Gee, I wonder if something happened on Okinawa that was deeply traumatic to the locals and made them especially unwilling to put up with abuse from an unaccountable foreign military?
“In its history of the war, the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum
[88] presents Okinawa as being caught between Japan and the United States. During the battle, the Imperial Japanese Army showed indifference to Okinawans' safety, and its soldiers used civilians as human shields or outright killed them. The Japanese military also confiscated food from the Okinawans and executed those who hid it, leading to mass starvation, and forced civilians out of their shelters. Japanese soldiers also killed about 1,000 people who spoke in the
Okinawan language to suppress spying.
[90]“
“Witnesses and historians claim that soldiers, mainly Japanese troops, raped Okinawan women during the battle. Rape by Japanese troops reportedly "became common" in June, after it became clear that the Imperial Japanese Army had been defeated.
[35][19]: 462 “
“There are, however, numerous credible testimony accounts which note that a large number of
rapes were committed by American forces during the battle. This includes stories of rape after trading sexual favors or even marrying Americans,
[100] such as the alleged incident in the village of Katsuyama, where civilians said they had formed a vigilante group to
ambush and kill three black American soldiers who they claimed would frequently rape the local girls there.
[101]”
“Reportedly, three
African-AmericanMarines of the
United States Marines Corps began to repeatedly visit the village of Katsuyama, northwest of the city of
Nago, and every time they violently took the village women into the nearby hills and
raped them. The Marines became so confident that the villagers of Katsuyama were powerless to stop them, they came to the village without their weapons.
[2]
The villagers took advantage of this and ambushed them with the help of two armed
Imperial Japanese Army soldiers who were hiding in the nearby
jungle.
[2]Shinsei Higa, who was sixteen at the time, remembers that "I didn't see the actual killing because I was hiding in the mountains above, but I heard five or six gunshots and then a lot of footsteps and commotion. By late afternoon, we came down from the mountains and then everyone knew what had happened."
[1]
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org