Latest / Japanese America / S3E8: Unwanted Truth – John Okada and the Book That Wouldn't Stay Silent

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S3E8: Unwanted Truth – John Okada and the Book That Wouldn't Stay Silent · Japanese America

• 0:00
  You did it. I would say, John, you did it.
• 0:03
  You, of all the Nisei, put pen to ink or fingers to a typewriter.
• 0:07
  You were the one who wrote the novel that has stood the test of time I I.
• 0:12
  You've written the great camp novel of the 20th century. You won.
• 0:44
  Welcome back to Japanese America.
• 0:45
  I'm Koji Steven Sakai.
• 0:47
  And I'm Michelle Malizaki.
• 0:49
  Michelle, how are you doing?
• 0:50
  How have things been with you lately?
• 0:52
  Oh my gosh, the school's back.
• 0:54
  So I'm so happy. I got my house back and I got a dog and a cat to adopt it at the, uh, shelter.
• 1:03
  Oh, you got a new dog?
• 1:05
  Yeah, I got a new dog, a pug.
• 1:07
  Oh, nice.
• 1:08
  Yeah. Yeah. I never had a.
• 1:11
  I know I always had Chihuahuas, so this is my first bigger sized dog.
• 1:16
  That's not a big dog. What's his name?
• 1:18
  No. Uh, Toby. It's a boy.
• 1:21
  And it was great because he's four years old and he belongs to somebody else before.
• 1:26
  And he's fully potty trained.
• 1:28
  No accident so far. I mean, I, I wish I got my kids from the shelter, too.
• 1:33
  What people don't understand about shelter or about getting older dogs, a lot of times they're potty trained already, so they know what to do. Everybody always wants a little puppy because they're cute because obviously they're cute.
• 1:44
  But the problem is that you have to do all the training.
• 1:47
  Having a older dog is sometimes I think, better.
• 1:50
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:51
  Who does the pug love the most?
• 1:53
  Who does Toby love the most in your family?
• 1:55
  Um, whoever has the food in hand.
• 1:59
  Yeah, I was really sad.
• 2:00
  My first dog, my first dog with my wife and I, the one that we had, uh, his name was rabbit.
• 2:06
  And, uh, he loved my wife, even though I fed, walked and took him to the vet and did everything and played with him.
• 2:12
  But he, uh, he just loved my wife.
• 2:13
  And it made me very sad. But luckily my dog now coffee, the one, the the one, the crazy one in my family, she loves me the most, which makes me extremely happy.
• 2:22
  I think he likes me, but he likes my son and I think he loves his son.
• 2:28
  I mean, he he loves my son more than me, but he's moving out, so hey, so there'll be less competition for love for my dog.
• 2:38
  Before we get into the heavy history, let's jump into our opening question.
• 2:41
  Michelle, what was the book you were forced to read in school that you completely hated at the time, but grew to appreciate later in life?
• 2:47
  None. No, no. Like, I had to read like Rashomon was made to be made into a movie, and I had to read it when I was in high school maybe, and like, okay, why would you want to make a movie?
• 3:05
  And people are like making, you know, such a big deal about the movie.
• 3:09
  I didn't get it. And I read it again like a couple months ago.
• 3:14
  It's gross. I do you know that story that's like this?
• 3:18
  Yeah. Well, it's like, I don't know.
• 3:20
  Um, it's an old guy. I mean, not old.
• 3:22
  It's a poor guy. And he's like, oh, should I die or should I steal?
• 3:27
  So he goes up to this Rashomon gate and and then he finds this woman stealing hair from a dead body and like, oh, if you do that, I should steal, too. Then he steals stuff from this old lady and runs away.
• 3:45
  That's the story. Like, what's the moral of the story are steal. What about you?
• 3:53
  For me, it was probably The Great Gatsby.
• 3:55
  I think when I read it in high school or middle school, I think I didn't really understand it and didn't really seem to make a lot of sense to me. And then when I read it as an adult, it was amazing.
• 4:06
  And it talked a lot about some of the issues that I felt very attuned to working in corporate America. And it was it was really it was really powerful.
• 4:14
  Which brings us right to No-No.
• 4:16
  Boy. For listeners who haven't read it yet, the novel is set in Seattle in 1946 during post-war resettlement.
• 4:24
  It follows a young Nisei named Ichiro Yamada, who returns to his hometown after spending two years in an incarceration camp and two years in federal prison for refusing the draft.
• 4:36
  Instead of finding peace when he returns.
• 4:36
  Ichiro walks right into a fractured community. His mother refuses to believe Japan lost the war.
• 4:43
  His younger brother rejects him in anger, and he's confronted by fellow Japanese Americans on the street who view him as a coward and a traitor.
• 4:49
  The novel is a raw, agonizing psychological portrait of survivor's guilt, post-war trauma, and the search for identity.
