Ma. Luisa E. Mabunay

Danyag XI, 2: 137-174 (2006)

TRACING THE ROOTS OF THE NIKKEIJIN OF PANAY, PHILIPPINES

MA. LUISA E. MABUNAY

This narrative situates human-level elements into an account of migration between Japan and the Philippines. With a focus on the island setting of Panay in the Visayas region and a timeframe spanning the 1900s to the 2000s, the paper documents and analyzes the collective origins and experiences of an ancestral community and the situation of contemporary cohorts of Japanese-descended Filipinos. Recently known as the nikkeijin, they are now able to live and work in Japan. Tracing back to the prewar Japanese settlement, wartime involvements and eventual repatriation, the collage of migration stories in local and international contexts informs many of the Panay nikkeijin of their own families’ past and should inspire the options they select for themselves and the generations to come.


INTRODUCTION

The 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in the Asia-Pacific region in 2005 and the 50th anniversary of the resumption of diplomatic relations between the Philippines and Japan in 2006 are successive milestones that inspire this narrative. The origins of today’s Philippine ‘nikkeijin’ lay beyond that dark period of absence of bilateral relations between formerly adversarial nations that these events signified.¹ The term ‘nikkeijin’ refers to people with Japanese ancestry, particularly the descendants of Japanese diasporic communities before World War II.² With changes in Japanese immigration policies since the early 1990s, they have been allowed residence in Japan. The revision, though apparently brought about by the confluence of pragmatic solutions for labor needs in both countries, also addressed hitherto neglected consequences and remnant strains in mutual relations. Hence, ‘achieving peace’ – reflected in the Heisei reign name of Japan’s current emperor Akihito – appears to flourish today. But in contemporary discourses of Japanese diasporas, the nikkeijin phenomenon still points to a variety of circumstances that produce a lag in the ‘normal’ status of Japanese descendants as Japanese citizens or nationals, and thus, Nihonjin.

1 The paper draws from Mabunay (1979) with new materials from a research travel grant of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Core University Program in 2000, a Research Fellowship from Japan Foundation in 2003, and research grants from the UP System (2003-2004) and Sumitomo Foundation (2005- 2006). A Western-style citation of Japanese names is used here; for brevity, selected materials are cited. 2 This broad definition admits that nikkeijin also exist elsewhere, particularly in Latin American countries like Brazil and Peru. Before the 1990s in the Philippines, they had simply been reckoned as the ‘Japanese mestizos’, ‘Japanese-descended Filipinos’ or ‘Japanese-Filipinos’. As individuals, they are also informally referred to as ‘nikkei.’

There were relatively few forebears of the nikkeijin in Panay, estimated at around 600 just before the start of the war. It is thus feasible to weave the strands of their families’ stories into both local history and the more general trends in Philippines-Japan relations. As it bridges the collective experiences of early 20th-century Japanese migrants and their progeny today, this essay echoes familiar allusions to generational cohorts of the Issei, Nisei and Sansei in studies of Japanese immigration. Considering age differences and the timing of settlement, the first-, second-, and third-generation references may not directly correspond to prewar, wartime and postwar cohorts of the Japanese in the Philippines. Notwithstanding, the succeeding Yonsei (4th generation) and Gosei (5th generation) as well as ‘new’ nikkeijin are fast becoming part of this phenomenon. This exposition also recognizes the mixed ancestry groups (mestizos) among these descendants before, during and after the war – from Japanese and Filipino marriages or informal alliances – even as the nikkeijin status of descendants from informal unions remains in question.

Further, the account uses the Japanese terms imin (immigrants) and guntai (military) to distinguish the circumstances of the Issei and Nissei who were living in Panay on a temporary or permanent basis before and throughout the war years from regular military personnel. The presumably civilian imin are analytically differentiated from the guntai – broadly referring to the Japanese military, including officers, soldiers and occupation administrators. Admittedly, there were overlaps since conscriptions engaged Japanese nationals at home and abroad as gunzoku (paramilitary forces) to substitute and supplement the guntai. Nonetheless, whether or not entire families of the imin were persuaded to join the repatriation with the guntai to Japan in 1945, it is the Nisei – whose experiences have not been fully uncovered and told – who were at the center of the epic story of war and endurance. With the diminishing number of the Nisei, it is the younger cohorts who are the emerging nikkeijin in the 21st century.

There are four parts in discussions that follow: (1) a brief introduction to the contexts of Japanese immigration to the Philippines, (2) the characteristics of the early 20th century Japanese settlement in Panay, (3) the migrants’ involvement with the Japanese Occupation and the consequences of repatriation, and (4) the postwar environment that continues to shape the life choices of those who opt to leave for Japan or remain in the Philippines. In concluding, the essay observes some parallels in the labor migration that recent flows of the nikkeijin into Japan represent to those of the dekasegi (contract workers) turned imin in the Philippines more than a century ago.

Many records have been lost due to circumstances of war and repatriation. Nonetheless, existing Nihonggo texts, personal memorabilia, and oral history sources in Japan and in the Philippines, reveal aspects of lives and relationships hitherto unknown. The migration stories rely most heavily on the cooperation of numerous participants directly and indirectly involved for which the author is immensely grateful and indebted. Personal information from witnesses and translations of Japanese-language sources substantiate English language-based information on the migrants. Incorporating the subjects in this account presents some ‘faces’ of this particular Japanese community and allows the current and future nikkeijin to discern how they contribute to making history. While supplementing studies on larger Japanese communities in the Philippines, the essay informs new generations of Filipinos of a slice of the past, cut off and almost entirely forgotten, until it became relevant once more to contemporary issues in Philippines-Japan relations.


An Overview of Japanese Immigration to the Philippines

Three phases in the long history of Japanese immigration to the Philippines may be recognized: the first phase in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the second phase in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the on-going third phase since the restoration of official relations after the war in the Asia-Pacific region.

Contacts during the first phase took place in a pre-industrial, although commercially competitive, colonial milieu in Asia. They were brought about by feudal Japan’s commercial interests in Nan’yô (literally, ‘South Seas’, covering northern Southeast Asia and the Pacific regions) as well as the Japanese Christians’ search for refuge from domestic religious persecutions.³ Yet this era of diplomatic and commercial relations was brief, and immigration was geographically limited to areas in and around the Spanish centers on Luzon island such as Manila and Pangasinan. Official ‘red-seal’ vessels were received in Manila while those of adventurers called wakô (pirates) active around the South China Sea, occasionally entered other areas of the archipelago. Due to urgent domestic security concerns, the Tokugawa Shogunate imposed a ‘closed country’ (sakoku) policy that lasted until 1854. It was American ‘gunboat diplomacy’ that forced Japan to acquiesce to a series of unequal treaties with Western powers in Asia and thus abandon its seclusion policy.

