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

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Augsburg (New English Literatures and Cultural Studies), course: Japanese Canadian and Japanese American Literature, language: English, abstract: A proverb says: “War does not determine who is right, just who is left”. Left, that isnaturally the veterans who managed not to get killed in battle and thus survived theirmission. But left, that is also the ones who refused fighting in a war for their country,for whatever the reason. War and its aftermaths clearly do not take a decision on whichof the two behaviors is right. It just leaves the involved people opposing each other contrarily– like left and right.In John Okada’s novel No-No Boy, almost all of its characters are immediatelyconfronted with the previously mentioned discord. Set in the Seattle of 1945, No-NoBoy deals with the outer and inner conflicts of a young Japanese American, namedIchiro, who refused the draft by a government, which in his eyes deprived him of hisidentity as an American. The narration starts with its central character, Ichiro, who hadjust arrived at a bus station in Seattle and now sees himself confronted with a drasticallychanged and diverse Japanese American community. By telling the story from Ichiro’sperspective, Okada thereby convinces his audience with an authentic depiction of “aquest for self-identity under extreme circumstances” (Huang, 2006: 152) in this fragmentedand torn segment of society.Like his protagonist, Okada himself was an American-born son of Japanese immigrants,a so-called Nisei, and therefore also got evacuated from his hometown Seattleduring the war years. When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Okada was in hismid-twenties and, unlike Ichiro in the novel, volunteered in the US Air Force, only toget discharged again directly after the war, in 1946 (see Huang, 2006: 152). Okadatherefore can be rated a prime source for rendering a Japanese-American community inSeattle which on the one hand “struggles with and seeks to recover from the disruptiveeffects of the internment” (Cheung & Peterson 195), and on the other hand has to dealwith the repercussions of a more or less forced recruitment. Moreover, during the progressof his book, Okada confronts the topic of racism and segregation in the UnitedStates with his “painful, powerful, and nuanced messages” (Huang, 2009: 768) – someof which the United States of the 1950s were not yet ready for. [...]