• 4:54
  When you feel rejected by both your ancestral homeland and your own country.
• 4:59
  And the history behind the book publication is just as dramatic.
• 5:03
  When Charles E Tuttle published it in Tokyo in 1957, the Japanese American community largely met it with silence or outright rejection.
• 5:14
  At that time, families were desperately trying to assimilate, rebuild their lives, and prove their American loyalty.
• 5:21
  Nobody wanted to air the community's painful internal division.
• 5:25
  Okada died suddenly of a heart attack in 1971 at just 47 years old, believing his novel was a forgotten failure.
• 5:32
  It wasn't until a group of young Asian American writers in the 1970s rediscovered a copy in a used bookstore and republished it that No-No boy finally became recognized as the foundational classic of Asian American literature.
• 5:43
  Koji, you've mentioned before that this isn't just another book on your shelf.
• 5:48
  No-no boy has had a massive personal impact on your own path as a writer and storyteller.
• 5:53
  Yeah, I remember I took an Asian American class when I was in college, and this was one of the first books that we read.
• 5:59
  And I remember thinking that, uh, this is something I'd never read before.
• 6:03
  I had never read anything like this.
• 6:05
  And I just remember thinking, um, it was really interesting.
• 6:09
  It got me to ask questions about my family.
• 6:12
  And when I found out that my grandfather was a, was a No-No boy, or he answered no, no to a loyalty questionnaire.
• 6:18
  It really spoke to me in a way that other books hadn't.
• 6:22
  And it gave me some insight into the Japanese American community at that time.
• 6:27
  So even though Okada feels like he had failed, I hope he wherever he is that he realizes that it it inspired a whole group of Japanese Americans like myself, yonsei and it.
• 6:40
  It inspired me. It was one of the books that probably inspired me to pursue a career in writing. You bought the book?
• 6:45
  I bought the book.
• 6:46
  Uh, did you read it?
• 6:47
  And I read it.
• 6:48
  And, uh, what were some of the things that you liked in it?
• 6:51
  Yeah, it was a great, you know, maybe it's not a it's a lightweight light. It's the wrong way to say it, but it was a great read.
• 6:59
  It just pulled me in and I read it very quickly.
• 7:04
  I was surprised. I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm not gonna read it.
• 7:07
  I'm gonna read it by the time I see Koji.
• 7:10
  But hey, I read it way before I saw you.
• 7:15
  I was very proud and I highly recommend this book.
• 7:19
  It was so, so deep. I've learned, I've been learning about incarceration and camps and things like that.
• 7:27
  And then there are many layers of people that it's not.
• 7:30
  It's you can't have just one group of Japanese Americans.
• 7:34
  There are like different Japanese Americans.
• 7:36
  There are Japanese, Japanese who i mean, Ichiro's mom believed that Japan won the war, and she was waiting for a ship to come to rescue her.
• 7:49
  And she was getting letters from her relatives in Japan, and she thought it was a propaganda like it's crazy.
• 7:57
  The letters were saying, we need help, we need food.
• 8:01
  That kind of thing. Right?
• 8:02
  Yeah, there's no food.
• 8:03
  And, um, and the mom's like, oh, that's just the propaganda.
• 8:07
  We wonn the war. Like Japan won the war.
• 8:10
  There's no way we lose.
• 8:11
  Like, ah, it's so crazy.
• 8:13
  If you were born to a mother like that, it was a hard, hard, hard, really hard question to answer those questions because your your mom, I mean, maybe not so much anymore.
• 8:27
  My daughter doesn't respect me, but 80 years ago, you know, parents are the higher power to you.
• 8:38
  And if my if your mom says this way, you have to obey that way.
• 8:43
  And your thinking is the way your mom thinks and you can't just say, hey, I'm not sure, but hey, I, uh, I guess I'm.
• 8:54
  No, no. And, uh, when when he come, when he came back, everybody was like, so, so mean to him.
• 9:02
  Oh, I was sad how he was treated when he went back to Seattle.
• 9:08
  To help us unpack this extraordinary history.
• 9:11
  We sat down with author, filmmaker and historian Frank Abe.
• 9:15
  Frank authored the definitive biography of John Okada, co-edited the literature of Japanese American Incarceration, directed the PBS documentary conscious and the Constitution, and has lived alongside this book for nearly 50 years.
• 9:31
  Frank's connection to No-no Boy began in 1973 in San Francisco, alongside the writers of CARP, the combined Asian American Resources Project, Frank Chin, Sean Wang, Lawson Inada, and Jeffery Paul Chan.
• 9:47
  We asked Frank about this very reaction to seeing the original hardcover on the shelf.
