A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

the issei. Few had gone against the ‘official’ advocacy of cooperation represented by the
Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), attempting to provoke test cases in order to
appeal in courts for constitutional rights.
One writer, John Okada, turned to the psychological impact that the camps and
the subsequent army draft had on young nisei: His 1957 novel No-No Boy deals with one
of the draft resisters who went to prison for two years and came back to a world of
veterans and silence. 178 The protagonist voices his double ‘no’ to the decision he is forced
to make: He can neither be Japanese nor American, for he grew up with both cultures
demanding allegiance. No-No Boy was largely ignored by both the critics and the reading
public, until the cultural nationalists around Chin rediscovered Okada’s work in their
search for roots and traditions in the late 1970s. 179 Today, this first Japanese American
novel is championed for its sincerity and insight. Okada, however, had died without
recognition.
Wartime internment is also a striking example of the different situations of
Japanese on the mainland and in Hawai’i: In 1941, one third of Oahu’s population was of
Japanese ancestry. The detainment of over 100,000 people would have been too costly
and would have toppled the islands’ economy. As Weglyn records:
Accordingly – and paradoxically – it had become a veritable military necessity for
authorities to retain, not detain, Hawaii’s Japanese population in a battle zone
thousands of miles closer to the enemy mainland than the jittery state of California
and to do everything possible to encourage their loyalty so that all would stay at
their tasks. 180
Only 980 ‘suspect’ individuals were taken to Sand Island detention center on the island of
Oahu. Stan Yogi thinks that because of these different experiences “it might have been
easier for Hawaiian nisei to explore Japanese American history and identity in the
178 The double negative of the title refers to two questions that internees over the age of seventeen were
required to answer: Would they serve in the military? Would they give unqualified allegiance to the United
States?
179 Chin refers to Okada’s fate when in the play The Year of the Dragon he lets his alter ego Fred Eng rant:
“I don’t wanta be a pioneer. […] To die and be discovered by some punk in the next generation and
published in mimeograph by some college ethnic studies department, forget it” (quoted in Sau-Ling Cynthia
Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: from Necessity to Extravagance, Princeton 1993: 208, 178).
Other early Japanese American milestones are Monica Sone’s 1953 autobiography Nisei Daughter, and
Toshio Mori’s 1949 short story collection Yokohama, California, modeled after Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio. Hisaye Yamamoto’s postwar short stories about issei or intergenerational conflicts were
also republished as “Seventeen Syllables” and Other Stories in 1988.
180 Quoted in Chin et al. 1991: 433.
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