Militarized Biopolitical Displacement: Hansen’s Disease and Spatialized Governance of Care in Okinawa under U.S. Occupation

• In Event: Settler Militarism at the Edge/End of Empire

Abstract

How does imperial governance weaponize health narratives to control populations and consolidate territorial dominance? This paper examines the management of Hansen’s disease patients in Okinawa under U.S. military occupation (1945–1972) as a critical nexus of militarized care and biopolitical displacement, where health governance intersected with settler militarism to enable territorial restructuring and control. Through U.S. military archives, I argue that seemingly humanitarian U.S. Hansen’s disease policies in Okinawa transformed medical care into an operational technology for settler militarism, embedding health governance within military land-use planning. Introducing the concept of “militarized biopolitical displacement,” I analyze how medical narratives justified the confinement of populations under the guise of care, enabling territorial control through spatial reorganization and land dispossession. This paper further examines how U.S. military discourse on Hansen’s disease in Okinawa, in contrast to its concurrent framing of patients in South Korea, reveals distinct rhetorical and policy strategies that shaped Okinawa’s governance under U.S. occupation. In Korea, U.S. Cold War health policies positioned patients as both biological and ideological threats, whose curability was contingent upon assimilation into an anti-communist order. Framed as curable subjects within a U.S. regime of militarized care, Hansen’s disease patients in Okinawa were relocated to facilities like Ailakuen, where segregation was rationalized as a function of health governance within a militarized spatial order. Yet, beneath this rhetoric lay a deeper logic of spatialized governance, where containment was not simply medical but served U.S. military expansion and settler dominance. Thus, Ailakuen was not merely a site of medical isolation but a militarized infrastructure, erasing patients from Okinawan society while rendering them instrumental to settler militarism. Unlike Japan’s eugenic eradication policies, which cast patients as biological threats to be eliminated, positioning their removal as a symbolic triumph of Japanese modernity, or South Korea’s Cold War portrayal of patients as biological and ideological germ carriers within a spectrum of curability, U.S. policies in Okinawa redefined care as an operational technology of spatial and military control. By situating Okinawa at the edges of empire and as a testing ground for imperial governance, this paper demonstrates how health governance was weaponized to sustain territorial restructuring and settler militarist control in postwar Asia.

Author

• Ka-eul Yoo, University of California Irvine