SPIRIT RELEASE In 2009, Japanese and ifugao residents ceremonially burned over 500 skeletal remains of Japanese soldiers who died at the end of the war in 1945. The ritual was meant to release their spirits, before the ashes were returned to Japan. EV ESPIRITU / INQUIRER NORTHERN LUZON
BAGUIO CITY—Sepia images of Japanese soldiers used to be regular television fare during the early years of martial law in the 1970s. The screens showed large numbers of Japanese troops walking gingerly through dense forest, their rifles and bayonets swinging widely. Then, all of them fall in slow motion like toppled dominoes because a Filipino hero mows them down with a hand gun or rifle that never runs out of bullets.
Like Hollywood, the country’s movie industry produced reel after reel of war flicks in the 1950s and 1960s to offer Filipinos some form of escape, years after Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, the “Tiger of Malaya,” surrendered to pursuing Americans and their allies on Sept. 2, 1945, in Kiangan, Ifugao province.
Yamashita was promoted and deployed to the Philippines during the last months of World War II to wage what a military historian describes as “effective delaying actions” from Baguio City. He had relocated the Japanese military headquarters from Manila to Baguio.
On Sept. 3, 1945, after the Japanese emperor announced that he had given up the fight, Yamashita formalized his surrender to former prisoners of war, like Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, at what is now the US Ambassador’s Residence in Camp John Hay. He was one of the first Japanese officials to face court martial, was convicted for his soldiers’ atrocities during the occupation, and was executed as a war criminal in Los Baños, Laguna province, in 1946.
Seventy years since his surrender ended the war in the Pacific, fairly little of his stories is being retold. When Yamashita’s name crops up, he is associated with buried treasure. This blurring of the war has been good for some people who lived through it—those who needed to forgive and those who needed to forget.
The Japanese occupation of the Philippines from 1942 to 1945 had been harrowing for Filipinos, said war veteran Canuto Mabalot, 96, who served as staff sergeant for the 121st Infantry Battalion of the US Armed Forces in the Far East in Northern Luzon (Usaffe-NL).
Stories of cruelty
Mabalot, who returned to teaching after the war at the school that became University of Baguio, said many Filipinos considered the Japanese soldiers very cruel.
“During those times, if we don’t bow to them, if we don’t [say] ‘Good evening’ to any Japanese [or] soldier, they will punish [us],” he said. “I forgave the Japanese since the war is over. The Japanese have been very repentant. Their Emperor apologized for all the trouble they caused during the war.
He said it won’t happen anymore so I forgive them.”
When the war broke out, he was 22 and was teaching in Daet, Camarines Norte province. “I was enlisted because I completed ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps). We were instructed to proceed to Bataan, but we were blocked in Laguna…. Our commanding officer, Colonel Wenceslao, was captured by the Japanese so we were ordered to disperse, [to] lie low,” he said.
He and a companion went to a barrio in Laguna province and when a resident learned that they were soldiers, he allowed them to stay and work in his farm for a year. He then went to Tubao, La Union province, when the train service resumed during the occupation, burying all evidence that he was a soldier. There, he was immediately contacted by guerrilla units of the Usaffe and instructed to proceed to Kapangan, Benguet province.
35,000 surrender
Mabalot said he took part in many skirmishes in Northern Luzon, and his unit was ordered to go to Loo Valley in Buguias, Benguet, “to accept the surrender of around 35,000 Japanese soldiers.”
“The war was over. I did not need to go back to the battlefield. His surrender meant the war was over,” he said.
The surrender in Ifugao was best represented by a long line of Japanese soldiers who were made to march out of the mountains, said Santos Bayucca, a Baguio-based Ifugao artist, quoting tales told by his late grandmother, Dallupdup Bayucca. “My grandmother said the line of Japanese spanned Hapao village in Hungduan to Banaue and it took them a day to reach their detention facilities in the lowlands,” he said.
