No-No Boy

“It was her way of saying that she had made him what he was and that the thing in him which made him say no to the judge and go to prison for two years was the growth of a seed planted by the mother tree and that she was the mother who had put this thing in her son and that everything that had been done and said was exactly as it should have been”

Ichiro’s mother responses to his homecoming by saying that she is proud of him, proud that he is her son. This sentiment upsets Ichiro who wants to convey his pain to her; she views his jail time as a commitment to her values and to Japan, so she is unable to see the suffering of her son. To her, his commitment to Japan and remaining Japanese is all that matters. That he went to jail for his mother’s values makes him a good Japanese son but, Ichiro thinks, a poor American.

“I wish with all my heart that I were Japanese or that I were American. I am neither and I blame you and I blame myself and I blame the world which is made up of many countries which fight with each other and kill and hate and destroy”

Ichiro’s identity crisis spans the length of the book. In this moment, he blames his mother for foisting an identity on him, forcing him to remain traditionally Japanese. He also blames himself for not identifying as fully American when he was questioned. The war, and the recurrence of war, also factor into his identity crisis; if these two nations were not in conflict, he as an individual would not be pushed to choose a side.

“Ichiro’s mother looked at him with a look which said I am Japanese and you are my son and have conducted yourself as a Japanese and I know no shame such as other parents do because their sons were not really their sons or they would not have fought against their own people”

While Ichiro feels that he must conceal his status as a no-no boy, his mother views it as a badge of honor. Any Japanese American that fought in the war has betrayed Japan and his family in her view. In her mind, Kenji and other vets are marks of shame on their culture, while Ichiro’s prison time was noble. For this reason, she takes Ichiro around to show him off to their fellow Japanese neighbors, because she is so assured that he made an honorable decision.

“They continued to maintain their dreams by refusing to learn how to speak or write the language of America and by living among their own kind and zealously avoiding long-term commitments such as the purchase of a house. But now, the Kumasakas, it seemed, had bought this house and he was impressed. It could only mean that the Kumasakas had exchanged hope for reality and late as it was, were finally sinking roots into the land from which they had previously sought not nourishment, only gold”

Ichiro is surprised but impressed that his neighbors have finally purchased a home. He views it as a sign that they are beginning to do what his parents will not, namely stake a claim to an American life. Ichiro contrasts this decision of his neighbors with his parents’ decision to never buy a home, to not learn English, and to save every penny so they can one day return to Japan. It is clear that Ichiro would like his parents to invest in the country in which they have raised their sons.

“She shrugged without actually moving. ‘That is what they all say. They who claim to be Japanese. I see it in their faces and I feel it on their lips. They say I am crazy but they do not mean it. They say it because they are frightened and because they envy my strength, which is the strength of Japan. They say it with the weakness which destroyed them and their sons in a traitorous cause and they say it because they see my strength which was vast enough to be your strength and they did not have enough for themselves and so not enough for their sons’”

Here, in one of her longest bits of dialogue in the book, Ichiro’s mother explains how she shrugs off her detractors and those, like Ichiro, who would call her crazy. It is all very straightforward in her view; those that opposed her failed Japan by raising sons that would not choose Japan over America. They were weak whereas she and Ichiro remained strong. It does not matter to her here or elsewhere that her son now feels ostracized and alone. Nation and family take precedence over the individual.

“It is not an easy thing to discover suddenly that being American is terribly incomplete if one’s face is not white and one’s parents are Japanese, of the country Japan which attacked America. It is like being pulled asunder by a whirling tornado”

Ichiro tries to explain that feeling—tornado like—of learning that you have been labeled as “other” despite feeling as if you belonged. Before Pearl Harbor, Ichiro felt more complete as an American, though he notes that being non-white means always being excluded in some way.

“‘I’ll change with you, Kenji,’ he thought. ‘Give me the stump which gives you the right to hold your head high’”

When he first reconnects with Kenji, Ichiro is so awash with self-pity that he isnot able to see the intensity of Kenji’s suffering. Instead, he feels that having a visible war injury would be a blessing. It would be a badge of honor, Ichiro feels, and would be the antithesis of his no-no boy shame.

