The Concept of Failure Represented by the Nisei Characters in John Okada’s No-No Boy

Forces outside the individual's control, such as racism, often shaped how a person was viewed and treated. Consequently the distinction between individuality and community disappears. Nisei realize Japanese Americans are not seen as distinct individuals but only as a reflection of a larger community. The actions of an individual Japanese American, therefore, have broader implications for the entire group.

Frustrated Nisei could not at this time lash out against something so abstract as a racist society that refuses to recognize their individuality, nor could they rail against something more concrete like a gouvernment that abused them. Various characters perpetuate a racial hierarchy either by the status of Whites, or by discriminating against non Whites Blacks.

While sitting in the Club Oriental, for example, Kenji learns that a young Japanese American who attempts to bring in two Blacks is turned away. The woman's uncomfortable Nikkei escort promptly tells her to shut up, pulling at her arm and causing her to tumble into a chair. Although the crowd in the bar laughs at the woman and.

Ironically, racist Whites are allowed into the bar but Blacks are not,. Okada hints at the costs of assimilation in an inverted that takes place on the eve before Kenji checks into the veterans hospital for an examination of his leg. Kenji's father calls together the entire family to join Kenji in a dinner that turns out to be a last supper because Kenji eventually dies in the hospital.

With Kenji's siblings and in-laws chatting amiably above the ubiquitous din of a televised baseball game and the commotion of young grandchildren, the gathering has the flavor of a holiday or birthday celebration. Read without the knowledge that this is a Japanese American family, one would never know that the clan's patriarch is Japanese ; the family has adapted the behavior and values of the American middle class of that era.

But exactly because we identify Kenji's family as Nikkei do we see the sadness that pervades and undermines the surface joviality. We realize, as Kenji does, that everyone has been called together because he is going to the hospital. The nature of his injury, the ever encroaching pain that requires more and more of his leg be amputated, symbolizes the costs, both physical and psychological, of Nikkei efforts to prove loyalty. Kenji's father realizes that his son fought in the war because:.

T his son had gone to war to prove that he deserved to enjoy those rights which should rightfully have been his N. In Kenji, whose wartime injury requires that he sacrifices more and more of his leg in order to survive, we see a parallel to the Nikkei community as a whole, which had to do more and more to prove itself loyal when it never should have been suspect in the first place: Japanese Americans were told that they were being interned because the government could not distinguish the loyal from the disloyal while simultaneously being told that in order to prove their loyalty they should agree to internment without Internees were then given loyalty questionnaires to prove their fealty to the U.

Subsequently, Nisei, many of whom were still confined, were enjoined to enlist into segregated units of the armed forces as another demonstration of their loyalty. Ichiro, who recognizes all the inequities, all the divisions within himself, within his community, and within America, attempts to reconcile himself with his past and with the fragmented world that. In an inverted celebration late in the novel, we see symbolically and manifestly evidence of that reconciliation.

Ichiro dances at a roadside restaurant with Emi, a young Nisei woman who is both lover and advisor to Ichiro. This is an inverted celebration: Yamada commits suicide after accepting the reality of Japan's defeat and the misery of her family in Japan. Through his sympathetic reaction to the immigrant generation Ichiro acknowledges his Japanese heritage as part of his own past, as part of his identity as an American.

This acceptance, both of himself and his parents, comes about after a series of events that force him to alter his ideas about America, the Japanese American community, and his own actions. These include meeting a sympathetic white man who offers Ichiro a job and accepts him for who he is: While dancing with Emi he thinks to himself:. I've got to love the world the way I used to. I've got to love it and the people so I'll feel good, and feeling good will make life worth while. There's no point in crying about what's done. I've been fighting it and hating it and letting my bitterness against myself and Ma and Pa and even Taro throw the whole universe out of perspective.

I want only to go on living and be happy. I've only to let myself do so N. The dance floor becomes a metaphor for America, and dancing becomes a metaphor for the constant cooperation and respect necessary to maintain a truly pluralistic nation. Ichiro sees that there is a place for people as diverse as Emi, who throughout the novel challenges Ichiro to dismantle his self-absorption and see the positive in the world, and Freddie, who as a foil to Ichiro runs from his problems and accepts no responsibility for his actions. Ichiro's dance with Emi symbolizes a more benign version of Kenji's assimilation theories because it does not necessarily result in the disappearance of racial and ethnic differences.