• 9:51
  Because I know that I was in the Kinokuniya bookshop in San Francisco, Nihonmachi Japantown, and I saw a hardcover of of the Charles Tuttle edition of No-No boy on the shelf. And I picked it up, looked in the back, and it said, um, you know, this is the story of a draft resister in prison and the woman who loves him and his friend, the veteran who lost a leg in the war.
• 10:14
  And I thought, oh, lost a leg in the war.
• 10:16
  How unpleasant. I put it back.
• 10:20
  This is, you know, this book is worth, you know, hundreds of dollars now, hardcover edition, and I had to pay $100 for it later, but I did. I just put it back.
• 10:28
  Uh, and so it took me, I think a while to, um, appreciate what the novel really was.
• 10:35
  Even Frank put it back at first, but once the Carp Collective decided to reprint the book out of their own pockets, they needed cover art that captures the raw anger of Ichiro Yamada.
• 10:48
  And that's where Frank accidentally became immortalized in Asian American history.
• 10:52
  They decided to republish it out of their own pockets.
• 10:56
  And there's a long story attached to that as well. But, uh, they did republish it.
• 11:00
  And I met Bob. Bob. They hired their friend Bob Onodera.
• 11:04
  Onodera. But Bob Onodera, uh, and I remember them discussing how they wanted Koji, like the idea of the cover of being like brown paper, like a, like a grocery bag, you know, the amount of grocery, uh, and also using the, uh, military stenciling, uh, for the title of No-No boy, uh, as a cover design, but they needed a face for the angry young, you know, young man. And we were in rehearsals at the time for Honey Bucket at Asian-American Theater Workshop. And so Bob came out and took some pictures or he sent somebody, uh, took pictures of rehearsals at the Asian American Theater Workshop.
• 11:47
  And one of the photos.
• 11:49
  If you look at the logo that Bob designed for the Asian American Theatre Workshop is so clearly Mark Hayashi. I mean, it's it's uncanny.
• 11:58
  It's, it's a line drawing graphic design of Mark Hayashi.
• 12:01
  And for the cover of this republication of No-No boy.
• 12:05
  Uh, you look at it and it's so clearly a picture of me with, um, the theater lighting casting down on my cheekbones, uh, with kind of a surly expression on my face.
• 12:18
  Uh, when we were rehearsing the play Honey Bucket, about a Filipino Vietnam, Vietnam veteran, uh, being an Asian. Killing Asians in Vietnam.
• 12:27
  Uh, so that was, uh, so the book came out and, uh, I don't recall actually asking Bob if that was me, but I there are rehearsal photographs, rehearsal photos that he used for the, for the cover. And, um, it, uh, it, it sure looks like me.
• 12:45
  How do I feel about it now? After after all this time, I. To me, it's just it's an amusing anecdote, but it also, I think, reminds me how tied I am to the novel, the author, and just the legacy of this book.
• 13:03
  Decades after the cover came out, Frank began digging into archives and interviewing Okada's family and friends to write the author's biography.
• 13:13
  What surprised Frank the most was that John Okada wasn't some tortured, reclusive myth.
• 13:17
  He was an everyday Nisei family man who had actually studied playwriting on the GI Bill.
• 13:22
  One was that he really was, as opposed to being a man of mystery, a very ordinary guy. He was.
• 13:27
  He was a Nisei everyman.
• 13:29
  He was like every other Nisei guy after the war who just wanted to get education, uh, raise a family, uh, have a good job and, uh, get along, assimilate.
• 13:42
  Uh, and he did, uh, fairly successfully, uh, raised two children, had a good marriage, um, to Dorothy, uh, died way too soon at the age of 47 from a heart attack.
• 13:55
  But I think the other surprising thing was, well, okay, two more surprising things. One was that he actually had been aspired to be a playwright in the short stories, and the one act play that Greg discovered in microfilm, uh, appeared to me to be class exercises that he had worked on while taking creative writing classes at the University of Washington on the G.I.
• 14:23
  Bill. After returning from the MIS the military intelligence service in World War Two. Uh, he he took creative writing courses and playwriting courses at the UW and this one act play, uh, when in Japan, um, is a parody of the satire of American diplomacy post in Japan, postwar diplomacy in Japan, occupation diplomacy in Japan.
• 14:51
  And the play was actually produced at a 55 seat theater in the U.
• 14:57
  District in a place called the Tryout Theater.
• 15:00
  So Okada had theatrical chops, but there was always a question among literary historians the Okada know how monumental No-No boy was when he wrote it, or was it just another project?
• 15:13
  Frank got his answer when he tracked down one of Okada's oldest Seattle friends, Hiromi Nishimura.
• 15:18
  I did get to talk to a fellow named Hiromi Nishimura, who was a friend of his, you know, after the war.
• 15:25
  John had been helping his family manage a hotel in Chinatown, the Pacific Hotel, and nearby was the largest hotel in Chinatown, the Puget Sound Hotel, Puget Sound, run by the Nishimura family.