“The mother uttered a single, muffled cry which was the forgotten spark in a dark and vicious canyon and the spark having escaped, there was only darkness but a darkness which was now darker still and the meaning of her life became a little bit meaningless.”

When Taro turns eighteen, he decides to enlist in the army despite the protests of his father and brother to wait until he graduates from high school. Ichiro and Taro’s mother does not try to convince him, believing that it is impossible that he will reject his family and his heritage. When Taro storms out to sign up for the military though, she emits a single sound that gives voice to the intensity of the blow that has been dealt to her worldview. It foreshadows her decision to commit suicide at the end of the book, believing it is better to die than raise sons that reject Japan.

“They were two extremes, the Japanese who was more American than most Americans because he had crept to the brink of death for America, and the other one who was neither Japanese nor American because he had failed to recognize the gift of his birthright when recognition meant everything”

Ichiro is struck by the differences between his life and Kenji’s. In a way, Kenji is not just American but hyper-American because he gave his leg and eventually gives his life for his country. Ichiro, in his own mind, is insufficiently American because when asked to express his allegiance, he said no.

“Taro, my brother who is not my brother, you are no better than I. You are only fortunate that the war found you too young to carry a gun…And you are fortunate because the weakness which was mine made the same weakness in you the strength to turn your back on Ma and Pa…I was born not soon enough or not late enough and for that I have been punished. It is not just but it is true. I am not one of those who wait for the ships from Japan with baggage ready, yet the hundreds who do are freer and happier and fuller than I am. I am not to blame but you blame me”

Ichiro attempts to understand his brother Taro and realizes that in many ways Taro benefitted from being the secondson. Being born when he was, Taro was not forced to serve in the war. Because Ichiro clung to his parents’ values, Taro had a greater ability to reject them and to find a path for himself. Ichiro feels as though he is in limbo—not of the same mindset as the immigrants who wait to return to Japan someday but also not as free as his younger brother who can walk out of his parents’ lives forever in pursuit of his own American dream.

“It’s because we’re American and because we’re Japanese and sometimes the two don’t mix. It’s all right to be German and American or Italian and American or Russian and American but, as things turned out, it wasn’t all right to be Japanese and American. You have to be one or the other”

This remark from Emi echoes Ichiro’s own feelings that being Japanese and American puts him in a unique bind. Other Caucasian cultural groups are given more latitude and are allowed to keep their traditions within seeminglytraitorous, former Axis nations. But Japanese Americans need to be clearly and exclusively American if they want to be accepted.

 “Right or wrong, she had, in her own way, tried harder than most mothers to be a good mother to him. Did it matter so much that events had ruined the plans which she cherished and turned the once very possible dreams into a madness which was madness only in the view of the changed status of the Japanese in American? Was is she who was wrong and crazy not to have found in herself the capacity to accept a country which repeatedly refused to accept her or her sons unquestioningly…where they could still not rate as first class citizens because of the unseen walls?”

In this attempt to understand his mother, Ichiro acknowledges that her plan to remain true to her cultural background is made more dangerous by timing and events she herself had no control over. If Japan had not attacked, she may have been allowed to continue living the life she had designed for herself and wanted for her children. Ichiro also acknowledges the racism around them and that experiences of racism would hardly motivate his mother to assimilate if she were already reluctant.

“’I’ll go,’ said Ichiro to the man who was neither husband nor father nor Japanese nor American but a diluted mixture of all”

Ichiro feels that his father has become spineless in the face of the conflicting views around him. His father does not seem to fully support his mother’s view but he does not stand up for his sons either. He has not become fully American, but he does not wait for the boats to arrive to take him back to Japan, as his wife does. Ichiro wants his father to take a stand, to carve out an identity and stick to it.

