Racial division and acts of settler colonialism are justified by acts of “military security”

In World War II–era Hawai‘i, the medical care and surveillance of individual bodies, indeed “life” itself, was not only a biological resource but also a nationalist metaphor for military security. Biomedical discourses of health and immunity empowered, and were empowered by, Manichaean wartime logics of “the familiar and the foreign” and “good versus evil.”21 In spring 1942 the Office of the Military Governor mandated a compulsory immunization program that required all civilians (other than infants and the elderly) in Hawai‘i to be vaccinated against smallpox, typhoid, and paratyphoid fevers.22 Harriet Kuwamoto, a public health nurse who administered typhoid immunizations, recalls receiving supplies such as syringes, needles, and vaccine from the US military, and conducting vaccinations alongside volunteers, military members, and other nurses in the health department basement, a process she estimated took months to complete.23 By August, over 90 percent of the target population had been immunized, and during the war, at least 363,000 civilians were immunized out of Hawai‘i’s total population, which grew from about 424,000 to 500,000.24 In 1943 the military government made vaccination for diphtheria mandatory for children, and it required booster shots in 1944.25 The Board of Health also worked to combat venereal disease, the bubonic plague, tetanus, and dengue fever. Vaccines for the bubonic plague and tetanus were recommended but not mandatory.26 The military government considered the security and productivity of the military base in the islands to be fundamentally reliant on the health of local civilians, defense workers, and soldiers. It chose smallpox and typhoid as the mandatory immunizations because they were the most common “war diseases.”27 Mandatory immunization, then, was employed not simply to decrease death and disease but to cultivate the highest level of life in all its capacities within the population. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hawai‘i, the Board of Health established racially exclusionary medical programs, such as the Kalaupapa leprosy settlement on the island of Moloka‘i, and the quarantine and disastrous “controlled burning” of Honolulu’s Chinatown.28 In particular, the practice of forcibly sending leprosy patients, the majority of whom were Native Hawaiian, to the Kalaupapa settlement is an example of how colonial health policies that claimed to “protect” or “rehabilitate” Indigenous people also worked to displace and eliminate them. Yet Native Hawaiians have always resisted these projects: leprosy patients exercised autonomy over their health practices by refusing to separate from family members, protesting against the Board of Health, voting in Hawai‘i’s elections, and even by using physical force.29 Moreover, we continue to see traces of these carceral health policies during World War II. Under martial law, the military government asserted, “for the protection of the public health and safety. . . . Hawaii must be viewed as an isolated and congested stockade, crammed with a half million men, women, and children.”30 This characterization of Hawai‘i as a “stockade” that sequestered its inhabitants in order to protect them again combined logics of detention and medical security, and this time incorporated the entirety of the islands out of military necessity. During World War II, the pressures of wartime mobilization against the “racist states” of Germany and Japan required the United States to employ a wartime “antiracism,” which in Hawai‘i promoted the participation of all civilians, the majority of whom were nonwhite. Military policies proclaimed liberal inclusion even as they continued the classification and regulation of racially differentiated groups. While General Emmons called for racial tolerance at the start of the war, the military government still compelled Japanese and Japanese Americans to demonstrate loyalty: “The Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, and various Caucasian people caused no concern. . . . The big question mark were the Japanese . . . poorly assimilated into our western civilization.”31 Provisional wartime racial liberalism strengthened the code of white patriotism as a regulatory power through regimes of health that bifurcated the population into “good subjects” who complied and un-American “others” who refused. These projects created an asymptotic horizon of possibility for inclusion that demanded assimilation without addressing inequalities created by past and present racial violences. Furthermore, the military government’s provisional racial liberalism still relied on spaces of racial exclusion and imprisonment: during the war, Hawai‘i’s only quarantine center was converted into an internment camp that segregated Japanese and Caucasian internees, thus concretizing the imbricated logics of race, health, and military security.