do about it.
-Okada can only find a publisher in Japan
who specializes in books to span the east and west.
His novel appears in 1957 with the title "No-No Boy",
the term of scorn for those
who refuse the government's loyalty oath,
and were sent to the Tule Lake segregation camp
in Northern California.
But Ichiro is a draft resister like the Akutsus,
who served two years at the federal prison
on McNeil Island, south of Seattle.
-The "No-No Boy" title is misleading
because the main character is not a no-no boy.
He's a resistor.
Maybe it makes a better sounding title.
-A reviewer calls Okada "a writer of promise",
saying, "perhaps here at last
is the man who will write the great nisei novel."
But the book does not sell.
-The book "No-No Boy" was not well received
by many in the Japanese-American community
because it raised that question of the resisters,
and I think that they were also thinking
that things had stabilized
for Japanese-Americans in the postwar period,
And and there was more, quote unquote,
"acceptance" of Japanese-Americans,
and if you raise the issue of no-no boys or resisters,
then maybe Americans reading this book
would think that Japanese-Americans
were disloyal.
-When I first read it,
I got so disgusted with the first part of it
that I didn't complete it.
-"I'll piss on you next time."
-All the resistors that I know
would never have reacted the way
Ichiro in his novel reacted.
I think any of our resistors would have probably hauled up
and smacked him.
-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.
-The feelings that come out of the book --
it goes right through you. You don't --
It's like a hard --
getting hit hard with a feeling, and you really feel them.
I just wonder where he got all that from.
-December the seventh of the year 1941
was the day when the Japanese bombs
fell on Pearl Harbor.
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
and jot down air ground messages spoken by Japanese-Japanese
and 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 are 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, they could kiss my ass."
-It's a hard book for me to read.
There's a part where he talks about his mother,
and I feel like the hatred that he feels for his mother,
it's very hard to read,
and usually, I put down the book
when I get to that point and stop for a while,
and I wondered if maybe he felt that way about his own mother.
-"Word has been brought to us
that the victorious Japanese government
is presently making preparations to send ships
which will return to Japan
those residents in foreign countries
who have steadfastly maintained their faith and loyalty
to our emperor."
-"No," he said to himself.
"There was a time when I was your son.
There was a time that I no longer remember
when you used to smile a mother's smile
and tell me stories,
and we were Japanese with Japanese feelings
and Japanese pride and Japanese thoughts,
even if we lived in America."
-"Heed not the propaganda of the radio..."
-'Then there came a time when I was only half Japanese,
because one is not born in America and raised in America
and taught in America without becoming American and loving it,
but I did not love enough,
for you were still half my mother,
and I was thereby still half Japanese."
-"The day of glory is close at hand.
The rewards will be beyond our greatest expectations."
-The mother is believing somehow Japan has won.
This is not the mother that he had left.
So, obviously, in the ensuing years,
it's the whole wartime incarceration
has driven her crazy.
-In fiction, the mother's spirit is broken
and she despairs.
In life,
the mothers of soldiers who fought and died in the war
close ranks to shun the mother of the draft resister.
- I believe that my mother suffered
because for the stand I took.
She got ostracized,
got cut away from the issei community,
and the last thing that happened was she was told
to not come to church anymore.
So, she told me, "I can't even go to church."
And it was shortly thereafter she took her life.
[ Keyboard clacking ]
-Having captured the turmoil of the nisei,
Okada has in mind a new book about the issei,
the immigrant first generation.
He knows how it will start.
A ship docks in the harbor.
A man jumps overboard and swims ashore,
then searches for soy sauce casks on display,
a sign he will find fellow immigrants to take him in.
[ Clacking continues ]
But before he can finish the book,
John Okada dies of a heart attack in 1971.
Only months later,
a new generation of Asian-American writers
discovers "No-No Boy".
They look up Okada's widow.
-We asked, of course, about the novel
that Okada had written, but not published,
and she informed us
that she had offered these papers to UCLA,
all of his papers,
but UCLA had never heard of him.
And so, she burned all of his papers.
And as writers, I remember
we were sitting there looking at her,
stunned that you would burn somebody's creative work.
-The young writers campaigned to bring
"No-No Boy" back into print.
-The University of Washington Press turned us down
and then made us a curious offer,
saying, "Well, if you give us $5,000,
we'll publish it for you."
And the four of us were not MBA geniuses
when we realized that,
"You know, we could give ourselves $5,000
and publish this book."
-They pool their money
and sell a paperback edition entirely by mail.
-[ Chanting "Strike!" ]
-The war in Vietnam and the rise of Asian-American studies
create an audience ready for a story about an outcast.
-When they first proposed it,
we had no idea of its significance.
We had no real context for it.
Shawn told us that he was wrapping and shipping the book
from his own basement in Seattle,
trying to keep up with the demand for it.
We gradually became aware of its significance,
and so we decided to go ahead and print our own edition.
And of course, we've been very glad that we did.
♪♪
-I think I don't
really understand what it is about the book,
that it stays with people for 30 or 40 years.
I want to get to that point,
but it seems like once people read the book,
they can't forget it.
♪♪