The No-No Boys

One of the original barracks at Tule Lake, still extant in 1975.

The following is excerpted from Danielle Steele’s 1996 best seller Silent Honor, an historical novel about the experience of Japanese-Americans in WWII internment camps, pp. 291-293. It is a story of Japanese-American honor and mainstream American dishonor, and it has much in common with the current story of Guantanamo Bay, in the total failure to understand people because of racial and cultural profiling. The No-No Boy phenomenon is something from which every American on the East-West cultural interface still suffers. These emotionally twisted individuals who “didn’t feel American, didn’t feel Japanese,and didn’t feel anything” have been a major alienating influence in the Japanese-American Sangha, either offending home offices in Japan, or offending, offing, and abusing members of the cultural mainstream who may try to participate in these Sanghas, or both things simultaneously. For them, Buddhism has been a stage from which to dramatize how hurt they were. Now most of them have passed on, but the scars they left behind are deep and lingering. Yes, these incarceration camps were wrong. But two wrongs, or innumerable wrongs for that matter, don’t make a right. There’s nobody left alive in America today who was responsible for those camps, or who approves of them.

Danielle Steele’s work is the opposite of current chopped-up formula story best sellers, which simply exacerbate attention spans already shortened by TV. Her plot moves at a glacial pace, due to her attention to blow-by-blow accounts of interactive feelings, and emotional traumatization in particular. I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the Japanese-American Sangha.

Namu Amida Butsu
Xing Ping
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…And much to everyone’s surprize, at the end of January, the Selective Service had reopened for Japanese men and boys, and the “privelege” of volunteering to the military had been restored to them. But Ken no longer wanted to go into the army, he didn’t see why he should volunteer now to serve a country that had betrayed him. Most of the other young men felt the same, and they were still in an uproar when camp officials asked them to sign a loyalty oath in the first week of February. To many of the internees, the loyalty oath was not a problem. They were all loyal to the United States, but to Ken, and many young men like him, they felt even more betrayed by the questions they were asked and the answers that were required of them. There were two questions in particular that irked them, one asking if they would be willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered, and the other was if they would forswear any allegiance to Japan or the Emperor, neither of which should have worried anyone, since so many were Americans or had lived in the states all their lives. But the young men like Ken were particularly outraged to have had all their rights taken away from them (by being sent to internment camps), and now be asked if they were willing to die for a country that had treated them so badly. Ken had been desperate to join the army for over a year (i.e. since the attack on Pearl Harbor), but after being betrayed and incarcerated for months, he no longer wanted to serve, or do anything for his country.

And like him, just on principle, many of the young men refused to answer those two questions positively, and as a result got labeled the No-No Boys, for the two questions they refused to say yes to, and they were swiftly sent off to segregation at the higher-security area at Tule Lake, for further interrogation.

It created a huge outcry in all the camps, and Ken still hadn’t signed the oath two days after he’d been shown it. Everyone else in the family had, and Ken and his father argued furiously over it. Takeo (the father) understood how he felt, and he ached for him and all the young men like him. They had been shunned and sent away, their rights as Americans had been denied them. But now their right to serve had been restored, and other than work through the WRA, or renouncing their citizenship, there was no other way to leave the camps. This was a chance ot prove themselves as Americans, to have their rights restored, to prove that they were loyal citizens, and Tak didn’t want Ken to fail to do that. He had to sign the loyalty oath, not to would be a disaster. “I don’t feel American anymore, Dad,” Ken said angrily. “I don’t feel American. I don’t feel Japanese. I don’t feel anything,” He said unhappily, and his father didn’t know what to say to him.

“You have no choice, son. I understand. I respect how you feel. But I am telling you to sign the loyalty oath. If you don’t, they are going to put you in prison, and cause you a great deal of trouble. Ken, you have to.” They battled about it for days, and finally, not wanting to cause trouble for them, Ken signed, but many of his friends didn’t. They didn’t because it was the only opportunity to object to what had happened to them, but it made them instantly suspect and many of them were considered dangerous. Many renounced their citizenship immediately, and chose to go to Japan as they had threatened to for months. And Ken had threatened too, but in the end he couldn’t do it.

Those who didn’t sign were rounded up from the other camps as well, and the No-No Boys wound up in the segregation section at Tule Lake. It was, in fact, at that point being built into a separate camp, for people thought to be disloyal to the United States, and security was immediately increased to deal with the problem. Tak was deeply grateful that, in the end, Ken had agreed to sign the loyalty oath, even if it meant seeing him go off to war and risk his life for his country. At least his loyalty as an American would never be questioned. …
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Perhaps. But Ken joined the American army and died in combat in the European theatre, and his father Tak subsequently died of a broken heart at Tule Lake internment camp.