The renewed ties under the aegis of colonial Spain and Meiji Japan in the late 19th century took place in a new colonial context produced by changes in Europe related to notions of scientific progress and the industrial revolution, the rise of capitalism and the concept of free trade. Regime change with the 1868 Imperial Restoration brought widespread changes needed for Japan to gain wealth and strength (fukoku kyôhei) for the nation (kokutai) to surmount the humiliation of the unequal treaties. Yet the simultaneous processes of centralization and rapid industrialization did not spread evenly across Japan and stressed both the scarce arable lands and abundant labor in many remote rural areas. Emigration at this time was primarily motivated by perceived economic gains and the desire to evade compulsory military service; but it also partly relieved population pressure in rural Japan.⁴

3 The two major settlements in Manila reflected the interests of the migrants: at Dilao, they were mainly merchants; at San Miguel, the Christian refugees included Ukon Takayama, the Christianized feudal lord (daimyo) banished from Nagasaki. 4 Japanese recruiters (i.e., ‘colonization’ or ‘emigration’ companies) worked with labor contractors in Hawaii, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Peru and Brazil, to bring them across the Pacific. Until the 1920s, the Meiji government was only indirectly involved in sending labor out of Japan (Ichioka 1988, 7-14).

In this second phase of official relations, Spain opened up its ports in the Philippines to international trade, such as that of Iloilo in Panay in 1855. Moreover, treaty relations led to the 1888 opening of a Japanese Consulate in Manila that was meant to promote commercial exchange and to consider the potential of Japanese immigration. Once again, these developments paved the way for the entry of the Japanese primarily into Luzon. Spanish officials recognized the desirability of recruiting Japanese cultivators, especially for tobacco plantations even if opposed by religious corporations. Spanish anxieties were heightened by increases in both official and unofficial arrivals of Japanese visitors just as they were confronted with the nationalist fervor of Filipino reformists and revolutionaries. Hence, both governments strove to maintain cordial relations. Japanese consular officials, observers, and other visitors strove to maintain a neutral attitude vis-à-vis Philippine affairs throughout the Philippine Revolution and the Philippine-American War.

The United States’ debut as an imperial power with colonial possessions in the Pacific coincided with a modernizing Japan that had grown more confident with victorious armed encounters with China (1894-1895) and Russia (1904-1905). These exploits produced imperial territories for Japan and led to its 1931 takeover of ‘Manchukuo’ and the 1937 war in China.⁵ The Meiji regime cooperated with the zaibatsu (literally ‘money cliques’ or great combines) for commerce and industry that was soon turned into a wartime economy. There were also discernable increases of voluntary emigration of laborers to the imperial territories and the Nan’yô. In the Philippine Islands, Japan’s prominent position in the expanding foreign trade grew with a gradual dependence on Japanese shipping facilities. As more Japanese business agencies and enterprises opened by 1939, the number of visitors and settlers reached 29,057 (1939 Census, II, 393). In that year, however, there was an evident rise in total Japanese out-migration that probably continued into 1941. Women and children made up the nearly 3,000 Japanese who returned to Japan in 1939 (Saniel 1966, 107 and 105). These departures were likely the result of familial worries over the expansion of Japan’s war with China and the outbreak of World War II in Europe involving Japan’s allies. The Japanese started to enter the country in significant numbers in 1901 as contracted skilled and unskilled labor or dekasegi. Their numbers rose briefly when Japanese recruitment agencies sent itinerant workers mainly for the American road project in Benguet between 1903 and 1904.⁶ When their contracts expired, some remained to engage in retail trade, develop vegetable farms around Baguio or found wage work in nearby mining projects. Among them, however, were illegal workers who came as ‘free emigrants’ with ‘show money’; these voluntary travellers were not contract laborers since they did not sign employment contracts before leaving Japan (Yu-Jose 1997, 108 and 114).⁷ Both types of entrants were recruited into various constructions in Manila and surrounding areas; as well, they were brought to Mindanao island by abaca plantation pioneers in Davao, Kyozaburo Ôta, and others (Hayase 1999). Here, they became the nucleus of the largest Japanese settlement in the Nan’yô that boosted the production of the famed ‘Manila rope’ (Hayase 1999). Henceforth, many dekasegi became imin, i.e., temporary or permanent residents in the country. As in the Japanese immigration to the United States, an incentive for the shift was the opportunity for them to summon wives from Japan once they changed occupations (Ichioka 1988, 5-6).

Just prior to the Asia-Pacific war, the imin in the Philippines had become the largest proportion of Japanese settlers in Southeast Asia. Favorable economic prospects and the absence of discriminatory immigration policies until 1940 contributed to increases in Japanese presence, trade and investments (Provido 1936; Guerrero 1966). The swelling of imin numbers following the boom in Japanese trade and hemp production during World War I (1914-1918) was facilitated by recruiters as well as by low rates and even free passage for those travelling on their own. The growth of Japan’s trade with the Philippines was accompanied by imin participation in retail merchandising. Consecutive arrivals settled in

5 Okinawa was incorporated in 1879; Taiwan in 1895, and Korea in 1905. 6 The rise of arrivals at this time is evident in the following figures: 399 (1901); 560 (1902); 1,123 (1903); 2,770 (1904); 1,167 (1905); 277 (1906); 374 (1907). See Report of the Philippine Commission 1907, 118. 7 In effect, this practice circumvented US immigration laws that limited the entry of contract laborers into American territories when agitation against the influx of Japanese laborers on America’s Pacific coast intensified. The 1924 Immigration Act banned the admission of aliens ineligible for citizenship as immigrants (Ichioka 1988, 55).

or moved around prosperous commercial centers, especially in Manila (Yoshikawa 1995), where they became retail and service proprietors or sales employees, fishers, laborers, carpenters, and contractors.

The entry of Japanese fishers soon indicated a dependence of the country’s food supply on these imin.⁸ The relatively high capital requirements of their major capture technologies (muro-ami and utase methods) called for their working in collectivities. With motorized and sail-powered vessels, elaborate gear and organization, they exploited offshore grounds untapped by methods in use by Filipino fishers. There was already a fisher’s union using the utase in Manila Bay in 1918, as also observed later in the Lingayen and Ragay gulfs. And even before the 1930s, Japanese fishers were also operating muro-ami units in these gulfs as well as along the Batangas, Mindoro, Palawan, Cebu, Iloilo coasts (Porter 1940, 156-157; Alviar 1931, 9). By 1940, there were 1,250 Japanese fishermen operating about 120 boats (Hayden 1945, 715-716). Their free movement along the coasts lent to the suspicion that they were spies; indeed, while consular officials in Manila strove to protect the interests of Japanese fishers, they were not remiss in using them for military purposes (Hayase 1998).

The entire second phase of Philippines-Japan relations was influenced by the condition of Japan’s own relations with Western powers in Asia, particularly with the United States. Japan’s enviable position as leading exporter triggered a protectionist backlash from industrial competitors who possessed colonies in Asia (Nagano 2003). In turn, military propagandists in Japan used the protectionist issue as reason to support the drive for expansion into the Nan’yô. Naval leaders in 1935 began to explicitly refer to the need to dispatch warships to protect Japanese overseas enterprises and citizens – notions that soon became concrete in the developments in China. The increasing popularity of views in Japan that the Philippines was an important position for Japan’s advance into Southeast Asia exacerbated the deterioration of US-Japan relations.

