UC Irvine

Scholars have engaged in constructive, interdisciplinary discussions on how to reconnect and reconfigure the imperial histories of the Pacific, which were previously divided by academic fields. However, few scholars have substantially examined the imperial nature of U.S. civilian internment camps in the Pacific during World War II. This dissertation investigates the U.S. military’s administration of civilian internment camps in the Northern Mariana Islands (NMI) and Okinawa from 1944 to 1946. The U.S. military described this internment as rehabilitative to make internees self-sufficient after the destruction of war. I analyze imperial, racist, and gendered aspects of these military rehabilitation policies, as well as the responses of the interned people in the camps. I argue that the U.S. military administered the camps in the NMI and Okinawa to govern and “rehabilitate” Asians and Pacific Islanders in the former Japanese colonies. The U.S. military interned the local people in the NMI and Okinawa in the name of liberating them from brutal Japanese rule. Yet this rehabilitation was a process to cure, Americanize, and subordinate interned people through political, medical, and economic policies. In doing so, the U.S. military normalized its occupation of the islands for decades after the war. Yet, I also contend that internees practiced their own rehabilitation to survive the military occupation. I define the internees’ rehabilitation as daily practices of resistance to the violent conditions of internment. The U.S. military’s rehabilitation policies undermined the well-being of the interned people, exposing them to malnutrition, starvation, infectious diseases, and racial and sexual violence by American soldiers at camps. For survival, interned women in particular rehabilitated the lives of themselves and their families through political, economic, and cultural practices, including stealing, cooking, crafting, and sewing. In doing so, they resisted accepting U.S. internment as benevolence. This dissertation draws on archival research conducted in U.S. military archives and community archives in the NMI and Okinawa. Employing feminist approaches to these archives, it interprets U.S. military reports and images through the lived and gendered experiences of the interned people. By examining the camps in the NMI and Okinawa together, this dissertation shows the intertwined dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, and imperialism that continue to operate globally in today’s vast U.S. military base network.