Life under Siege: Militarized Welfare in U.S.-occupied Okinawa

This dissertation examines the formations of what I have termed “militarized welfare,” that is, the multilayered ways in which discourses and practices of protecting and promoting life became intricately and intimately connected with militarism in Okinawa through the period of U.S. administration (1945-1972). This project draws on, and aims to contribute to, roughly three fields of scholarly literature: the politics of life and death, theorized most explicitly by Michel Foucault; U.S. (and Japanese) Cold War expansionism in the Asia-Pacific; and transpacific militarism. The central argument of my thesis is that the expansion of medical welfare in Okinawa was not antithetical to militarization, but in fact enabled it. I demonstrate this complementary relationship between warfare and welfare by closely examining the lived experiences of agents and subjects of welfare in/for occupied Okinawa – missionaries, medical practitioners, patients, Okinawan diaspora, and displaced farmers. While each actor engaged in promoting and protecting life in their own right, their acts of welfare were often easily appropriated by the U.S. military and U.S. and Japanese governments to serve their respective purposes. My thesis also tries to capture the moments when this affinity between welfare and the military was destabilized by actors who closely observed the limits of medical welfare in Okinawa. Chapter 1 explores the role of American Christianity in occupied Okinawa in producing the narratives of liberation and rehabilitation to transform Okinawa into a place worthy of salvation in the American imagination. Chapter 2 closely examines the lived experiences of public health nurses, illustrating how the education and mobilization of public health nurses constituted part of the biopolitical strategy of the U.S. Cold War empire. Chapter 3 explores the transpacific circuits of care and relief that connected occupied Okinawa, Hawaiʻi and beyond in multifaceted ways. I argue that transpacific biopolitical projects of “nurturing life” were facilitated through the necropolitical network that simultaneously shaped the Pacific in Cold War formations. Chapter 4 focuses on the protest by displaced farmers and shows how land and life itself became an effective basis for the struggle against militarism. However, these movements were soon depoliticized through social security measures.Ph.D