American policies on Japanese immigration to the Philippines also became entangled with the US Exclusion Act of 1924, the economic depression of 1929, the Mukden incident in 1931 and the establishment of Manchukuo, Japan’s invasion and undeclared war with China since 1937, and the zaibatsu mercantile offensive to offset the rise of an organized Chinese boycott of Japanese products in 1938. In addition, Japan’s aggressive competition with the dominant British and American trade in the Philippines clashed with preparations for the imminent Philippine independence. As a result, the growing perception that the Japanese had become too intrusive with their extensive assets and interests led the Commonwealth government to impose limits with the Immigration Act of 1940.⁹ The Japanese occupation of the Philippines implied an expansion of the roles and concerns of the imin that related not only to economic but also political motives and expectations. Many of them worked with the guntai to establish and maintain the new socio-political order, first led by the Japanese Military Administration (JMA), and in October 1943, by the Japan-sponsored Second Philippine Republic. Japan’s surrender and consequent pull-out brought an end to this era of significant imin presence in the Philippines. Aware then that Japan’s prosperity was at the expense of their own, Filipinos rejoiced over Japan’s defeat and were happy to see the withdrawal of its military forces and the repatriation of its

8 In Japan, fishing in foreign territories had been encouraged since the late 1890s (Hayase 1998). 9 Commonwealth Act No. 473 passed with a 67 to 1 vote in the Philippine National Assembly.

overseas residents. All the same, on condition that it would pursue war reparations, the Philippine government signed the peace treaty with Japan in 1951 that formally ended World War II. President Elpidio Quirino’s pardon for remaining Japanese officers and soldiers accused of war crimes in Philippine courts also paved the way for improved relations. Still, it was the satisfactory conclusion of Philippine war claims on Japan through the reparations agreement in 1956 that made the normalization of ties possible. As early as 1958, the Japanese War-bereaved Association (Nippon Izokukai) put up markers and organized pilgrimage tours throughout the Philippines in remembrance of the more than half a million Japanese war-dead in the country, a figure second only to those for China. Through official and unofficial channels throughout the 1970s and 1980s, there were increased interpersonal contacts and exchange visits among family members and sentimental journeys of both former imin and guntai into different parts of the Philippines, including those who came under the banner of the ‘Reunion for Peace’ program in the late 1970s. These visits and memorials were reminders of the graphic realities of the war that continued to underlie the renewed relations between the Philippines and Japan (Nakano 2006).

Within these opening decades of the third phase of Philippines-Japan relations, a few imin of prewar times managed to return to their families in the Philippines. Among the slow stream of new migrants were wives and children of Filipinos once employed at the American bases in Okinawa. In time, there was a growing visibility of entrants such as the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers (JOCVs) throughout the country. Ultimately, however, it was the December 1973 ratification of the official peace treaty by President Ferdinand Marcos’ that led to a steady broadening of ties between Japan and the Philippines. Since then, Japan has become the Philippines’ top trading partner and donor of official development assistance (ODA). Many projects supported by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the activities of private investors, traders and entrepreneurs projected Japanese prosperity and generosity, if not responsibility and atonement for the war and its atrocities.

The postwar imin have been mostly tourists and students as well as transient personnel of academic, scientific, technical, financial and commercial agencies and enterprises. Further, ever since the entry of Filipino entertainers into Japan in the 1970s, there was a discernible increase of movement to and from Japan by Filipino-Japanese couples and their families that feature the new cohort of young Niseis by the 1980s (Ballescas 2003). These new Nisei (sometimes called Japanese-Filipino Children or ‘Japinos’) are now regarded as the new set of nikkeijin and reckoned as the ‘shin’ nikkeijin.¹⁰ More recent Japanese visitors include retirees on extended visits, and some investments are creating ‘retirement villages’ that appear to rely on relatively inexpensive local care-giving services. Throughout the 1980s, the confluence of Japan’s unprecedented economic boom that required a continuous supply of unskilled labor and a crisis situation in Brazil underlay the exodus of Japanese-descended Brazilian citizens entering Japan (Yamanaka 2002). Japan faced a sudden labor surplus problem with this influx of unskilled and illegal entrants when its economic bubble burst in the mid-1980s. Its rapid recovery from recession, however, and the rise in domestic demand for labor led to a push for the legitimation of ‘foreign’ workers and the placement of trainees (UN-ESCAP 2002, 8-9).

10 See Shin-Nikkeijin Network (SNN) Association, Cebu, Inc., http://www.shinnikkei.net/aisatu-eng.html.

Most relevant to this account was Japan’s implementation of the Revised Immigration Law in June 1990. While the revised law retained existing restrictions on foreign immigrants to skilled occupations, it nonetheless created a new category exclusively for foreign descendants of Japanese emigrants – the nikkeijin – with no restrictions on occupation. This privilege was extended up to the third generation and included nikkeijin spouses and other dependents. By 1995, the flood of nikkeijin contract workers, mostly from Brazil and congregating at particular urban areas, reached more than 200,000 (Yamanaka 2002; Tegtmeyer Pak 2001). More dekasegi from other Latin American countries, along with Korea, China, the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries, are benefiting from this preferential immigration policy by which they are included among the temporary immigrants in Japan.

There are certain nuances, however, on both the Japanese and the Philippines sides on the labor migration that the nikkeijin represent. Whichever generation, the Manila consulate requires them to present their Japanese parent’s koseki-tôhon (copy of the koseki or family registry) to acquire resident visas for Japan as nikkeijin. Upon entry into Japan, the nikkeijin were advised to respond to the immigration officers’ queries that they were doing so in order to reunite with family members. Hence, the nikkeijin from the Philippines ostensibly enter Japan as voluntary migrants and are admitted as long-term residents for family reasons. As ‘free travellers’, they are not recorded among Philippine accounts of overseas contract/Filipino workers (OCWs/OFWs) and are unable to access their privileges as Filipinos nor are they fully considered ‘Japanese’.

As descendants of Japanese nationals, the nikkeijin are initially granted a resident visa for a year, usually renewed for another year or more, and are allowed to engage in any occupation. The law provides that they may eventually apply for permanent residence, even a Japanese passport and citizenship. To date, as a whole, the Philippine nikkeijin constitute the new dekasegi who have been motivated to leave their own homes and families to earn better incomes, if not better jobs and lifestyles in Japan. They make up part of the unskilled immigrant populations taking on jobs long avoided by the Japanese in manufacturing, construction and service industries (Yamanaka 2000). It appears that their nikkeijin status is a ‘probationary’ phase for the adjustment of persons verified as ‘Japanese’ to living and working conditions in their host communities that may eventually lead to their exercise of full rights, privileges, and more options as Japanese citizens or Nihonjin.

Initial interest on Japanese descendants in the Philippines in the 1970s, particularly from Panay, was focused on full-blooded Nisei, deemed war-displaced victims or ‘war orphans’ (zanryu koji), who had been inadvertently separated from their families and informally adopted into local ones (Ôno 1991 and 2006). The search for and reunions with the missing family members was largely pursued privately, often in conjunction with nostalgic visits and memorial ceremonies. The more recent activities of various support agencies, legal advocacies and official accommodations manifest a more pragmatic approach towards the welfare of the mestizo Nisei and Sansei born of Japanese and Filipino unions. Apart from the FNJKP, at least one group has emerged to support the needs and interests of mestizo ‘shin’ nikkeijin, born of “Japanese (who came to the Philippines) and Filipina (who went to Japan) parents”, to find missing fathers and their koseki in some unidentified town or city in Japan. Clearly, however, their circumstances differ from those of the ‘older’ nikkeijin whose futures had been jeopardized by the fragmentation of families as a result of war.

