Once More, With Feeling: Cold War Masculinity and the Sentiment of Patriotism in John Okada's No-No Boy

John Okada's 1957 novel, No-No Boy, offers a harrowing account of the psychological damage inflicted on Japanese American subjects by the World War II policy of internment, a damage that was shared—though differently—by those who maintained their sense of loyalty to the U.S. government even as they were rounded up and sent off to "relocation centers" and those who did not. Okada's protagonist, Ichiro Yamada, is a member of the latter group. He is a no-no boy, someone who refused to answer yes to two questions on a form that the War Department insisted that interned Nisei males fill out. These questions were:

No. 27. Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered?

As a result of his refusal, Ichiro, like his historical counterparts, has spent the final years of the war in prison. The novel opens with his return to Seattle, and it records his agonizing struggle to regain a sense of belonging—both to the local Japanese American community and the imagined community of the American nation.

Obviously Okada's novel has much to tell its readers about the difficult choices that Japanese Americans faced during World War II and the devastating psychological consequences of those choices. It is mainly for this reason that this work has become firmly ensconced in the canon of Asian American literary studies. But as critics Jinqi Ling and Viet Nguyen have argued, No-No Boy is a text that reveals as much about the period in which it was published, the 1950s, as it does about the one it depicts, the late 1940s.² My aim here is to extend the contextualizing trajectory of Ling's and Nguyen's analyses by reading Okada's work as both an exemplary mid-century Cold War text and a seminal Asian American text. I begin by examining the vulgar Freudian terms in which No-No Boy depicts Ichiro. By exploring this dimension of the text—particularly its focus on the nonnormative nature of Ichiro's masculinity—I demonstrate how it both echoes and reworks dominant psychological narratives of the early Cold War period. These narratives—which flesh out an ideology that historian Elaine Tyler May has termed "momism"—purported to identify those subjects who were vulnerable to subversion and suggested how their loyalty could be shored up. Such subjects were rendered particularly susceptible to foreign influence because they had been raised by domineering mothers who wielded an "unnatural" amount of power within the family.³ In Okada's novel, this corrupting maternal influence is explicitly linked with a jingoistic Japanese nationalism through the character of Mrs. Yamada. The rehabilitation of its protagonist requires, I argue, a shift in maternal allegiance: the Japanese maternal presence is replaced by one that is American, and one that can effectively be embodied by male characters. In the latter part of this essay, I consider how Okada's rendering of the maternal—and of the sentimental power with which it is associated—refracts the international concerns of the 1950s, drawing on the work of revisionist historians who have reimagined this period as one governed by a globalizing logic of "integration."

I.

What takes center stage in No-No Boy is the tortured psyche of its protagonist, Ichiro Yamada. He arrives in Seattle full of anger, but it is directed not so much at the misguided state policy that led to the incarceration of 119,000 Japanese Americans but at himself and at his family. There are, to be sure, characters in the novel who do voice an outrage at the government's actions, but Ichiro is not really one of them.⁴ The ways in which this text places primary blame for Ichiro's psychic ills on his family rather than on the state indicate how deeply embedded it is in the culture of containment examined by such scholars of the Cold War as Elaine Tyler May, Alan Nadel, and Michael Rogin.⁵ In her influential study titled...