• 15:40
  So John and Hiromi Nishimura would hang out after work After, you know, changing bed sheets and cleaning toilets.
• 15:47
  Um, they would go hang out, play cards, go to movies, eat, go out and eat. And Hiromi was like a hundred years old when I interviewed him in his home in Beacon Hill.
• 15:56
  Uh, in what, 2015 maybe.
• 15:59
  And he, I asked him about John.
• 16:01
  He says, yeah, John. He said John wanted to write the great American novel.
• 16:08
  And that was the one piece I needed to hear, to justify and to reinforce and validate my interest in No-No boy and John's intention that, goddamn it, John Okada really did want to write the great Nisei novel.
• 16:25
  He did want to write the great camp novel, and that's what is what drives No-No boy and makes it so remarkable is that even though No-no Boy.
• 16:36
  The novel takes place in 1946 47 in Seattle, after the war, after camp, during the resettlement.
• 16:45
  It is the. His attempt to pull everything together and tell the story of, you know, racial discrimination, forced removal, forced incarceration. You know, and then the, the, the choices the government imposed on Japanese-Americans inside the camps.
• 17:03
  Um, the first the questionnaire, then the draft, then, uh, he alludes to the Denaturalisation act, which led to renunciation at Treaty Lake.
• 17:13
  He has like one page on that in the middle of nowhere.
• 17:17
  And he talks about Tule Lake.
• 17:18
  So John did want to write the great camp novel.
• 17:22
  And so, which was the ambition of so many other Japanese-American writers during the war.
• 17:29
  What makes Okada's ambition even more fascinating is that he was a decorated combat veteran who volunteered to fly reconnaissance in B-24s.
• 17:39
  So why would a veteran write a novel about a draft resister?
• 17:42
  Frank explains how a court abridged his own military service with the real life story of his friend Jim Akutsu.
• 17:48
  John Okada did write about his personal experience as a m I.
• 17:53
  S interpreter translator in the ability of B-24.
• 17:58
  The good Japanese American who had volunteered for the Army sat smoking in the belly of a B-24 on his way back to Guam from from a reconnaissance flight to Japan.
• 18:09
  His job was to listen through his earphones, which were attached to a high frequency set, and jot down air ground messages spoken by Japanese, Japanese, in Japanese planes and in Japanese radio shacks.
• 18:20
  And he's talking to this, you know, comrade, a blond giant from Nebraska who asks where you're from?
• 18:28
  He says, you know, I, I got folks, yeah, my folks are in the, in the in the camp, in the desert.
• 18:33
  And, and, and that's how the fellow says hell's bells.
• 18:37
  If they tried to do that to me, I wouldn't let them do that. I wouldn't I wouldn't let them do that to me And the good, the good Japanese-American soldier says, yeah, well, I got reasons, I got reasons. And the good Japanese-American soldier who thinks about his friend in a different uniform, i.e. prison stripes, uh, who, who did not volunteer for the army, who refused, stood before the judge and said he would not go in the army as his father out of a DOJ internment camp to join his mother in an a WRA camp because she misses her husband and wants to, wants to wants to sleep with him, lie with him, lie next to him.
• 19:12
  If he can do that, judge, I'll be happy to put on a uniform.
• 19:16
  Judge says no. So he fuses.
• 19:18
  And so this good soldier lying in the belly of the B-24 is thinking about his friend in prison. And then you cut to chapter one.
• 19:28
  Ichiro gets off a bus at Second and Main in Seattle.
• 19:31
  He'd been gone four years, two in camp and two in prison.
• 19:34
  And right away you enter the story into the head of John's friend, Jim Akutsu Hajime Jima, Akutsu of Seattle.
• 19:42
  So what that tells me is that, yeah, John started with his own story, but he, he found the angle of someone who said no to the draft and who said no to the draft for reasons he couldn't quite articulate.
• 19:59
  But they were connected to rejection of the camp experience connected to anger, suppressed anger at the injustice of forced removal and incarceration.
• 20:10
  Uh, and John did not spend time in camp except for a summer.
• 20:16
  The first few months of Puyallup, Washington, and 3 to 4 weeks in Minidoka, Idaho.
• 20:24
  John was in Minidoka for 3 to 4 weeks before he was one of the first to be granted relocation student relocation into Scottsbluff Junior College in Nebraska.
• 20:38
  Scottsbluff, Nebraska.
• 20:39
  So. So John was not there in Minidoka for the loyalty questionnaire in 43, for the draft in 44 and for the Denaturalisation act in 44.
• 20:49
  And I think he recognized those.
• 20:51
  Those are the those are the real stories, not just the, you know, being kicked out of your homes in the West Coast.
