“A Terribly Incomplete Thing”: <i>No-No Boy</i> and the Ugly Feelings of Noir

Abstract

In its January 1956 issue, Reader's Digest published an article by Albert Q. Maisel titled Japanese Among Us, which offered an assessment of status of Japanese Americans in postwar years. The piece contended that while Japanese Americans had been subject to decades of discrimination that culminated in their wartime internment in West Coast detention camps, sacrifices, composure, and success of Japanese American soldiers, students, and entrepreneurs in 1940s and 1950s led to an amazing turnabout in their fortunes. Maisel argued that mid-1950s Japanese Americans were enjoying a prestige, a prosperity and a freedom from prejudice that even most sanguine of had never hoped to attain within their own lifetime (182). The improved status of Japanese Americans, article contends, can be traced to performance of Nisei soldiers in highly decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which had been assembled interned young men were asked to serve in military forces of same country that had incarcerated and their families. By middle of 1944, Maisel states, the conduct of evacuated Japanese and, above all, superb military record of Nisei had brought about a reversal in feelings of most other Americans toward them (192). The patriotic valor and dedication displayed by Nisei soldiers had galvanized public opinion, Maisel claims, and ensuing years saw gradual erosion of prejudice, as Japanese Americans returned to life outside camps and achieved remarkable economic and cultural success. As evidence of such success, Maisel points to achievements of a long list of individual Japanese Americans in agriculture, law, education, and business. Like many other articles about Japanese Americans in mass-market publications during postwar years, Maisel's essay claimed that anti-Asian prejudice was largely confined to past and that through their industry, patience, and patriotic commitment, Japanese Americans were rapidly entering American mainstream. (1) In painting such a picture, essay foreshadows model minority discourse that would come to shape public image of Japanese Americans in 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. (2) Given his aim of demonstrating both wartime loyalty of Japanese Americans and ultimately all-embracing and tolerant nature of American democracy (even as article's title enforces a divide between Japanese Americans and us), Maisel neglects to mention history of those interned Nisei who refused to serve in army, earning moniker because they responded negatively to two key questions on a government questionnaire administered to Japanese American men in camps. The postwar predicament of such no-no boys serves as focal point of John Okada's novel No-No Boy, published a year after Japanese Among Us appeared. The novel, which has become a canonical work of Asian American literature, complicates relentlessly upbeat thrust of Maisel's account by foregrounding emotional anguish of a no-no boy who returns from prison to find Japanese American community deeply fractured along lines of generation and military participation. However, extent to which No-No Boy challenges liberal, assimilationist ideology at heart of an essay such as Japanese Among Us has been vigorously debated. Critics such as Jinqi Ling have sought to discern novel's response to narrowly-conceived politics of national identity that dominated postwar years, when Cold War ideological drives toward U.S. nationalism and legitimation of material abundance promoted tendencies to embrace a common national character and a 'seamless' American culture (360). While Ling argues that novel rejects both wholesale assimilation and a diametrically opposed Japanese nationalism (374), Suzanne Arakawa more recently contends that Okada's text ultimately demonstrates virtual impossibility of resisting grand narrative of assimilation (191). …