Board Thread:Naruto Discussions/@comment-37045710-20181104015902/@comment-1458758-20181111040858

Otogakure was basically a shell company. He set up a "village" in the land of rice fields, probably convincing its lord that he could bring revenue into the country or something, but its clear that no one knew who was truly running the village cause Konoha wasn't like "That's the sound village, it's run by a traitor to our village, so we let their team compete in our chunin exam." The village as it were did have more men as we see multiple sound ninja during the invasion, but after that his resources for willing minions was clearly more limited, having around a dozen or so loyal followers and the rest being variants on slaves and prisoners.