• 20:59
  Uh, I think, I think Okada recognized that the real story is what the government did to us in camp after putting us there for a year and then retroactively asking for, are you loyal to the US or not?
• 21:13
  You know, are you are you willing to serve in the armed forces and on combat duty wherever ordered? Asking us a year after they had taken away everything your homes, your family, your homes, your, uh, college, your businesses, your farms. And so I think he recognized that that was a stronger angle into the story of camp.
• 21:33
  In the novel. Ichiro calls himself a No-No boy, but historically answering no to the loyalty questionnaire in 1943 was completely different from refusing the military draft on constitutional grounds in 1944.
• 21:48
  Because the book blended those ideas together and portrayed a hero with so much agonizing self-doubt, actual wartime resisters had strong reactions.
• 21:56
  No-no boy was a generic slur that was applied then and now to anyone who dissented.
• 22:05
  Anyone who did not go along with the program of assimilating, volunteering for the army, going into combat to prove you're just as Americans. Anyone else spilling your blood for America to prove you're just as American as everyone else? So it's not necessarily a confusion that each row says I'm a No-No boy.
• 22:25
  It was a common year, a slander, uh, something distasteful in the Japanese-American community. No. No.
• 22:34
  Huh. And it's catchy. People who don't like the draft drafters just love saying that because it's just, it's just, it's, it's alliterative, right? Um, so, and also, we, we don't know if John titled the book, you know, boy himself, publishers often assign titles to novels.
• 22:51
  And in his letter, Chris query letter, John does not say the novel.
• 22:55
  He does not give the title of the novel.
• 22:58
  So we we don't we don't don't know for sure if that was the title he he had, or if Tuttle, the publisher, put that on the.
• 23:06
  Nevertheless, confusion has persisted for, you know, um, 75 years over, uh, the the idea Ichi Yamada himself being a literal No-No boy, he is not.
• 23:19
  Uh, how did the real draft resisters feel about this?
• 23:22
  They hated it. They absolutely hated it.
• 23:25
  They did not like Frank did not like the novel.
• 23:27
  Jim Akutsu did not like like the novel at all.
• 23:31
  Uh, when it was finally, uh, sent to him, uh, Jim says, I would, you know, I would not let anyone spit on me?
• 23:36
  If someone's trying to spit on me, I'd haul back and punch him in the nose.
• 23:40
  Uh. And frankly, he said much the same thing.
• 23:43
  Frank, any of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee led an organized resistance at Heart Mountain, which I documented in conscience and the Constitution.
• 23:55
  An organized resistance that was founded on a very clear set of principles attached to the Bill of rights and the Constitution.
• 24:04
  Uh, that they were protesting the draft, protesting.
• 24:08
  They were breaking the law in order to protest, not just not just drafting men from a concentration camp, but they're protesting the underlying unconstitutionality of the camps themselves.
• 24:21
  Um, and so that was, that was their form of patriotism, that they were loyal not to popular opinion, loyal not to JCL policy or, you know, uh, J. Public relations campaign.
• 24:37
  They were loyal to the principles of the Constitution.
• 24:40
  Due process, equal protection under the law.
• 24:43
  Uh, so the manifestoes of the Fair Play Committee are filled with, uh, very righteous stand on on on the law.
• 24:52
  Uh, Ichiro Katsu was not as clear.
• 24:56
  Now, neither is Ichiro Yamada in the novel.
• 24:58
  And I think Okada himself, when you look really closely, Koji, um, Okada himself is uncertain where he stands, and if pushed, he. He will have.
• 25:09
  Emmy and the character of Emmy in the novel says what you did was treason, but forgive you. This country forgave you for that, so you should be grateful. And that's a character in the novel.
• 25:21
  But I, I kind of hear the voice of the author in there too, because in his letters to the publisher, Okada says it's the same thing.
• 25:29
  What, what what my character does is treason.
• 25:32
  But it must be understood under these circumstances.
• 25:35
  So Okada himself did not have quite the whole.
• 25:38
  Did not have the entire thing sorted out in his own head, I think.
• 25:42
  And the resistance wasn't the only group unsettled by that novel.
• 25:46
  The broader Japanese American establishment at the time didn't know what to do with it either.
• 25:51
  Frank points to the 1957 review, written in the Pacific Citizen by prominent J. A c l leader and journalist Bill Hosokawa.
• 25:58
  When it was published in 1957 in the Pacific, citizen Bill Hosokawa writes a.
• 26:05
  What, in fact, is a fairly favorable review of runaway.
• 26:10
  Uh. My friend Frank chin wants to.
• 26:13
  Maintains that JCL campaigned to suppress the novel.
• 26:18
  Well, the evidence shows Bill Saikawa wrote a review that was dismissive of the story, dismissive of the of the of the so-called No-No boys.