Following a 1986 JICA survey that showed almost 3,000 Japanese descendants in the Philippines, verifications only revealed 1,024 Nisei registered in koseki across Japan (Ôno 1992). Such results indicated the need to systematize other means for the substantiation of claims for Japanese ancestry by numerous claimants. In time, whatever their cohort, the processing of the claims of those who declare themselves as nikkeijin has been according to the following classification: Category A, those with their Japanese parent’s koseki-tôhon that contains the marriage registration and the birth of the claimant (hence, considered Japanese nationals); Category B, those with their parent’s koseki-tôhon that does not register the marriage and the birth of the claimant; and Category C, those who do not have their Japanese parent’s koseki-tôhon at all. Despite the attendant problems of spelling variations, reconciliation of mixed-up dates, and the need for supporting affidavits, the acceptance of descendants from the late registration of prewar marriages and births in Philippine records has increased prospective claimants. The fate of offspring of undocumented marriages in the Philippines is a matter yet to find its resolution. The nation-wide Federation of Nikkei-jin Kai Philippines (FNJKP or FENJINPHIL) has supported claimants with documentation problems upon their registration as nikkeijin claimants. Family trees and family histories were reconstructed as part of 1997-1999 survey made by the Manila liaison office of the non-governmental organization (NGO), Legal Aid for Japanese Descendants in the Philippines, sponsored by the Japanese foreign affairs ministry. As a result, a ‘Nikkeijin Desk’ at the Japanese embassy facilitates the processing of resident and spouse visa applicants. However, there are still numerous cases of Category B claimants even among the Nisei who could stay and work in Japan. The more difficult to authenticate are the Category C cases, mostly of Sansei not versed on even the full name or place of origin of their Japanese parent(s). Hence, they need assistance for research and legal processes that could produce valid proofs of their bloodline. Since 1999, the Philippine Nikkei-jin Mutual Foundation (PNJMF a.k.a. the Philippine Nikkei-jin Gojo Zaidan) led by the Nisei honorary consul of Japan in Baguio, Carlos Teraoka, has carried out the necessary research for remaining nikkeijin who seek to enter Japan and operates a training center for those about to leave at Pangasinan. More recently, in 2003, the Philippine Nikkei-jin Legal Support Center (PNLSC) has collaborated with the PNJMF to provide legal support for Nisei and Sansei claimants. Moreover, Philippine nikkeijin representatives continue to participate at conventions of the ‘Japanese and Nikkei Abroad’.

Since the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in 1995 and with help from the PNJMF, the federation has sent delegations to petition government for the recognition of the Philippine nikkeijin as ‘Zanryû Nihonjin’ (Japanese left behind) as well as the issuance of their Japanese passports. Some success has been obtained on this matter: a few passports were issued and Prime Minister Ryûtôro Hashimoto in 1997 referred to the ‘Firipin Zanryû Nihonjin’ parallel to those who remained in China. However, they appear to have simply been considered ‘Japanese’ but not yet ‘Japanese nationals’. Since 2005, there have been group petitions at the Tokyo Family Court by elderly Nisei to acquire their nationality by obtaining the court-verified document, the shuseki, in lieu of the koseki that normally support official recognition as nikkeijin. So far, successes on this route, however, have been few and far between.

Other foundations and recruiters have also advanced costs and supplied job contracts, since even just obtaining a passport was an expense that many nikkeijin could not afford.¹¹ These concerns, however, have also given rise to splinter associations and foundations with their lawyer and recruiter contacts that compete for support funds as well as the claims of various nikkeijin clients. Interestingly, among those already recognized as nikkeijin and working in Japan, there are those who directly strive to open avenues for the placement and residency of their kin. At the same time, Philippine media has become more attentive to stories of war-displaced people and activities of various descendant groups to find family connections and establish legal identities as nikkeijin.

Initial interest on Japanese descendants in the Philippines in the 1970s, particularly from Panay, was focused on full-blooded Nisei, deemed war-displaced victims or ‘war orphans’ (zanryu koji), who had been inadvertently separated from their families and informally adopted into local ones (Ôno 1991 and 2006). The search for and reunions with the missing family members was largely pursued privately, often in conjunction with nostalgic visits and memorial ceremonies. The more recent activities of various support agencies, legal advocacies and official accommodations manifest a more pragmatic approach towards the welfare of the mestizo Nisei and Sansei born of Japanese and Filipino unions. Apart from the FNJKP, at least one group has emerged to support the needs and interests of mestizo ‘shin’ nikkeijin, born of “Japanese (who came to the Philippines) and Filipina (who went to Japan) parents”, to find missing fathers and their koseki in some unidentified town or city in Japan. Clearly, however, their circumstances differ from those of the ‘older’ nikkeijin whose futures had been jeopardized by the fragmentation of families as a result of war.

Beyond immigration matters, therefore, the Philippines and Japan are caught up not only in their historical ties but also the contemporary global paradigms at the turn of the 21st century. Specific configurations today as well lend complexity to the nikkeijin story. Economic issues emerge from profiles of an aging population and low fertility rates in Japan. Given high levels of homogeneity, there is also the matter of the assimilation of the nikkeijin (Tanimura 2000; Lie 2001). In the meantime, the Philippines has developed ‘a culture of migration’ beyond just moving to America and has become increasingly dependent on remittances of its own emigrants worldwide (Asis 2006). Even more open movements for trade, investment, and natural persons (particularly nurses and caregivers from the Philippines) are expected with the proposed Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA). In these scenarios, the case of nikkeijin from earlier imin families in the Philippines is indicative of the intensification of the movement of Filipinos into tentative niches of the labor market in Japan.


The Roots of the Imin in Panay

In the late 16th century, the only sign of Japanese presence in the area of Panay in the Visayas island group in the Philippines was a reference to a ‘sea captain’ (probably a pirate or wako) who became involved in a local power struggle in islands off northwestern Panay. Official Japanese interest in Iloilo in the last decades of the Spanish control was seen in the 1874 Kawakita trade survey that also included Cebu and Manila. Following the push for dekasegi emigration from Japan by the 1890s, there was a Japanese contract

11 Entities such as the Japan Introductory Services and the Asian Foundation for Japanese Descendants, Inc. were precursors of various associations, federations and foundations that offered to assist the nikkeijin with their documentary requirements.

laborer employed at a trading company in Iloilo (Saniel 1969, 223). More definite signs of imin presence soon followed in the early 20th century. Under American administration, Panay Island was divided into the provinces of Antique, Capiz and Iloilo. Capiz included present-day province of Aklan while Iloilo included today’s island province of Guimaras. Apart from interprovincial road connections, the capital towns of Capiz and Iloilo were also linked by the Philippine National Railway, with major stops at the towns of Pototan and Passi, essentially servicing passengers and transporting sugar products to warehouses in Iloilo. Air transport was also available with the Iloilo-Negros Air Express Company (INAEC) linked with cane sugar plantations and mills across Panay and Negros islands. Already well-known by 1936 for the international port that made it the bustling commercial, transport and communications center of Panay, the city-status of the Iloilo province’s capital town of Iloilo was revived by a new charter and was headed by an appointed mayor, Dr. Ramon Campos. The population grew rapidly since 1903 when figures for the town showed only 52,472; by 1938, the numbers in the city stood at 166,277 (McCoy 1977, 213). By then, there were five major banks operating in the new city that hosted a cosmopolitan population, mostly Europeans (Spanish, British, Dutch, Germans, Norwegians and Swiss), Americans, Lebanese, Chinese, and Japanese. Given the prominence of Iloilo at this time, people in Panay tended to refer to themselves as ‘Ilonggos’.

