John Okada’s No- No Boy and Toshio Mori’s Yokohama, California are both works illustrating the struggles of loyalty to America. In No- No Boy, Ichiro is bitter after America sent him to prison for remaining loyal to Japan. Through word choice, Ichiro’s bitterness over his being sent to jail and his resentment for his refusal to serve in the war. For example, during Ichiro’s internal monologue, he reveals it was his loyalty towards his mother that he chose not to register for the draft:
“I did not love [being American] enough, for you were still half my mother and I was thereby still half Japanese and when the war came and they told me to fight for America, I was not strong enough to fight you and I was not strong enough to fight the bitterness…show more content… When Ichiro returns home from jail, his mother reveals how she is proud to call Ichiro her son, to which Ichiro asserts:
“It was her way of saying that she had made him what he was and that the thing in him which made him say no to the judge and go to prison for two years was the growth of a seed planted by the mother tree and that she was the mother who had put this thing in her son and that everything that had been done and said was exactly as it should have been and that that was what made him her son because no other would have made her feel the pride that was in her breast,” (Okada 12).
By calling Ichiro’s unwarranted loyalty to Japan as a “thing” his mother had placed in him and as a “seed” in which she implanted in him, transforms the mother into a virile being. Also, Ichiro characterizes his father as a “goddamned, fat, grinning, spineless nobody,” who bounces when he walks, cooks, and cleans (Okada 8) to which Ichiro concludes “He should have been a woman. He should have been Ma and Ma should have been Pa. Things would have worked out differently then,” (Okada 102). Ichiro’s assertion that “things would have worked out differently then,” suggests Ichiro would have joined the war and feel whole, American, and