• 26:28
  You know, Hosokawa says, I never I've never met a No-No boy myself, but, uh, and of course, their choices were all wrong and screwed up.
• 26:35
  But this John Okada fellow is a writer, a writer of promise he wrote.
• 26:40
  And that who who may someday write the great Nisei novel, implying this was not it, but his next one.
• 26:48
  Maybe, you know, might, might, might be, might be good. But he calls him a writer of promise. And, and, and I can feel the subtext there of Bill being, you know, a little jealous, slightly jealous, envious that this fellow in Detroit, John Okada, did it. And and Bill had not.
• 27:06
  Bill had Bill Omura and Tajiri, you know, stuck to news and opinion to journalism, which is what they were they were good at.
• 27:14
  But Bill Saikawa in my Penguin Classics anthology, The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, we considered but did not have room for Bill Hosokawa short story that we found.
• 27:25
  I found in in the PC in 1946 or 47 called the Service flags, which was a fairly, um, not melodramatic, uh, fairly maudlin, you know, short story about, uh, a mother and child who had resettled out of camp and who's the husband had had been killed in the 442. And they had these service flags and the son asking the mother about dad, you know, so, uh, and that was Bill's.
• 27:56
  So, Bill, bill wrote a short story.
• 27:58
  Ohmura wanted to write a novel about Issei immigration.
• 28:03
  And before the war, he had written, he submitted a short story that I found in his archive a short story, uh, about the JCL, actually, which I got to dig more into.
• 28:15
  Uh, is one of the things I got.
• 28:16
  I got to look further more into, but, uh, and also Tajiri apparently wanted to write the, the, and Toshio Mori also, uh, wrote a novella called The Brothers Murata about the two brothers who make different choices around the draft.
• 28:33
  So the point being that all these fellows wanted to write this story, but John Okada was the one who actually did it.
• 28:41
  Beyond No-No boy. John Okada had started writing a second novel focused on the early Issei immigrant generation.
• 28:48
  When Frank transcribed the original 1970s carp interviews with John's widow, Dorothy Okada, he heard the heartbreaking story of what happened to that manuscript after John's death.
• 28:57
  Dorothy Okada Frank, after John Okada died, told interviewers that she had, um, gathered up his the the magazine articles that she had, that he had, that she had helped him collect about, I assume, the camps and about Japan and about Japan and about Japanese immigration, because Okada pitched his publisher on a second novel that would be the story of the Issei. The Issei immigration story that he said he feared would be lost if it were not recorded, and only if not recorded in fiction and only in fiction can the hopes and joys and fears and sorrows of a people be adequately recorded.
• 29:40
  Uh, so he started writing this, this novel about the issei, and Lawson asked her, well, what was it about?
• 29:48
  And she said, well, it was, um, it started with a man jumping off the ship in Seattle. Uh, he jumps off the ship into the, uh, and, and is told to swim to shore and look for the tallest building you can see, which at the time in Seattle was Smith Tower in Pioneer Square, you know, walk towards the tallest building in town and keep walking until you get to a place where you see soy sauce, caskets show you caskets on the sidewalk, and you go inside. You'll.
• 30:18
  You'll find people there who will be willing to help you.
• 30:21
  And if you walk in a line from.
• 30:23
  From Elliott Bay port towards Pioneer Square, keep walking. You'll end up in Chinatown.
• 30:32
  Uh, so that was the journey.
• 30:33
  Uh, that's how the, that's how the novel opens.
• 30:35
  And that's what Doris Dorothy remembered of the novel.
• 30:39
  Uh, she said, and there's some controversy here because my, my, our friend Frank chin, uh, remembers things in his own way.
• 30:49
  What she says on the tape was that she gave the materials that she collected.
• 30:54
  She did not confirm that she gave them the manuscript.
• 30:57
  She says, I gave them articles that that I helped research.
• 31:01
  The research I had helped John collect on the issei does not mention I don't I don't think she I don't think she mentions the manuscript to UCLA, to the Japanese language department at UCLA.
• 31:13
  And Hiroshi Kashiwagi confirmed to me that at the time that there was an East Asian languages program at UCLA in 1950, 1971.
• 31:23
  Uh, and this is a little bit and this is before I believe I looked at it up, the establishment of the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA.
• 31:33
  So at the time, it was East Asian, East Asian languages program.
• 31:37
  And and she said and they they turned it down.
• 31:39
  They didn't want it. And they said, well, would you do.
• 31:42
  Then she says, I burned it.
• 31:44
  She says, I. She says, I threw it out.
• 31:46
  And that became in some tellings that she burned it.
• 31:48
  So the idea that that Asian Asian American Studies department rejected it is probably not true. Nevertheless, you know, someone at UCLA just was not interested. And so I was typing this up and I could hear the silence in the room when she told the story that that she had to throw them away.
