No-No Boy

4 ideas

1. Ichiro Yamada's homecoming as a no-no boy

   In 1946 Ichiro Yamada returns to Seattle after two years in internment camp and two in federal prison for answering 'no' to the loyalty questions and refusing the draft. On his first day a Nisei veteran spits on him, his younger brother Taro has abandoned school to enlist and later sets him up to be beaten, and his mother still insists Japan won the war. The mother drowns herself, and Freddie, another no-no boy, dies fleeing a bar fight. Ichiro ends the novel with only a faint hope of rejoining American life.

2. Coerced loyalty tests turn victims into enforcers

   When a state forces a persecuted group to publicly prove loyalty, it divides that group into those who passed and those who refused. The members who paid the price of passing, such as veterans, then police the refusers more harshly than outsiders do. Their own acceptance depends on marking a visible line between themselves and the 'disloyal.'

3. Belonging valued above bodily wholeness

   Ichiro envies Kenji, who is losing his leg piece by piece to a war wound and will soon die. Kenji's sacrifice bought him unquestioned membership in both America and his community, while Ichiro's intact body carries a permanent social exclusion. The mechanism is that people will rank the moral legitimacy that suffering buys above health or even life itself.

4. Parental absolutism produces the child's divided self

   Ichiro's mother holds an unbending Japanese identity and denies that Japan lost the war. Ichiro made his 'no' partly out of loyalty to her, and it cut him off from the American self he had actually grown into. Read this way, a second-generation child's identity crisis is often the price of a parent's refusal to accept a changed reality. The child pays for a certainty the parent will not give up, and is left feeling neither fully one identity nor the other.

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