“It was because he was Japanese and at the same time, had to prove to the world that he was not Japanese that the turmoil was in his soul and urged him to enlist. There was confusion but underneath it a conviction that he loved America and would fight and die for it because he did not wish to live anyplace else”

Kenji expresses some of the confusion that torments Ichiro throughout the book. Kenji admits to feeling that he cannot be Japanese and American at the same time. For him though, the deciding factor is the realization that he does not want to live anywhere but America. Therefore, he has to serve.

 “Things are as they should be, he assured himself, and feeling greatly at peace, sleep came with surprising ease”

Given the enormous pain he is in, it is surprising that Kenji can fall right to sleep; unlike Freddie and Ichiro, Kenji has accepted the terms of his life. He has also accepted the prospect of imminent death. In this scene, the relief of seeing and saying goodbye to family seems to bring him closure.

“It must be nice to be white and American and to be able to feel like this no matter where one goes to but I won’t cry about that”

In his last visit to Club Oriental, Kenji reflects on how at home he feels there. He wonders what it would be like to feel at home and at ease anywhere and thinks being white affords a person that luxury. He decides though not to mar the moment with anger.

“The government made a big mistake when they shoved you people around. There was no reason for it. A big black mark in the annals of American history”

Mr. Carrick, like Professor Brown, expressed disgust over the Japanese Internment. He goes on to say that he now views America differently, having seen its prejudice, and thinks the country needs to learn its lesson and try to improve. Mr. Carrick hopes to right American’s wrong by giving Ichiro a job, but Ichiro turns him down.

 “One did not say this is as far as we go together, I am stepping out of your lives without rendering himself only part of a man. If he was to find his way back to that point of wholeness and belonging, he must do so in the place where he had begun to lose it”

Though Ichiro is tempted to start a new life in Portland and never look back, he decides he cannot completely cut off ties with his parents. He cannot hope to understand himself in a context divorced from them.

“Eng for Eng, Jap for Jap, Pole for Pole, and like for like meant classes and distinctions and hatred and prejudice and wars and misery and that wasn’t what Mr. Carrick would want at all, and he was on the right track”

When a diner waiter attempts to befriend Ichiro, thinking they share the same ethnicity, Ichiro becomes irate and pretends to be Chinese. He feels disgusted by the isolation of cultural groups from one another and thinks that Mr. Carrick, who wants to see a more integrated America, has the right idea.

“Maybe dying is it. The finish. The end. Nothing. I’d like that too. Better an absolute nothing than half a meaning. The living have it tough. It’s like a coat rack without pegs, only you think there are. Hang it up, pick it up, hang it up again, drop again”

Kenji expresses how exhausting the search for meaning in life is. Purpose is fleeting and the quest for it is endless until death arrives. He feels relieved to be escaping that exhausting search.

“He leaned forward intently, smiling pleasantly, as if the boys were in front of him. He knew they were not there but the desire to voice their names could not be resisted and so again he called,‘Taro? Ichiro?’”

In a drunken stupor, Ichiro’s father gives in to his feelings of intense loneliness. His wife has become remote and inaccessible to him, lost in her own despair. Taro has run away to join the army and Ichiro has left to take Kenji to Portland, perhaps with the intention of not returning. Ichiro’s father is not able to effectively communicate with any of his family, but he dreams of doing so, here speaking his sons’ names aloud.

“I have had much time to feel sorry for myself. Suddenly I feel sorry for you, sorry for the happiness you have not known. So now you are free. Go back quickly. Go to the Japan that you so long remembered and loved and be happy”

When Ichiro discovers his mother dead in the bathtub, he feels first numb, then irritated, then at last a bit more generous. Here, he expresses regret that she never had the future she dreamed of, one that included returning to Japan.

“All she wanted from America for her sons was an education, learning and knowledge which would make them better men in Japan. To believe that she expected such a thing was possible for her sons without their acquiring other American tastes and habits and feelings was hardly possible and yet this is how it was”

Ichiro’s mother had never imagined her sons would become Americans. She wanted them to remain Japanese and to eventually travel back to Japan with her. She wanted this, in Ichiro’s opinion, despite the fact that it was impossible. Her dream of raising sons in America without them becoming American was a pipedream.