• 32:08
  And Frank and Lawson and Sean asking Frank and Sean asking, uh, this, this or that.
• 32:15
  Did you do this or do that?
• 32:16
  No, just just burned it.
• 32:17
  I burned it, and you can just feel the air leaking out of the room.
• 32:23
  Um, when they, when they heard this, um, this news Frank would later write in his essay that, uh, he got so mad he wanted to kick her ass around the block.
• 32:33
  Um. So. Yeah. And, you know, we all feel, we all feel we all feel the same way. Uh, it's a terrible.
• 32:39
  But we we don't know how far along the manuscript was.
• 32:44
  Whether I asked his children about it.
• 32:47
  They thought that he had. He certainly had notes.
• 32:50
  He may have had an outline.
• 32:51
  He certainly had a start to the story.
• 32:53
  Uh, but we don't know how if he finished it even or or if it was more than just an outline.
• 33:01
  Losing that manuscript is devastating, but Frank's 50 year relationship with John Okada's work isn't over.
• 33:08
  He is currently writing a brand new stage adaptation of No-No boy for the Seattle Repertory Theatre.
• 33:12
  I've been commissioned by a private party to write a theatrical stage adaptation of No-No boy, the novel John Okada's No-No Boy for the stage.
• 33:23
  So I've been working on that for the past five years.
• 33:27
  It's it's struggle. I'm going back to the novel and from the ground up, writing my own adaptation of the novel for a 21st century American audience, an audience. That is where we.
• 33:43
  Today we see the same thing themes of fear of the other and the targeting of people based on their, you know, race, religion, immigration status, um, and so on. So there are themes in the novel that I think obviously, obviously resonate with, with what's happening today and in the theaters today. I really am not seeing a lot of theater or any theater that's pushing back against what's happening on the streets today.
• 34:12
  Uh, so this is, this is also driving me forward as well.
• 34:15
  So we've had two script workshops, uh, here at the Seattle Repertory Theater.
• 34:20
  They've been collaborating with me on, on that.
• 34:23
  Um, this is a project that got started in 2021 when a friend, Elaine Coe, was appointed to the Board of Seattle Rep, and she called me up and asked for ideas for Asian-American plays to stage.
• 34:38
  I listed off a few, but I said, you know, Elaine, if you really want to do this. And we discussed putting the idea of the goal of putting the camp story on stage.
• 34:46
  If you said you want to put the camp story on stage, you know, the gold standard is no, no, boy. And she said, great, let's do it.
• 34:52
  And at the same time, coincidentally, a subscriber for the rep as a subscriber to the rep, contacted them through the internet and said, I just read this great novel, uh, about, about the incarceration called No-No boy. And I think it'd be a great play for the Seattle rep, and I'd be willing to commission somebody to, to write it. So those two things came together. Uh, and, and based on my experience with both the subject matter and also my degree in theater arts at UC Santa Cruz And, uh, my indoctrination in Asian American theater under Frank chin 50 years ago, 1973. This has become kind of a a full circle moment for me, a full circle moment for me to fulfill a bit of the promise that we we set out with the Asian American Theater Workshop to create new works that reflect our authentic culture and history, um, on the stage in, in ways that feel true and timely, uh, especially now. And so, uh, that, that work continues.
• 36:03
  Uh, and we'll see how that, and now we're working on seeking partners for possible co-production.
• 36:09
  We'll see how this goes. Uh, but, uh, hopefully we're, you know, your listeners will be able to see, read about, uh, a production of No-No boy, a new production of No-No boy, uh, a new adaptation of No-No.
• 36:21
  Boy. Uh, that is more firmly grounded in the novel and the themes of, um, you know, then and now my life being intertwined with this, this, this John Okada fellow and his novel, um, is, um, it's been a lifelong thread and one that I guess is going to continue.
• 36:44
  Hearing Frank talk about his lifelong connection to John Okada from accidentally being the face on the cover in the 70s to adapting the story for the stage today, really shows how powerful this bookstore is.
• 36:57
  It's amazing how a novel that was once so neglected has continued to find new life through people dedicated to keeping the history alive.
• 37:05
  It really does. Sitting down with Frank and hearing the depth of everything he uncovered while writing the biography gives you a completely different appreciation for what Okada was trying to do.
• 37:14
  It definitely left us with a lot to process.
• 37:17
  Michelle having read the novel and hearing Frank's insights.
• 37:20
  What did you ultimately think about the book about John Okada as a person, or about what Frank had to say.
• 37:25
  Can I play the mom in the new play?
• 37:30
  You want to be the crazy mom?
• 37:32
  Yeah. I'll get I'll gain some.
• 37:35
  I you know, I imagine her, although it's like right after the war.
• 37:39
  I imagine her, like, little and like a little bit chubby on her cheeks.
