Not far from the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz lies the curiously out-of-place Japanese farming district of Colonia Okinawa. Many of those living there are descendants of Okinawan farmers, forced off their land – by bulldozers or at bayonet point – by American soldiers in the 1950s. Some of the dispossessed were persuaded to make a new life in Bolivia. But when they arrived, instead of the fertile land they had been promised, they were dumped in the jungle where many died of hunger or unfamiliar diseases. Only the more fortunate made it on to Colonia Okinawa, now considered a model of Bolivian development.