Identity In John Okada's No-No Boy

This double-conscious can also be seen arise in John Okada’s No-No Boy. His main character Ichiro struggles between his American and Japanese identity a few years after WWII, where Japan and the United States were at war against each other. The U.S. had sent almost every single Japanese- American to an interment camp because they became suspicious of them. They also had forced people to fill out a form asking them to renounce any allegiance to any other country that wasn’t the United States of American and to enlist in the U.S. armed forces whenever asked. The mom Ichiro’s conflict results from him responding “No” to both of these questions on the application form resulting in him being sent to prison. Ichiro was born and raised in the United States but both his parents were

Ichiro blames him mother for the choice he made on that application, even though he wanted to have enrolled in order to deem himself worthy of being an American. Ichiro struggles a lot with his identity. He feels he is half Japanese and half American but never feels whole. He says that before the war and when he was young he was “Japanese with Japanese feelings and Japanese pride and Japanese thoughts because it was all right then” (Okada,16), and as he grew older and being “born in American and raised in America and taught in America… among Americans in American streets and house” (Okada, 16), he grew to become an American as well. Now returning after the war he renounces his Japanese ancestry and is left being only half American in the legal sense but he feels that America now rejects him as well. “It is not enough to be only half an American and know that it is an empty half… I am not Japanese and I am not American. “(Okada,16). He is left feeling this sense of double- consciousness where he is neither fully American or fully