The papers on this panel contribute to an important chapter of the emerging field of the history of disability: military disability history. For too long the study of disabled and wounded veterans was relegated to sociology, cultural studies, medical history, and the like. Within the last twenty years, however, more and more historians are investigating the history of disabled veterans. The authors explore the role of the state in the rehabilitation and employment assistance of disabled veterans in 20^th-century Japan, China, and the United States. More than that, though, these papers center disability as, in the words of military disability historian David Gerber, “the concept that helps to analyze and explain a larger phenomenon, rather than the thing to be explained.”