Younger Okinawans had learned Japanese in school, and spoke it fluently, but older and less educated inhabitants spoke only Okinawan. Japanese soldiers tended to treat the locals as members of an inferior caste. Since the start of the Pacific War, the Japanese had required hundreds of thousands to evacuate to Formosa and the Japanese home islands, but tens of thousands of Japanese troops had arrived during the same years, so that the net population in 1945 was between 450,000 and 500,000, of whom 100,000 were Japanese military personnel or local militias under Japanese army command.