Perhaps the earliest Japanese store in town was the Nippon Bazar along Calle Real (now J.M. Basa Street) that appeared in a 1906 American postcard. In 1918, there were 99 Japanese residents (86 males and 13 females) found in six of Iloilo province’s 28 towns or municipalities; there were none as yet in Capiz or Antique (1918 Census, 352- 353). In time, more imin took advantage of opportunities in the city’s thriving economic life stimulated by the storage, trading and transshipment of sugar. With almost 30,000 imin in the country in 1939, Iloilo was among the 14 provinces (outside of Davao and Manila) to have more than 100 Japanese residents. In Iloilo City alone, there were 426 males and 148 females of the 574 imin among the local residents (1939 Census II, 16-17).

A year after his arrival in Iloilo in 1908, Torakichi Murakami from Hiroshima began to import and sell Japanese knitted goods (meriyasu) at the Murakami Bazar (shoten) at one of the intersections of Plazoleta Gay.¹² His local brokerage firm, the Murakami Kabushiki Kaisha, was associated with the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha that eventually established its branch in the city in the 1930s; other subsidiaries of key trading houses were the Osaka Boeki Kaisha, and the Daido Boeki Kaisha. These firms acted as export-import agents for Japanese manufactures (textiles, yarn, shirts, canned goods, food products, soap, paints, plastic toys, paper umbrellas, kitchenware, chinaware, hardware, machineries, school, office and hospital supplies) as well as the agricultural (mainly sugar) and mineral products of Panay and Negros islands for budding Japanese industries. Connections with the state-assisted Nihon Yusen Kaisha and Osaka Shosen Kaisha enabled passage and cargo deliveries direct to Iloilo. With long-term credit, consignment shipments, and floating expositions to promote Japanese products, these links encouraged retail trade by enterprising imin.

In 1936, there were already 28 Japanese retail stores at the city center and another in nearby La Paz across the Iloilo River (David 1937, 22). These included a local branch of the Kinka Meriyasu (Gold Coin company) that imitated local textile designs into cotton-knit goods from imported yarn (Guerrero 1966, 43-45). Notably, however, the added proliferation

12 Japanese shoten in Iloilo adopted the reference to ‘bazar’ that derives from the Spanish equivalent of the English term ‘bazaar’.

of cheap cotton goods that imitated the colorful plaid designs of the patadyong (a common wrap-around garb) was deleterious to Iloilo’s hand-weaving industry. Murakami himself set up other retail outlets: the National Bazar on Calle Real, and another Murakami Bazar in nearby Bacolod City on Negros island. Other ‘bazars’ (Fuji, Hinode, Iloilo, Kawahara, Kanashiro, Mashiko, Matsuoka, Nagoya, Nagai, Oriental, Osaka, Real, San-ei, and Tokyo) lined the city’s main thoroughfares. Specialty shops that dealt with photographic, bicycle, and medical supplies, other enterprises and warehouses were along side streets leading to the river port and into the city’s public market. White-suited Nihonjin salesmen blended with others in the city, while Japanese wares themselves became even more visible in the late 1930s as imin enterprises assiduously sought to neutralize the effects of the Chinese boycott of Japanese goods. In 1938, a distinct business sector came to be represented by the Iloilo Japanese Commercial Association (Otani 1940). By the next year, there were 97 Japanese merchants in the city: 38 retail dealers and 59 sales employees (1939 Census I, 56). Coming from the home islands and imperial territories, their combined activities reached distant towns inland and along the coasts and competed with the more numerous Chinese wholesalers and Filipino retailers. The shoten of Utaro Itô from Kumamoto (aptly called the ‘La Camiseteria de Itoh’) was next to the Daido Boeki company at the corner of Arsenal Street. But Itô was often in Japan and it was usually the gregarious and Hiligaynon-speaking ‘Tonying’ Shiraishi who was in charge of the store; the latter was also a well-known figure among itinerant traders at weekly markets (tiendas), notably at Jaro and Pototan.

Obviously, the urban progress in Iloilo drew a variety of other Japanese enterprises. Yosokichi Miyata and a brother moved to Iloilo from their parents and four other brothers at the abaca plantations in Davao. He first set up a small restaurant in front of the La Paz market; later, the Tokiwa restaurant close to the city’s waterfront along Calle Real. Others operated bakeries, candy factories, and inexpensive shops that served noodles and cold refreshments (refrescos), like the Kanashiros and Matsuokas. Other enterprising imin also engaged in peddling toys and trinkets, and snack items such as sweet bean paste wrapped in apa (a thinly-pressed egg-based dough) and the syrup-coated banana slices (called pinasugbo). Still other imin developed small flower and vegetable farms (e.g., the popular ‘Moto’ or Fujimoto near the Jaro market and KamekichiTôma in Guimaras) or worked as excellent gardeners for some of the city’s most prominent families (e.g., Fernando Lopez and Mariano Cacho) and local institutions (e.g., Jiro Higa at St. Paul’s Hospital and another at Assumption Convent). Unnamed female assistants at Japanese barbershops and massage parlors also reputedly worked as hostesses in brothels patronized by Japanese and other residents. There were few unattached women among these imin, though Miyata met Machi who became his wife in Iloilo. An identified female was Satsumo Yomogita who was a domestic helper for the Campos and Cacho families and who married an Ilonggo, Vicente Ardeño. One other household help was a certain Akagishi who was a caretaker of the boathouse-shaped home of Fernando Lopez.

Mining resources in Panay drew attention in the late 1930s. Of the few Japanese professionals around at this time were the transient mining staff and consultants of the Manila-based Ishihara Sangyo who periodically inspected the copper and manganese mines of Emilio Montilla at Capiz and Antique. A Mr. T. Uewaki supervised the Pilar Copper Mines, Inc. and was also consulting engineer for the Pampanga Gold Mines (David 1937, 327). Some skilled local imin also had positions of responsibility. Itsozo Masumi from Hiroshima became a mining supervisor in the carbon mines at Concepcion, Iloilo; Taneji

Minezoe was also a mining firm employee. The medical practice of a Dr. Hashimoto in the city was assisted by a female Japanese nurse. Miyoshi Haraoka was recruited from a prior employment in Negros as chief sugar boiler at the Central Santos-Lopez mill in Barotac Nuevo, Iloilo. Yoshiharu Wataki was originally hired by the Atlantic Gulf and Pacific Company to supervise the construction of irrigation and reservoir system at Maasin and Sta. Barbara in Iloilo; this was completed in 1920 and presumably brought in other Japanese contractors, artisans and laborers into the area. Eventually, Wataki became the trusty foreman (kapatas) of Mariano Cacho, the well-known local contractor and businessman who also owned the Panay Electric Company (PECO).

