Refusing Loyalty in John Okada's "No-No Boy"

While reading No-No Boy, I kept coming back to notions of loyalty, whiteness and that elusive state of “being an American.” In Okada’s novel, these three terms seem to be inextricably linked. For Eto, Bud and other Japanese-Americans who are hostile to the no-no boys, loyalty oaths to the U.S. government and military service is meant to differentiate them from other “Japs” and to allow them to prove their Americanness. The Nisei profess their loyalty in order to stake their claim to citizenship and to assert their right to the clean, white America that Ichiro finds in the “homey magazines” (Okada 159). Yet, it is the very act of pledging loyalty that differentiates the Japanese-American from other, namely white, Americans whose loyalty is taken for granted and whose citizenship rights are never violated (159). Put differently, Japanese-American gestures of loyalty and belonging are simultaneously gestures of difference. As Okada portrays through the antagonism that exists between the no-no boys and the Japanese-American soldiers, no amount of military service or genuine confession of loyalty can erase such difference.

Most of the hostility that Ichiro faces as a no-no boy comes from Japanese-American servicemen whose post-war lives have left them disillusioned. At the VA hospital, Kenji explains to Ichiro that the reason for soldiers’ animosity is a “misbegotten idea that maybe you’re to blame because the good that they thought they were doing by getting killed and shot up doesn’t amount to a pot of beans” (Okada 163). Kenji implies that once the Japanese-American war veterans are back in America for a long enough time, they will “get cut down to their own size. Then they’ll be the same as you, a bunch of Japs” (163). Kenji denies even the possibility of a Japanese-American identity by equating “nisei” with the ethically and physically inferior “Jap” who is incapable of assimilation and who acts as a complete foil to the unhyphenated (white) American.

Gary, like Kenji, explains to Ichiro the hostility bred of disillusionment by referencing whiteness as a marker of national belonging:

They’ll see themselves getting passed up for jobs by white fellows not quite so bright but white. They’ll take a trip up to some resort, thinking this is God’s green land of democracy for which I killed a dozen Krauts, and get kicked in the face with the unfortunate mistake about the reservation story because he’d signed the letter Ohara and the guy at the resort thought it was good old Irish O’Hara” (Okada 227).

The Japanese-American is “kicked in the face” with the harsh truth that even life-giving gestures of loyalty to the United States do not guarantee that he will be recognized by his country as a proper citizen-subject like the others who are “not quite so bright but white” (227). The government, by calling upon the nisei to prove their loyalty as citizens, tacitly refuses the possibility of the sort of pure and presumed loyalty and citizenship of other Americans even before the oaths are made. Seen in this light, it is no wonder that Ichiro refuses to take such an oath or join the American army; he knows that, simply because he looks Japanese, he is always already constituted as alien by his country of origin. The Ohara/O’Hara distinction is also of importance in this passage: While Okada is not suggesting that the only difference between the Japanese and the Irishman is one of punctuation, he does suggest that such differences are at once as miniscule as the apostrophe and are yet made to appear great enough to justify racist programs like internment: For Okada, the apostrophe is “the little scale on which hinged the fortunes of the universe” (228).

If Japanese-Americans become disillusioned after the war, it is in part because whiteness still remains a signifier of access, belonging and Americanness. Sitting at the bar at the Club Oriental, Kenji reflects on the uniqueness of his sense of comfort in that space: “Not many places a Jap can go to and feel so completely at ease. It must be nice to be white and American and to be able to feel like this no matter where one goes, but I won’t cry about that” (Okada 133). Kenji suggests that it is not enough to be white or American. One must be both in order to feel such a constant sense of belonging. In another scene invoking whiteness, a Chinese girl at a prom is with a white boy, which means that “she has risen in the world, or so she thinks…[S]he flaunts her newly found status…with haughty smiles” (135). The Chinese girl dances with a white boy to change her status in the world, and yet that change is ultimately only in her head. Similarly, the soldier who returns to America has survived war, and has avoided “status-damaging” experiences like internment or jail time, and yet his status as an acceptable American is largely symbolic precisely because of his racial difference.

I am reminded in the above passage of a famous line from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: “There is a psychological phenomenon that consists in believing the world will open up as borders are broken down” (Fanon 5). Fanon is concerned with the psychosis that attends the black man’s desire to be white. The border to which Fanon refers is the one that separates the black Antillean from the European. People who believe in the ability to change one’s status by erasing difference are not seeking the type of post-racial humanism of Kenji, but rather seek to attain the intellectual and cultural markers of one race in particular—the white race.

Fanon later notes that “For [the black man] there is only one way out, and it leads to the white world. Hence his constant preoccupation with attracting the white world, his concern with being as powerful as the white man” (33). I do not argue that the Japanese-American characters in Okada’s novel wish that they were white. I would contend, however, that Japanese internment and loyalty oaths were racialized from the beginning and therefore foreclosed the possibility of a Japanese-American sense of “belonging.” Like the Antillean with his preoccuptation with whiteness, the Japanese-American soldiers exhibit a hypermasculinity and an excessive pride in their war efforts precisely because they know such efforts will never be enough. Ichiro, reflecting on the young waiter in Burnside, notes that the latter “was in the army and found it wasn’t enough so that he has to keep proving to everyone who comes in for a cup of coffee that he was fighting for his country like the button on his shirt says he did because the army didn’t do anything about this face to make him more American” (159). Again, to be more American is to look more American. The waiter, like Ichiro himself, cannot escape the racialized ideal that to be American is to be white. His race always already renders the loyalty oath a gesture of difference and differentiation.

We can now turn this entire analysis on its head by looking at loyalty from the perspective of the issei. We can consider how alignments with whiteness and with the American identity housed in images of picket fences and coca cola are the unforgiveable markers of disloyalty for people like Ichiro’s mother.