As if a sign that the vision of an integrated yet diverse America is possible, a slightly drunken white man insists on buying Ichiro and Emi a drink. Okada slyly plays on our expectations that the drunk will pick a fight with Ichiro and Emi because they are Japanese and instead has the man surprise the couple with friendliness. By providing this final explanation, Ichiro signals his hope for a truly unfragmented America. The novel however ends on a more somber note. In the final scene, we see the deep wounds that still must be healed.

After a brutal brawl outside the Club Oriental in which Ichiro tries to end the cycle of violence among Nisei, Freddie flees the scene only to be killed when his car smashes into a building. In a remarkable act of reconciliation with his Nisei Tormentors, Ichiro initiates the healing he so desperately sought throughout the novel. He tries to bridge the rifts rampant in the Nikkei community in part because he sees that the divisions which tear the community apart have, in his mind, collapsed.

Okada ends the novel with this cautiously optimistic phrase, hinting at his own tempered hopes for the healing of the Nikkei community and America as a whole. Concentration Camps, North America: Japanese in the U. Race and Power in the Pacific War. Sumida, and Russell C. Washington State UP, , The World of the First Generation Japanese Ichiro's Search for in No-N Boey. An Analysis of trie Popular Press Image in the s and s.

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Promises and Prospects for Asian American Studies. Okihiro, Shirley Hune, Arthur A. Hansen, and John M. Writing, Research, and Commentary. Nomura, Russell Endo, Stephen H. In addition to informal discrimination, Japanese Americans were the focus of racism. In California and Washington, for example, alien land laws prevented Japanese American farmers from owning and leasing. Japanese were formally barred from naturalizing by the Supreme Court decision Ozawa v.

A short insight into the conflicts in John Okada’s No-No Boy

For a fuller discussion of anti- Japanese discrimination, see Ichioka. Barely more than 20 years after the end of the wartime camps, this is a minority that has risen above even prejudiced criticism. By any criterion of good citizenship that we choose, the Japanese Americans are better than any other group in our society, including native-born whites. Even in a country whose patron saint is the Horatio Alger hero, there is no parallel to this success story N.

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A few years after Petersen's article, a similar story on Japanese Americans appeared. See, for example, Osajima.

Although Nisei were frustrated and angered when lumped together with the Japanese enemy, the resulting discrimination did not hinder them from considering themselves American. Recent statistics show a high rate of outmarriage marriage to a partner not of the same ethnic group for Japanese Americans. In , and , Plan Works cited [link]. Okada explores the gray area between these ultimately trying to reconcile seemingly incompatible We can examine more closely the divisions within the post-war Japanese American community, the forces which act on it and to which it reacts, by looking at dysfunctional celebrations scenes in which celebrations are expected but are absent or scenes in which celebrations occur but in a warped manner and inverted situations in which celebrations take place at inappropriate moments.

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Ichiro even goes one step further and thinks she is insane, due to her belief that Japan won the war, and all else is propaganda that was staged by the United States government. Hence, the father-son relationship fails as well. Gradually, Ichiro regrets his decision acting out against the United States, and faces these consequences again and again. This becomes obvious when he declines a job offer as he does not feel worthy, since he did not fight in the war. Furthermore, Ichiro experiences several kinds of racism. In the novel, racism is not only about blacks and whites or Japanese Americans and Caucasians, but the conflict is expanded among Japanese Americans themselves.

All these experiences that happened to Ichiro after he is released from prison drive him into despair, to the point where he would rather change places with the wounded Kenji. For Ichiro, he would even accept a disability, if would help him feel like an American with a clear identity. The main reason for this article is to recommend that everyone read this wonderful work of fiction and experience the content for themselves. She is studying German and English languages and literature at the University of Wuppertal.

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A short insight into the conflicts in John Okada’s No-No Boy | Discover Nikkei

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