Unlike skilled workers who worked in situ, Haruyoshi Hirano contracted jobs at a furniture and upholstery shop along Ledesma Street. Most other artisans worked as house and boat-carpenters, furniture-makers, mechanics, and construction workers. They came from economically depressed farming environments of prefectures in western Japan: from Yamaguchi, Shigeichi Umano and Morizo Suehiro; from Hiroshima, Tadaichi Kono and Kashiro Takahashi; from Kagoshima, Eikoma Arima; and from Kumamoto, Senguro Tomasaki and Kosako Betsuki. But even if from rural backgrounds, their involvement in farming in Panay was uncommon.¹³ Some, like Takahashi, also produced items of unique significance to their own traditions (e.g., ash boxes). Singly or in groups, their craftsmanship was in demand for made-to-order household embellishments to wooden church altars (e.g., in Molo). The impressive home that Kono built for his family in Igbaras, Iloilo, showcased their skill and artistry. Holding a rather unusual occupation of a blacksmith was Hyoshiro Nakaya from Gifu who met and married Pelagia Cipriano in Iloilo in 1922. Like many others, he eventually settled at his wife’s hometown; at Kalibo in Capiz, he was well-known as ‘Kaya’ who freely shared his skills as a traditional bonesetter (hilot). Okinawan-born bachelor Saburo Akamine moved from Iloilo to Kalibo with Nakaya where he set up a noodle eatery (pansitan). Although the business and service sectors were clearly noticeable, it was the fishers from Okinawa who had the most numbers. Of the 172 Japanese fishers in 1939 were 28 fishery boat owners and 144 employed crew members (1939 Census II, 51). Their capture methods and harvests were distinct from the preponderant small-scale and near-shore activities of the locals. A typical fishing trip lasted 2-3 days with 10-15 fishers and laborers; at one time, a single trip from Iloilo landed over 4,400 pounds of catch (Montalban and Martin 1930, 470). On extended fishing trips, they reached the northeastern coasts of Panay, northwestern Negros, southern Masbate and northern Cebu. Land-based crew included boat-carpenters and mechanics for the muro-ami operations (oikomi in Okinawan) that brought in fresh fish stored in ice. Most fishers and their families built or rented quarters at Pala-pala, a fish landing enclave that they built up along the coast less than a kilometer away from the city center. Until today, the area is associated with certain types of catch as ‘mansurya’ and deep-sea fishing outfits called ‘mansuryahan’ – all coming from the understanding of the Ilonggos that the Japanese methods used here first developed in Manchuria. These fishers (pescadores) in Panay were led by Izô Takaezu who came from Kin town in Okinawa, briefly stayed in Davao unlike many others who stayed there, and arrived in Iloilo sometime in 1914. Takaezu (locally known as ‘Takayes’) organized the local Japanese fishing guild in 1921. Since a Philippine regulation in 1933 required the registration of fishing

13 Only a solitary Japanese man is known to have been harvesting scattered abaca produce around the town of Lambunao, Iloilo in central Panay.

vessels and banned alien-ownership, Takaezu created the Iloilo Fishing Corporation that included ten new members from among local fish brokers (comisyonistas), e.g., Roman Quimsing and Adriana Maloto, who were thus allowed entry into what had been a purely imin undertaking. Incidentally, Takaezu was quite different from the Okinawan fishers since he had a high school degree and was active in local civic affairs in the city. Further, he was an important link between the imin from Okinawa and those from the Japanese home islands. As with other prosperous proprietors like Murakami and Itô, he periodically traveled to visit family and friends back home. In comparison, most of the fishers came from the Okinawa: from Henza (e.g., Tsugohide Aragaki, Seiie Higashi Kawakami, and Seikichi Ushiban), Oroku (e.g., Ryohei Uehara), and Itoman (e.g., Seiichiro Oshiro and Ryozen Uehara). They dealt mainly with local brokers and retailers at Pala-pala and local consumers at the Iloilo Central Market. As elsewhere in the Philippines, remittances sent by post or through banks significantly improved their home and village situations in Okinawa (Fresnoza 2003; Kin-cho Shi 1996, 276).

Due to the predominantly male composition of the imin in Panay, intermarriages and other alliances with local women were quite common. This was particularly true for the fishers and artisans whose unions produced quite a large number of mestizo Nisei – usually registered in municipal or local church records – sometimes with local names. All four children of Tadaichi Kono (Amado Heredia), for example, grew up with the family name of their father’s god-father, obtained when he was baptized a Catholic as a precondition for his marriage to Paz Eaga of Igbaras, Iloilo in 1915. Senguro Tomasaki operated a rice mill in Potatan, Iloilo where he married Emilia Bolivar in 1923. Among the fishers in Iloilo, Tsugohide (Jose) Aragaki married Francisca Cena of Cadiz in 1930 whom he met on frequent fishing trips near Negros. Seiji Shimoji had a family with Inocencia Valderrama in Concepcion, Iloilo; Takaezu himself raised a family with Epefania Rudas in Iloilo even when he already had a family back in Okinawa. There were a few instances of arranged marriages that led to the arrival of brides from Japan.. Nae Kobashigawa was one such ‘immigration bride’ as arranged by Takaezu for his townmate and associate, Kiyohide, who dealt with the paper work of the fishing organization. So was Tami in 1935, as second wife for Seiichiro Oshiro, who was in Iloilo with his own parents and siblings (Yomiuri 1983, 160). Nonetheless, the residential pattern of the imin showed their concentration in places where they were closest to their homes and occupations. Merchants lived with their family and staff members above the shops or rented rooms near the city center. Some artisan shops were in the city while others were based at inland towns of their spouses. Fishers tended to live around fishing stations along the coasts but were evidently more mobile.

The increasing numbers and visibility of the imin who arrived sporadically from different origins was apparently motivated by economic goals. Continuous communication through newspapers along with mail and passage links maintained pragmatic and sentimental attachments with Japan. Yet Real Bazar proprietor, Kojiro Furutani, for example, called attention to the importance of leadership and cultural bonding: “having no Japanese leader is deplorable” (Watanabe 1935, 253-254). No matter where it was established, the Japanese association provided leadership and was the core of the migrants’ social life. In Iloilo, the association managed the Japanese school, the night-time classes in English starting 1935, and the Japanese cemetery. Ultimately, the integration of the imin was guided by this organization that nurtured an awareness of their distinct ethnic and national identities framed in the accommodating environment of their host community.

The Iloilo Nihonjin Kai (Iloilo Japanese Association) was established on October 31, 1919 to promote better mutual relations among the imin and to pursue common interests. The president (kaichô) and four other officers were chosen from a 20-member executive board who were elected annually on February 11th, a holiday that once designated the anniversary of the original Japanese emperor’s accession (Kigensetsu) but presently signifies Japan’s Kenkokinembi (or National Foundation Day). While protecting and promoting the economic survival and prosperity of its members, the board also acted on criminal, legal or social offenses that may affect the dignity and honor of the imin community as a whole. Membership required an introduction from a member, payment of regular fees and submission of documents containing pertinent personal data and indicated regional origins in Japan, i.e., a copy of one’s registration of permanent domicile (honseki) – parallel to the more recent significance of a copy of the family registry (koseki-tôhon) for identification as nikkeijin. In 1936, only 200 of Japanese nationals living at the city center and nearby areas were association members, probably accounting for only the adult legal migrants.¹⁴ Through its activities, the association reinforced and cultivated elements of the home culture while reproducing traditional values and lifestyles for young and old alike. To establish a primary school, its 1928 fund-raising committee negotiated the purchase of a 2,836 square-meter lot at Tanza, near the Pala-pala fishing station, that was paid for within two years. A wooden two-storey building for the Iloilo Japanese School (Iloilo Nihonjin Shogakkô) was inaugurated on February 11, 1933. The Manila Consulate supported part of its construction cost and provided an annual subsidy for its operation. With Nihonggo as the medium of instruction, the school initially catered to pupils from Grades I to IV, including mestizos even from other places of Panay and Negros. Boarders from Negros included Alice (Hanako) Takahashi, Masako Watanabe, Shigeru and Fumiko Yamamoto. With a 3- term calendar, it became a foreign-certified Japanese school in January 1937 and graduated its first batch of elementary school pupils by the next year.