“Some stories of atrocities still linger in Ifugao. I still hear tales of how Japanese soldiers supposedly ate a pregnant woman. It may be a tall tale but it is still being told,” Bayucca said. “That is why as the surrendering Japanese marched out of Ifugao, some of them were gunned down by snipers. There was very deep anger.”
‘Kyo’ ritual
But a big gesture of forgiveness took place in Kiangan in 2009. On Jan. 30 that year, Enryo Sugiwaka, a Buddhist priest, oversaw the “kyo” ritual by burning the skeletons of Japanese soldiers that were collected by Bayucca on the request of Japan-based group, Kuentai. The group was commissioned by the Japanese government in 2008 to recover its war dead, which are estimated to number over 50,000.
Bayucca said he and the group, Good Sannan, tracked the skeletons by following Yamashita’s movements from Baguio to other parts of Northern Luzon.
Like Ifugao’s own ritual of bone cleansing, kyo was meant to release the spirits of the soldiers. The ashes from the burning were returned to a Japanese shrine, Bayucca said. Some of the skeletons were surrendered by collectors, he said.
Over 9,000 skeletons were collected from various parts of the Philippines, but the project was stopped by the Japanese government when one of the heirs of the slain Japanese accused Kuentai in 2011 of including Filipino bones that were sent to Japan, Bayucca said.
“I have just sent out to the Japanese government our evidence that we were sending out authentic remains. We had anthropologists helping us, and we gathered evidence like gold teeth, helmets and bayonets which were with the skeletons we unearthed,” he said.
Peace park
Ifugao’s other project is to develop a peace park to establish that enmity with the Japanese has ended, Bayucca said. “But returning Japan’s dead would be the best expression of kindness from Filipinos,” he added.
For Filipinos of Japanese descent, forgetting the war has been good for their clans. The Japanese are among the pioneers of Baguio, many of them laborers who worked on the construction of Kennon Road.
The 2004 book, “Japanese Pioneers in the Northern Philippine Highlands,” said 1903 and 1904 had the highest number of laborers emigrating from Japan to the Philippines, owing to a recruitment drive by the American colonial government. Some married into Ibaloy and other Cordillera families, and had established their own families, when their lives were disrupted by the war.
But Japanese-Filipinos here have declined to discuss this period of their families’ stories. A 60-year-old Japanese-Filipino based in Baguio said the war’s cruelties affected her parents and grandparents, too.
Ibaloy custom
“But there is an Ibaloy custom: When a human being’s story ends, we make sure it ends forever. My father and brother [were commissioned officers of the Allied Forces] when the Philippines was invaded by Japan but they were arrested after the war. Authorities also confiscated our properties. So how do we be at peace when economically, some Benguet families lost land and livelihood?” said the source, who asked not to be identified in the story. “That hurt us most, but we don’t complain. We prefer the silence,” she said.
Some of the Japanese migrants were tapped by the Japanese military to serve. Shonosuke Furuya, who founded the city’s Pine Studio, was assigned to head a cultural office in Baguio, according to the book. After the war, he was deported to Japan but was rearrested and returned to Manila to stand trial for war crimes, until his release due to testimonies by friends like the late Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo.
Museum
These days, the only accessible place left where Yamashita’s memory still lives is a small museum in front of Lourdes Grotto here. The Roxas Museum features Yamashita’s portraits and relics from the war, which the late treasure hunter Rogelio Roxas collected in his search for the treasures supposedly buried as Yamashita fled to the mountains. The museum is operated by his 47-year-old son, Henry.
Roxas is perhaps the most popular treasure hunter in the Philippines, after he sued the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos in 1988 for stealing a “golden Buddha” he had unearthed in the 1970s in Baguio. Henry said Yamashita remains a key figure in the lives of people in the treasure hunting community “because we believe that the treasure he buried is real.” With a report from Jessica Tabilin, Inquirer Northern Luzon