No-No Boy and Political Self-Sacrifice
“It’s the same world, the same big, shiny apple with streaks of rotten brown in it." -John Okada
I didn’t know what to say about No-No Boy, John Okada’s 1957 novel about dissent and its consequences, until 25-year-old Aaron Bushnell walked up to the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, doused himself in fuel, and yelled “Free Palestine!” while burning alive. The fire killed him, as he likely knew it would.
And you know, I’m assuming, much of what happened next. Initial media reports danced nervously around the topic, noting that someone appeared to have set themself ablaze in front of the embassy; it’s possible that reporters just hadn’t yet confirmed why. But pretty soon the video was out and authenticated, the evidence indisputable: Bushnell announcing his intent “to engage in an extreme act of protest” and to “no longer be complicit in genocide.” Then the hand-wringing could proceed: questions of whether self-immolation is an effective form of protest; whether it’s a legitimate one in These United States; whether Bushnell had a mental illness, the implication being that in order to viscerally oppose the mass murder of at least thirty thousand people, you must be insane. The Washington Post declared that “Aaron Bushnell was not a hero,” and The Atlantic ran an article headlined “Stop Glorifying Self-Immolation,” like it were the latest viral trend.
This kind of deep and ignorant cynicism is hard to stomach in real life, and in theory art and literature are there to help us navigate it. No-No Boy engulfs you in it instead. Okada’s protagonist Ichiro, whose name means “first son,” has engaged in a far less gruesome or permanent form of protest than Bushnell did. Detained in an internment camp during World War II, Ichiro is one fictional example of the 12,000 real people who answered negatively when presented with the following two questions in the camps:
"Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered?"
"Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, to any other foreign government, power or organization?"
For refusing to fight for or swear allegiance to the country that put him in a concentration camp, that country threw Ichiro — and so many nonfictional others — in prison.
Okada’s novel follows Ichiro after he’s been released. He’s back in Seattle, where his family has been allowed to return, and he’s trying to reintegrate into society. Though he doesn’t exactly feel full allegiance to the United States, he does regret his refusal to claim it. He hates himself for having chosen the difficult path of resistance, his parents for having taught him to value a Japan now burned with U.S. atomic bombs, the world for having put him in this impossible bind.
And the world hates Ichiro right back: He is ostracized for being a no-no boy, especially by fellow Japanese Americans who chose to embrace America in order to cling to their tenuous place within it. He struggles to find a job, gets spit on at a bus stop, gets beat up at a bar after his own brother leads him into a trap. Mostly, he wallows.
Though narrated in third person, the book is focalized mainly through Ichiro, and much of the narrative is set deep within his head. As a result it often lands on circuitous loops of despair, like in the following internal monologue addressed to Ichiro’s mother:
I wish with all my heart that I were Japanese or that I were American. I am neither and I blame you and I blame myself and I blame the world which is made up of many countries which fight with each other and kill and hate and destroy but not enough, so that they must kill and hate and destroy again and again and again. It is so easy and simple that I cannot understand it at all.
It’s tempting to read Ichiro’s pain as the novel’s thesis, his remorse as finite and total. When I first read the book, several years ago, it was hard to square with my impression of the no-no boys as a historical fixture — that obviously, they were heroic. Wars are brutal and cruel, and choosing not to fight in them is admirable. “Wars since the early 20th century have probably lit more people on fire than all prior military conflicts in human history.” writes the historian Erik Baker, in an essay connecting Bushnell’s anti-war protest to the use of fire as a weapon. “Like so many fires, it happened slowly at first and then all at once.”
How could you blame anyone for refusing to participate in the burning? How could you fault Ichiro or Bushnell? And if you’ve made the righteous choice, how could the outside world ever convince you to change your mind?
Ichiro’s strained yearning for a clean, simple American dream relies on complete submission. “I see now that my miserable little life is still only a part of the miserable big world,” he thinks. “I have been guilty of a serious error. I have paid for my crime as prescribed by law. I have been forgiven and it is only right for me to feel this way or else I would not be riding unnoticed and unmolested on a bus along a street in Seattle on a gloomy, rain-soaked day.” This is a perspective immersed in the cruelty of a world governed by fear, longing for a future that depends on self-erasure.
“Go someplace where there isn't another Jap within a thousand miles,” advises Ichiro’s friend Kenji, a dying war hero. “Marry a white girl or a Negro or an Italian or even a Chinese. Anything but a Japanese. After a few generations of that, you’ve got the thing beat.”
It is, in many ways, only logical that Ichiro regrets his heroic defiance, wants to disappear into a world that rejects him. It is perhaps a relief that Aaron Bushnell cannot hear what some are saying about him. He not only refused to perpetuate a harm to which we are all, if we pay U.S. tax dollars, complicit, but he sacrificed his own life in defense of a people to whom he did not belong, for thousands he would never meet. His final words, as he deliberately broadcasted:
My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.
Free Palestine.
At irregular intervals, between pained, wordless cries, he screamed “Free Palestine” six more times.