It’s common in books and articles to see the term “no-no boy” conflated with the Nisei draft resisters of WW2. These are two separate and distinct groups. A quick primer:

“No-no boys” are among the 12,000 from all ten camps who answered “no” or refused to answer the final two questions on a notoriously misleading government questionnaire in early 1943. This led to their removal from camp and transfer under an administrative process to a high-security prison camp at Tule Lake, one of ten War Relocation Authority camps which it fortified to serve as its Segregation Center.

“Draft resisters” are the roughly 315 young men from eight of the ten camps who in general answered “yes” or a qualified “yes” to the questionnaire but who, a year later in 1944, refused to be drafted from inside an American concentration camp until their rights were first restored and their families freed to return home. All but 22 were criminally convicted in U.S. District Court of violating the Selective Service Act of 1940. The older men were sent to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas; the younger ones were sent to McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary south of Seattle.

What blurs this distinction is the title of John Okada’s 1957 novel. It’s titled No-No Boy but it’s clearly about a protagonist who refuses the draft from the camp at Minidoka and serves two years at McNeil Island before arriving on a bus back in Seattle at the start of Chapter One. Despite the book’s title, he’s a draft resister and not, strictly speaking, a no-no boy. It’s possible but unlikely that Ichiro Yamada could have been both; had he answered no-no on the questionnaire, he would have been segregated to Tule Lake. Hajime Jim Akutsu, the real-life model for Ichiro, answered yes-no but for an unknown reason was never segregated.

To this day the term “no-no boy” is applied broadly but incorrectly as a slur or term of disparagement to anyone who dissented, protested, or resisted incarceration or the draft, including those who later renounced or pressured others to renounce their U.S. citizenship at the Segregation Center at Tule Lake.

Please keep these distinctions in mind when writing about this history.