<Begin Segment 49>

AH: I wanted to ask you, as a last question area. You're identified as the protagonist in the most famous Japanese American novel ever written by anybody. John Okada wrote a book back in 1957 called the No-No Boy and then it's been reissued several times with the work of people like Frank Chin and Lawson Inada came out and then you gave me something the other day which I had actually read before. It's from The Big Aiiieeeee and it's by Frank Chin and his long essay and he says definitively, he says, that this is not the autobiography of John Okada, this is really John Okada writing about you and everything, and I'm wondering, is this is as definitive as he makes it sound? I mean, usually novelists don't just copy one person's experience, it's usually a lot of this and some of that and a little of this. It's kind of an amalgam of different kinds of things, and so I'm wondering, if you buy this idea that it's just you that's represented in this book or not?

JA: At this point in time, number one, Frank Chin and Abe kept... they want for me to give them interview because they heard about me. But one thing is, they said, "Have you read No-No Boy?" And at that time, I thought it was something downgrading me, so I said, "No," I wouldn't even bother to read. So they came the second, the third time and says you gotta read it. So finally I read that thing and it sounded pretty good. I didn't really read but I perused it. So next time I went through to read it, but at no time did I tell, give authority or release to John to write about me. He did it quietly because he used to follow me around, just follow me around. He used to be working at a naval surplus and he used to sit on the table there. He didn't care how many people there...

AH: Is this right after the war?

JA: Right after I came out.

AH: Right after you came out of prison?

JA: Yeah. Well, anyway, I used to work for the Olympic Foundry, and I'm dirty so I'd go take a community bath, then I'd come down in front of this place, this surplus and John would be sitting there just looking down. He might have ten people there, he just doesn't care. So anyway, the person I am, after I finish my dinner, I'd go and talk to John. Because I knew -- we weren't in the same class but I knew of him -- so we got to talking and we got to talking and he'd say, "Hey, let's go to Wah Mei," or let's go here or let's go there and I'd go with him. But anyway, in due course a book was written, but he writes of me not as a strong person but as a weakling that I made a mistake of not going into the army. But that I don't like. I had my idea what it was but he, just like you said, he took little this, this, this and he didn't, it's not...

AH: He writes of your mother or Ichiro's mother as being very pro- sort of Japanese and having these delusions that Japan won the war and everything. Does that have any relation? I know it has the business about suicide but what about this other stuff?

JA: Okay, all of that, I'm hearing it too. But there's a guy, there used to be a half dozen people there including John's father. They all talk back and forth about their old times and so on, and this one guy keeps bringing up this about Japan didn't lose the war, and he gets his news from Brazil or someplace down and he'll come and talk about it. Anyway, my mother's listening to all of that. And for what happened to us here in United States from '41 on, she wants to go back to Japan. And I told her, "Japan lost the war and I don't want to go back." Because listening to people coming back, it's all... and then we had to send old clothes to Japan because their house burned, or food to them so I knew and she knew, because she was making these care package. But she kept listening to this one guy saying that Japan didn't lose. Well, to me I heard, but I'm not listening to him.

AH: What about the brother situation? Because the way Okada depicts it there's two brothers, one is the older one who goes through this but then the younger one who resents it so much joins the army, even has a fight with Ichiro and everything...

JA: No, that wasn't it. That's something that he brought in.

AH: Literary...

JA: What makes me... that we didn't really mean it. It made us look very weak and we never had a fight. We always was together.

AH: Somebody had mentioned that Okada had a very good friend, not you, a very close friend who was a "no-no" -- or not a "no-no," but a draft resister, and that this person might figure in the piece, too.

[Interruption]

AH: And just mentioned that Okada had a friend that was a close friend of his who was a draft resister, too, and that he talked to him all the time and for a long time and that this person... does that have any credibility, because I haven't run this down at all.

JA: I don't know. I have to read that again because I don't recall.

<End Segment 49> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.