• 37:43
  I could do it. And I see I, and I also speak Japanese.
• 37:47
  There you go. That's my selling point.
• 37:49
  That character in particular. I think what people don't or what people don't realize about her, was that the Issei is at the time, they couldn't become American citizens.
• 37:59
  So for them to choose, like in the loyalty questionnaire, for them to choose to give up their American citizenship, was essentially saying that they were going to give up their Japanese citizenship, which was going to make them stateless, which is a very scary place to be.
• 38:12
  Yeah. And also, when you when you taught me about the no no questions, I thought that was the end.
• 38:20
  Like, they went to the federal prison.
• 38:23
  And I thought that was the end of the story.
• 38:26
  But there was a story beyond.
• 38:28
  After the federal prison life.
• 38:30
  And it's like eye opening to find out what happened to those people who answer, no, no.
• 38:36
  Yeah. To this day, people are still arguing about the loyalty questionnaire.
• 38:41
  You know, people. Because when they find out that my dad or my grandfather was a no no, they call my grandfather coward.
• 38:48
  And it kind of blows my mind away because how can you call someone a coward when you weren't there and you don't you didn't put yourself in.
• 38:56
  I mean, you can't put yourself in his shoes.
• 38:58
  You don't know what what he was, uh, why he made the decision that he did.
• 39:02
  And it was Senator Daniel Inouye who is the senator from Hawaii, Medal of Honor winner, all of that.
• 39:08
  And he said that for people who were the resisters, in a lot of ways, they were they were brave in their own way.
• 39:16
  And that in a lot of ways, they had to be braver because they were instantly hated by, you know, the country.
• 39:22
  They were sometimes hated by their families and definitely hated by the Japanese American community as a whole. I mean, just look at No-No boy as an example of what the feelings toward, uh, the resistors and the no-nos were.
• 39:33
  So I think that, um, the senator's point was that it was brave on both sides, right? To go fight in the war and possibly die for your country that rejected you and to fight for your rights that were, you know, supposed to be given to us is one of those things.
• 39:47
  And also, he came back from the prison.
• 39:49
  Ichiro came back from the prison with all the limbs attached, and he met his friend Ken, and he was missing a leg, and he died from the, uh, rotten leg.
• 40:02
  And and then there are other people who died during the war.
• 40:06
  And. But this Ichiro guy, he was like, all messed up internally.
• 40:11
  And I'm like, oh my gosh, what's going to happen to him after that?
• 40:17
  The story is over. I want to know what happened to him after this book.
• 40:22
  One of the things I find interesting, and you brought up the veteran whose leg was falling off, was going gangrene.
• 40:28
  I think what's interesting and what people don't within the Japanese American community sometimes don't realize, is that it didn't matter if you went to jail or to the war, you were still.
• 40:38
  When people looked at you, they still considered you an enemy sometimes, right? They considered you a Japanese instead of a Japanese American.
• 40:45
  And so I think that in a lot of ways for the community, I think that it's one of those things that we see it as such a defining moment.
• 40:53
  But for us, it could also be a moment to us for to realize that there's just different paths for the same thing.
• 40:58
  And also, um, that really explained to me that why the Japanese community are not tight like other community. It seems like, um, because before the war, there used to be a lot of Japanese communities that are big, liking San Pedro. That was a big Japanese community there.
• 41:22
  Um, but now it's all spread out.
• 41:25
  And this book explains why Japanese community communities are not as tight as the different communities of other culture.
• 41:35
  One of the things, um, reading No-No boy as an adult, that's different than when I was a, when I was a young man who read it was just this amount of self-hatred that Japanese Americans had, whether you were a no no or a veteran, just that, that hatred of, of being Japanese American or being Japanese.
• 41:51
  And I think that's, I think that's really sad because being Japanese and being Japanese American, it's a, you know, it's just like anything, it's, it's wonderful to be able to be, you know, to have a, have a community and have a history.
• 42:03
  I think that that's all wonderful. And also being American, right. They could all work together at the same time.
• 42:08
  A huge thank you to Frank Abe for sharing his time, insight and incredible scholarship with us today.
• 42:14
  Be sure to check out our show notes for links to Frank's biography, John Okada The Life and Rediscovered Work of the author, No-No boy and his documentary conscience and the Constitution.
• 42:23
  Join us for our next episode, airing on the second Thursday of next month, October 8th for season three, episode nine Costumes and Consequences.
• 42:33
  Who gets to wear what?
• 42:35
  We'll be tackling cultural appropriation, representation, and Halloween.
• 42:39
  Make sure to subscribe, leave a rating, and review wherever you listen to podcasts, and share this episode with a friend.
• 42:45
  Until next time. Bye, everyone.
• 42:47
  Later. Bye.
• 42:48
  Bye.