John Okada

John Okada was born in Seattle in the early 1920s to first-generation Japanese immigrant parents. He went to college in Seattle, at the University of Washington, but the Second World War interrupted his education. Okada and his family were interned by the United States Government, first at the Puyallup Assembly Center in Washington, and then at an internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho. A year and a half after the U.S. Government began interning its Japanese citizens, it reinstated the draft for them. Okada did not wait to be drafted, instead enlisting as soon as he was allowed. He served as an interpreter, and eventually rose to the rank of sergeant. After the war, Okada completed his first Bachelor’s degree at the University of Washington in English Literature, earned a MA at the Columbia University Teacher’s College, and then earned a second Bachelors in Library Science, again from UW.  Okada then moved to Detroit with his wife and two children. There, he wrote No-No Boy, his first and only novel, which received no attention from the Japanese community or the greater literary community at the time. Although he continued to write for the rest of his life, Okada died at 47 without ever seeing the enormous positive critical and cultural response to No-No Boy, which began in the 1970s with the beginning of the Asian American literary movement.