US base-building destroyed Okinawa’s farmland economy and left its people in poverty.

Evidence

When a Time magazine reporter visited in 1949, he found that “the battle of Okinawa completely wrecked the island’s simple farming and fishing economy: in a matter of minutes, U.S. bulldozers smashed the terraced fields which Okinawans had painstakingly laid out for more than a century.” Four years later, Okinawa had become a neglected place. “More than 15,000 U.S. troops, whose morale and discipline have probably been worse than that of any U.S. force in the world, have policed 600,000 natives who live in hopeless poverty.” — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 842

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘15,000 troops policing 600,000 natives’ figure parallels patterns of occupation resentment the reader has tracked in this book.