Penguin Battles for Rights over the First Japanese American Novel

No No- Boy by John Okada  (1956) was the first novel by a Japanese American dealing with the Japanese internment camps in America after the bombing of Pearl harbour. The book was not well received by the Japanese  American community initially. It dealt with issues like racism and army drafting.

The novel centres around a Japanese American who refused to draft for the second World War by pledging loyalty to the Emperor Hirohito backed by the allied troops and to fight against those that “misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest”.

It was so hard for Okada to find a publisher in America that he published in Japan in 1956 with a Japanese English language publisher. In 1971, CARP ( Combined Asian-American Resources Project) found the book  and republished it. Now a copyright controversy rages between the University of Washington professor Shawn Wong  ,who republished the book in 1976 for CARP and Penguin. Penguin recently republished the book in May 2019 as part of a series featuring Asian American writing. Penguin claims that as the book was never registered in America, it has no copyright protection in USA, where it sells well and is taught as part of university curriculum.