Andrea Agudelo Campos

Multicultural Literature, 810

Trauma reflected in “No-No Boy”

Ichiro is the main protagonist of John Okada's novel “No-No Boy”. This story tells how after

the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese immigrants were relocated to concentration camps.

Not only this, but the Japanese were forced to answer two questions, which depending on the

answer would have some consequences or others. The questions were number 27 and number

28 of the questionnaire that they were asked and they said the following: question 27 asked if

an individual would serve the United States, either as a soldier, as a nurse, etc. Question 28

asked "Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States... and forswear any form of

allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, to any other foreign government, power or

organization?" On one hand, if they answered yes to both questions, they would be drafted

into the US Army and sent to fight in the war against Japan. However, if they answered no to

both questions, they would be sent to jail and called No-No Boy and be left appart by the

whole society. The latter was the case of Ichiro, he spent two years in the concentration camp

and later spent another two years in jail for answering both questions no.

But how did all this affect the Japanese living in the United States? The result was the

individual trauma that can be seen reflected in the different characters of the novel. On the

one hand, we have Ichiro's mother. She firmly believes that Japan has won the war because of

a letter that came to her saying that Japan had won and that the Japanese government would

shortly take care of repatriating them back to Japan. Despite what her husband and her son

Ichiro told her, she still did not believe it and continued to think that Japan had not lost.

Because of the trauma, Ichiro's mother has a distorted view of reality and is unable to see
what really happened. Ihiciro even goes so far as to say that her mother is no longer a woman

or a mother.

Continuing with this, Ichiro also describes his father as being neither ‘a man nor a father nor

an American nor a Japanese’ anymore, that his father has become a mixture of all without

ever having a clear or defined identity. It is because of the trauma that the father has lost his

identity and so to speak his gender role. Ichiro describes how after spending those two years

in the concentration camp, his father performs daily tasks related to women. Not only that,

but the father wears clothes that are more associated with women than men, leading to the

conclusion that the father has even lost his masculine identity. In addition, Ichiro goes so far

as to comment that his parents should have changed, literally saying "Pa should have been

Ma and Ma should have been Pa". With this Ichiro is giving the reader to understand that

because of the trauma his parents have lost all his identity.

This loss of identity can also be seen reflected in Ichiro throughout the entire novel. When

Ichiro is forced to answer questions 27 and 28, he is exposed to one of the most difficult

decisions of his life. On the one hand, there is his family, the Japanese branch of him, and on

the other hand, there is the country where Ichiro was born, raised, played, laughed at, cried,

etc. So when Ichiro gets carried away by his family's side, more specifically by his mother,

and decides to answer no-no to those questions, he also loses his identity. This decision will

lead Ichiro to what could be considered a depression in addition to first blaming his mother

for making that decision and later blaming himself for not having been brave enough to have

gone to the army.

However, it wasn't just the Japanese who answered no-no who were traumatized by the

consequences. This can be seen reflected in the novel by the character of Kenji, who did go to

war and fight for the United States but who nevertheless suffers from post traumatic stress.

Also, Kenji's leg had to be amputated but he still feels it and it still hurts. In this way, the
novel not only shows the consequences of not having gone to war, but also those of those

who did decide to go, making it clear that the decision one way or another was not going to

be easy or better.

To sum up, John Okada's novel reflects the consequences that different generations of

Japanese immigrants lived in the United States due to that attack on Perl Harbor. Going

through the loss of identity or gender in addition to the different psychological and physical

consequences that a war can leave in a person. It is difficult to imagine the thoughts or

feelings of those people who lived through it, but Okada tries to reflect all this trauma that

most lived in silence because they were not accepted in society either.