Foregrounding the US history of military build-up and encroachment in Cold War Asia and the Pacific, this panel collectively explores how tensions in precarity and the promises of militarism culminated in various forms of resistance, refusal, and activism in the latter half of the 20th century. Starting with a close examination of the US-Japan transpacific nuclear industry in the 1950s, to the racialized landscape of orphan "mascot" boys in Occupation Japan and wartime Korea, to the gendered politics of military trash collection in postwar East Asia, this panel brings together three case studies that provide glimpses of US militarization and its impact on the material structures of everyday lives across interconnected regions of East Asia and the Pacific Islands. How does militarism manifest in forms of violence and insecurity for Indigenous Pacific peoples and their ways of living? How was childhood, specifically boyhood, imagined as a discursive and affective site of racialized power? How does military trash collection factor into our broader understanding of gendered labor and precarity in postwar Japan?

Man’s paper examines how US and Japanese industrialists sought to develop Japan’s nuclear industry in the 1950s as a driver of capitalist development in Asia; the “promise” of nuclear capitalist modernity, he reveals, imperiled Indigenous lands and peoples throughout the Pacific - through nuclear waste dumping and other wastelanding practices that resulted in grassroots feminist Indigenous struggles against militarism, colonialism, and nuclearism in the 1970s and 80s. A focus on militarized environments and the racialized and gendered labor of scavenging informs the paper of Kang, whose focus on domestic struggles in this process reminds us of the importance of attending to those voices. Kang argues that economic "promise" and dependence on military waste collection among Zainichi Korean and Okinawan women were central to spurring women's postwar survival while also hastening their precarity. Building on the important work of historians who have examined the racial othering of Korean child mascots, Lenoe explores fictive kinship between American GIs and Japanese mascots as relationships that simultaneously contested and reified imperial power dynamics while shaping both Japanese and American conceptualizations of childhood. Together, the presenters of this panel will showcase how US militarism and precarity are central understanding to the economic, social and political forces that connect ongoing trans-oceanic forms of dialogue.