Ever since the school opened, it replaced the premises of Murakami’s store as the venue for Japanese cultural, recreational and practical activities – celebrations for Kigensetsu, the Showa emperor’s birthday, the new year, sports day (undokai); meetings, parties, medical services for members, and even services for weddings and funerals – not to mention the student presentations and graduation ceremonies that usually took place on December 25th. Since 1935, the growing needs of the imin were also reflected in communal efforts to raise funds once again for the purchase of additional adjacent lots for an expanded school area. Takaezu, who headed this undertaking in the late 1930s, moved to live at the school grounds along with some fishers and artisans for the construction of the larger school building completed by August 1941.

The association also represented the Japanese community in interactions with the host society. As founding and long-standing president and vice-president respectively, Murakami and Takaezu were often featured in local affairs and publications. Murakami’s civic involvement was seen in his prominent contribution to the local campaign among the imin for ‘Liberty Bonds’ during World War I. Familiar with other representatives of alien residents, the city dwellers’ recognition of Murakami’s importance in business and his reputed influence over

14 Otani (1937) observed that in 1936 there were 393 Japanese within the ‘city proper’ and 14 others ‘outside’. In 1939, there were more than 200 Association members; the resident Japanese totaled 421, including 7 Koreans, with 372 ‘inside’ and 42 ‘outside’ of the ‘city proper’ (Otani 1940).

other imin garnered him the sobriquet ‘Consul for Japan in Iloilo’; Takaezu was similarly reckoned as the ‘vice-consul’ (David 1937).¹⁵ The rising numbers and spread of the imin in Panay led to a branch of the association in Capiz in 1938, with Matsuharu Inagaki as president, Seikichi Araya as treasurer, and Saburo Akamine among 5 directors (Otani 1940). Though not as widely known or influential, the consular appointment of Isao Kayomori as principal (kocho sensei) and head teacher (kundô) of the Iloilo Japanese School in 1932 created another position of authority and respect among the imin. Kayamori was assisted in instruction by his wife Chiu and eldest daughter Mieko. An Ilonggo teacher, Filemon Gildore, handled English language classes for upper-level pupils as well as adult association members. The school doctor was Dr. Amado Piamonte (Otani 1940), although other local physicians (e.g., Mariano Arroyo, Ramon Campos, and Jose Ma. Roldan) also serviced the health needs of the imin at St. Paul’s Hospital. Upon graduation, older children were sent to Japan for further schooling; however, there were a few who continued their studies in Manila or at San Agustin College in Iloilo (e.g., sons of ‘sari-sari’ store owner, Goro Ueki). Following the general movement of women and children returning to Japan in 1939, Kayamori’s wife Chiu accompanied their daughter Junko (Paula) to Japan to continue her studies and remained there throughout the occupation.

Meanwhile, developments affecting the larger Philippine society, which anticipated the hour of independence from the United States were producing perceptions of the ‘Japanese menace.’ Extraneous factors pushed forward Japan’s southward thrust and changed the relationships between the guest imin and their host communities. Such matters beyond their control produced the overwhelming regard of the imin as ‘the enemy.’


Wartime Involvements and Repatriation

Following the bombing of America’s Pearl Harbor and bases in the Philippines in December 1941, the state of war and anti-Japanese sentiments prompted the preventive incarceration of the imin in Panay.¹⁶ When Japanese warplanes attacked Iloilo City for the first time on December 18, 1941, imin interactions with local friends and acquaintances became even more fraught and guarded. Not surprisingly, local retaliation for these bombings included the torching of the new Japanese school building. A joint US and Philippine force rounded up the resident Japanese at the Japanese school and different points in Panay before they were all transferred to San Enrique (then a part of the municipality of Passi) where the local elementary school became their restricted quarters.¹⁷ The imin had been policing themselves when their Filipino guards were removed upon the fall of Bataan to the Japanese (Kumai 1977, 10).

15 Cleary, however, these were local and unofficial designations indicative of their status among the Japanese in Panay. 16 Discussions in this section are largely based on accounts, resources and interactions with the following. Captain Jôdo Takahashi, a captain with the landing forces on Panay in April 1942 (also a Buddhist monk), stationed in Iloilo and Antique, but moved on to Mindanao by mid-1943. Lieutenant Toshimi Kumai (later Captain) was assigned from Luzon to Panay in October 1942. At various times, he served as unit commander at the town garissons in Sta. Barbara and Janiuay, and later, as adjutant for the Panay garrison headquarters until the Japanese surrender in September 1945. 17 There is a wide discrepancy in the numbers of interned civilians in accounts of former officers in Panay: 100 for Takahashi and 470 for Kumai.

Despite all forewarnings, defenseless beachheads fell effortlessly into the hands of a detached force of the Imperial Japanese 14th Army before dawn on April 16, 1942. Consequently, apart from some vengeful damage wrought by locals on Japanese businesses, imin residences were also burned down. The Visayas command of the Japanese Army was soon set up in Cebu and directed the garrisons established in Panay through most of the years of occupation (1942 to 1945). The Panay garrison was initially headed by Lt. Col. Yasumi Senô as battalion (daitai) commander. Succeeding commanders were Lt. Col. Kansuke Taga, Maj. Hisashi Fukutomi, and Lt. Col. Ryoichi Tozuka.¹⁸

Although there are no available estimates of the number of imin victims during the war in the Philippines, their involvements in the Japanese war effort must be examined and understood as part of the experience. On April 24th, the Japanese interned in San Enrique were released by Japanese support troops. Hereafter, males were drawn into army service with assignments as guides, interpreters and/or translators for English or the Hiligaynon vernacular for the military companies.¹⁹ The inadequate strength and capacity of the guntai caused men and boys from among the imin to carry guns and, thus, made part of the garrison in Iloilo City (Kumai 1977, 23-24). Moreover, since Hiligaynon is the common language of peoples of Panay and the western part of Negros island, as gunzoku, the imin were also assigned wherever needed across these areas.

