page_title: John Okada
section_title: Literary works
hierarchical_section_title: John Okada / Literary works
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of John Okada's 1957 novel, No-No Boy with Bob Onodera's 1976 design with the flags of the U.S. and Imperial Japan peering from Ichiro Yamada's (the protagonist) face.
context_page_description: John Okada was an American writer, who is considered to be the first Japanese American novelist.
context_section_description: Okada's only completed and published novel, No-No Boy (1957) deals with the aftermath of the Japanese American internment during World War II, Japanese-American identity, and how this event divided the Japanese American population after the war. He explored feelings among Japanese nationals, some of whom still held dreams of a return to Japan, and among their native-born American children, who felt conflicted about their identity but identified with the United States. Some of both generations were intensely bitter about their treatment in being interned during the war, in addition to the substantial economic and social losses they had suffered.  John Okada’s “No-No Boy” captures the injustice of incarcerating Japanese-Americans during World War II — and serves as a warning today for our own fractured society.
  The protagonist is a native-born American of Japanese descent who answered "No" on two important questions posed by the government: would he vow loyalty and would he enlist in the Army? Those who answered "no" were sentenced to two years in prison. On returning to Seattle after prison, he has to confront veterans whom he knew from before the war, some of whom were wounded and all of whom look down on him. He also struggles with his parents, as his mother clings to the belief that Japan did not lose the war and eventually loses her sanity.
  The novel did not get much notice, coming too soon after the war for people to want to explore the harshness of his portrayal and confrontation with hard questions. Okada's novel was rediscovered by some writers from Los Angeles in 1976, who tracked down his wife to meet her and see if she had any of his manuscripts. She had struggled after his death and, unable to find a publisher interested in his next manuscript and disappointed at the rejection of his papers by UCLA, she burned everything: novel, notes, letters, etc.
  In his introduction to the new 1976 edition of the novel, Lawson Fusao Inada writes of meeting Okada's wife, Dorothy, in La Grande, Oregon 1976:
  Dorothy is a truly wonderful person. It hurt to have her tell us that "John would have liked you." It hurt to have her tell us that "you two are the first ones who ever came to see him about his work." It hurt to have her tell us that she recently burned his "other novel about the Issei, which we both researched and which was almost finished." It hurt to have her tell us that "the people I tried to contact about it never answered so when I moved I burned it, because I have him in my heart." [...] You could say John was "ahead of his time," that he was born too early and died too young.
  In 2018, Frank Abe, Greg Robinson, and Floyd Cheung published John Okada: The Life and Rediscovered Writings of the Author of No-No Boy. This volume includes a substantial biography authored by Abe and based on interviews with Okada's family members and friends. The rediscovered works include a poem that Okada wrote during the night of the attack on Pearl Harbor entitled "I Must Be Strong," a play about the US occupation of Japan which was produced at the Tryout Theater in 1946, five short stories which were published in the Northwest Times in 1947, and two satirical essays about the military-industrial complex written during his stint as a technical writer at Hughes Aircraft Company between 1958 and 1961.
caption: Front cover of the University of Washington Press 1976 edition of No-No Boy with Bob Onodera's design
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