John Okada

John Kozo Okada (September 23, 1923 – February 20, 1971) was a Japanese American novelist known for his critically acclaimed novel No-No Boy.

Born in Seattle, Okada was a student at the University of Washington during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Okada had to interrupt his studies, and he and his family were among thousands of American citizens interned at Minidoka War Relocation Center in 1942 as a result of Executive Order 9066.

Okada was taken out of the internment camp and recruited to the United States Army Air Forces after he completed a loyalty questionnaire which asked him to "forswear allegiance" to the Emperor of Japan.

He served as a Japanese translator, overflying Japanese forces in the Pacific and translating intercepted Japanese communications.

After the war, Okada returned to his educational pursuits, earning a bachelor's degree in English and a second bachelor's degree in library science from the University of Washington, as well as a master's degree in English from Columbia University.

The rediscovered works include a poem that Okada wrote during the night of the attack on Pearl Harbor entitled "I Must Be Strong," a play about the US occupation of Japan which was produced at the Tryout Theater in 1946, five short stories which were published in the Northwest Times in 1947, and two satirical essays about the military-industrial complex written during his stint as a technical writer at Hughes Aircraft Company between 1958 and 1961.

The Asian-American ethnic-theme dorm at Stanford University is named Okada in John Okada's honor.

In 1956, Okada completed the manuscript for his novel No-No Boy, which was published the following year.

Over the years, Okada worked several different jobs including as a librarian and technical writer.

Okada's only completed and published novel, No-No Boy (1957) deals with the aftermath of the Japanese American internment during World War II, Japanese-American identity, and how this event divided the Japanese American population after the war.

He explored feelings among Japanese nationals, some of whom still held dreams of a return to Japan, and among their native-born American children, who felt conflicted about their identity but identified with the United States.

Some of both generations were intensely bitter about their treatment in being interned during the war, in addition to the substantial economic and social losses they had suffered.

John Okada's “No-No Boy” captures the injustice of incarcerating Japanese-Americans during World War II — and serves as a warning today for our own fractured society.

The protagonist is a native-born American of Japanese descent who answered "No" on two important questions posed by the government: would he vow loyalty and would he enlist in the Army?

Those who answered "no" were sentenced to two years in prison.

On returning to Seattle after prison, he has to confront veterans whom he knew from before the war, some of whom were wounded and all of whom look down on him.

He also struggles with his parents, as his mother clings to the belief that Japan did not lose the war and eventually loses her sanity.

The novel did not get much notice, coming too soon after the war for people to want to explore the harshness of his portrayal and confrontation with hard questions.

Okada died of a heart attack on February 20, 1971, at the age of 47.

He was survived by his wife Dorothy, as well as a son and a daughter.

He is interred at Evergreen Washelli Memorial Park in Seattle.

Okada's younger brother Frank Okada was a noted abstract expressionist painter.

Okada's novel was rediscovered by some writers from Los Angeles in 1976, who tracked down his wife to meet her and see if she had any of his manuscripts.

She had struggled after his death and, unable to find a publisher interested in his next manuscript and disappointed at the rejection of his papers by UCLA, she burned everything: novel, notes, letters, etc.

In his introduction to the new 1976 edition of the novel, Lawson Fusao Inada writes of meeting Okada's wife, Dorothy, in La Grande, Oregon 1976:

Dorothy is a truly wonderful person.

It hurt to have her tell us that "John would have liked you."

It hurt to have her tell us that "you two are the first ones who ever came to see him about his work."

It hurt to have her tell us that she recently burned his "other novel about the Issei, which we both researched and which was almost finished."

It hurt to have her tell us that "the people I tried to contact about it never answered so when I moved I burned it, because I have him in my heart."

[...] You could say John was "ahead of his time," that he was born too early and died too young.

(from the MLA database, March 2008)

In 2018, Frank Abe, Greg Robinson, and Floyd Cheung published John Okada: The Life and Rediscovered Writings of the Author of No-No Boy.

This volume, which received an American Book Award in 2019, includes a substantial biography authored by Abe and based on interviews with Okada's family members and friends.