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

In its January 1956 issue, Reader’s Digest published an article by Albert Q. Maisel titled “The Japanese Among Us,” which offered an assessment of the status of Japanese Americans in the 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, the sacrifices, composure, and success of Japanese American soldiers, students, and entrepreneurs in the 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 the most sanguine of them had never hoped to attain within their own lifetime” (182). The improved status of Japanese Americans, the article contends, can be traced to the performance of Nisei soldiers in the highly decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which had been assembled when interned young men were asked to serve in the military forces of the same country that had incarcerated them and their families. “By the middle of 1944,” Maisel states, “the conduct of the evacuated Japanese and, above all, the superb military record of the Nisei had brought about a reversal in the feelings of most other Americans toward them” (192). The patriotic valor and dedication displayed by Nisei soldiers had galvanized public opinion, Maisel claims, and the ensuing years saw the gradual erosion of prejudice, as Japanese Americans returned to life outside the camps and achieved remarkable economic and cultural success. As evidence of such success, Maisel points to the 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 the postwar years, Maisel’s essay claimed that anti-Asian prejudice was largely confined to the past and that through their industry, patience, and patriotic commitment, Japanese Americans were rapidly entering the American mainstream.¹ In painting such a picture, the essay foreshadows the “model minority” discourse that would come to shape the public image of Japanese Americans in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.² Given his aim of demonstrating both the wartime loyalty of Japanese Americans and the ultimately all-embracing and tolerant nature of American democracy (even as the article’s title enforces a divide between Japanese Americans and “us”), Maisel neglects to mention the history of those interned Nisei who refused to serve in the army, earning the moniker “no-no boys” because they responded negatively to two key questions on a government questionnaire administered to Japanese American men in the camps. The postwar predicament of such no-no boys serves as the focal point of John Okada’s novel No-No Boy, published a year after “The Japanese Among Us” appeared. The novel, which has become a canonical work of Asian American literature, complicates the relentlessly upbeat thrust of Maisel’s account by foregrounding the emotional anguish of a no-no boy who returns from prison to find the Japanese American community deeply fractured along lines of generation and military participation.

However, the extent to which No-No Boy challenges the liberal, assimilationist ideology at the heart of an essay such as “The Japanese Among Us” has been vigorously debated. Critics such as Jinqi Ling have sought to discern the novel’s response to the narrowly-conceived politics of national identity that dominated the 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 the novel rejects both “wholesale assimilation” and a diametrically opposed Japanese nationalism (374), Suzanne Arakawa more recently contends that Okada’s text ultimately demonstrates the “virtual impossibility of resisting the grand narrative of assimilation” (191). Ultimately, Arakawa claims, the novel “embodies the faint hope—through sacrifice—of a (re)negotiated American identity” (192). Along similar lines, Daniel Y. Kim argues that the novel presents its protagonist, Ichiro Yamada, as a figure whose wounded subjectivity positions him as an exemplary agent of national...