Japanese forces moved into Iloilo City on the same morning of their landing. Caught unaware, American and Philippine forces followed a ‘scorched earth policy’ – setting the city’s facilities ablaze to prevent their use by the invading forces. Retreating without a fight, they dashed towards Mount Baloy in central Panay (Doromal 1952). With reserves of weapons, ammunition, food and fuel, the United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) headquarters was thus set up in the village of Misi in Lambunao, Iloilo. Led by light tanks, on bicycles or on foot, the guntai entered an empty city amid the debris of abandoned US Army trucks and other vehicles, ongoing fires around Calle Real, and acrid smoke of burning sugar and ships from the port area. The place was hardly habitable: power, telephone, railway and water connections had been cut off. Some local residents were still scrambling to evacuate while some were taking advantage of the situation by looting shops and homes. When the imin returned from their internment a few days later, they were greeted by scenes of destruction and confusion as they sought for new accommodations. Eventually, families like the Aragakis and Ueharas were allocated abandoned homes across the city. Altogether, communication from the outside came through relayed broadcasts from Osaka as well as the Mainichi Shimbun published in Manila. Excerpts and local reports were printed in the weekly English and Visayan local newspaper, the Panay Times managed by Fernando Lopez, temporarily renamed the Panay Shu-ho between January to September 1943.

In late May 1942, shortly after capitulation at Corregidor, the combined USAFFE and Philippine Army forces in Panay led by General Albert Christie also surrendered to the guntai at Calinog, Iloilo. Even with limited troops, the Japanese were able to hold off the early forms of resistance and still controlled Iloilo City, the towns of Pototan and Sta. Barbara in Iloilo,

18 In April 1942, the Panay garrison headquarters was set up at the Iloilo High School grounds at the La Paz district and later moved closer to the city proper, at the Iloilo Provincial Capitol complex. Under Commander Tozuka, it was at the Iloilo City Hall towards the Molo district. 19 Civilians assigned to Takahashi’s company included one-time association treasurer Seikichi Araya and bicycle shop proprietor and prewar association president, Kenichi Yoshida (Otani 1940; Takahashi 1988, 15- 26; Kumai 1977, 10-11).

Capiz (now Roxas City) in Capiz, and San Jose in Antique by October 1942. The civil resistance led by Iloilo Governor Tomas Confesor moved the base of the ‘Free Government of Panay and Romblon’ to the mountains of Leon (Iloilo) while its provincial and town police forces occasionally challenged the guntai across its administrative districts. Meanwhile, Colonel Macario Peralta also organized the unsurrendered irregular troops as the ‘Free Panay Guerrilla Forces’ (later, the 6th Military District) that greatly outnumbered and severely dented Japanese confidence on the success of their pacification of Panay (Manikan 1977). However, the early rapport between the leaders and followers of local resistance in Panay collapsed by March 1943 over jurisdictional disputes and the printing of money. Bitter relations between the local civil and military regimes diminished only just before General MacArthur’s return with liberation forces in October 1944.

A brief condition of relative peace and order in the city came with the martial lawenforced administrative reorganization of Panay by the JMA on June 16, 1942, marked with ceremonies and a grand parade with comandeered vehicles across empty streets of the city. To reactivate local administration, the JMA installed ‘puppet’ executives who mirrored the Philippine Executive Commission created in Manila and acted as conduits of Japanese direction throughout the occupation. Characteristically, these were the well-educated locals who belonged to landed families deemed able to command respect from constituents. Most were from families who held local positions before the war or incumbent mayors who did not actively join the civil resistance government (Reyes 1999). Major political factions in Iloilo (the Confesor-Caram and the Zulueta-Lopez camps) endorsed their own representatives among the Japanese-sponsored officials who began to appear at pacification rallies and various ceremonies along with imin and socialized with the guntai.²⁰ Dr. Fermin G. Caram was assigned Governor of Iloilo province while Oscar Ledesma was mayor of Iloilo City (replaced in 1943 by Vicente Ybiernas). Moreover, as in Antique, elements of the Japanese sponsored Philippine Constabulary (PC) and the Coastal Defense Corps (CDCs) were effective cohorts of the Japanese army (Ponan 1970, 71). With indoctrination, training and uniforms, these volunteers were regarded as the local version of the Japanese ‘standing army’. Of abusive Filipino supporters and the gunzoku, most dreaded by Ilonggos were Jesus Astrologo, Vicente Murata, and a certain ‘Uyeki’ (Lacambra 1994). Altogether, the rather mild atmosphere in the controlled areas at least encouraged some local citizens to return and abide, if not cooperate, with Japan’s mission to create an “Asia for the Asians”. While Radio Taiso music and exercises disseminated Japanese standards and morality, the KALIBAPI (Kapisanan sa Paglilingkod sa Bagong Pilipinas) organized neighborhood associations to stimulate the assimilation of Japanese culture by local residents (Jose 1992). The ‘cultural warriors’ of the Japanese Army Propaganda Corps (later, Hodobu or the Department of Information) also strove to bring back and maintain normalcy by carrying out ‘goodwill missions’ with Filipino and imin counterparts. Leaflets with English and Hiligaynon exhortations were air-dropped for people who had evacuated away from the city to return to their normal lives. Pacification speeches delivered by Seikichi Araya as the interpreter seemed to have been most successful; thus, he was assigned to Captain Junsuke Hitomi’s medical missions to wean Filipinos away from their

20 Confesor’s faction organized the civil resistance government while Caram’s people staffed the Japanese-sponsored provincial government; Zulueta’s followers occupied key positions in Peralta’s guerrilla army while the Lopez faction controlled the ‘puppet’ Iloilo City government (McCoy 1980, 205).

loyalties to America and its promise of independence.²¹ In such conciliatory endeavors, Hitomi worked closely with Dr. Lorenzo Porras who headed the Iloilo Mission Hospital in Jaro that had been taken over by the guntai.

However, the pacification and propaganda operations in Panay were complicated by the guerrilla ambush on General Seiichi Tanaka, Commander of the 14th Army in the Philippines between Janiuay and Lambunao in February 1943.²² This was a rare occurrence of a direct challenge on such a high-ranking official of the Imperial Army. As a result, attempts at a ‘conciliatory’ approach in Panay shifted to one of ‘coercion’ (Nakano 1999, 51-54). Successive Japanese punitive subjugation campaigns (July 1943 and April 1944) and the increasing ferocity of guerrilla counter-attack and offensive – bolstered by deliveries of arms and supplies by American submarines since April 1943 – shattered any illusions of normalcy for all. As of May 1943, the population in the city reached a low of 34,722 (McCoy 1977, 212). It was a rough and tumble life for all concerned; everyone had to seek shelter of whatever sort at times of air strikes.

Even before Pearl Harbor, 20-45 year-old males made up the reserve army in Japan. As Japan advanced into the Nan’yô to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 20 to 60 year-old male imin were also considered part of the expanded reserve of the Japanese army. The progress of the war and the lack of reinforcements to the Philippines prompted the specific directive from the 14th Army headquarters in Manila early in November 1944: the Panay garrison was ordered to call for the conscription and training of a company of imin males under 45 years old (Kumai 1977, 148). Clearly, however, the extended involvement of the imin as a whole was vital for the guntai to hold on to controlled areas. Whatever tasks were assigned the mestizos were likely to have been limited since their loyalty to the Japanese mission may have been in doubt. Yet these attachments produced popular perceptions that all imin represented the ‘sleepers’ or advance guards of the occupation. Hence, the inevitable consequences of the hostilities were deeply felt by the imin. Many families endured the long absences of members who enlisted or were recruited as gunzoku. And, as elsewhere, coercion may have been involved in their recruitment under threat of punishment or execution. Long-established unions and close friendships with the Ilonggos made them sympathetic and helpful at times, even for those with connections with guerrillas and their sympathizers. Discussing the situation with a local employee at his restaurant, Yosokichi Miyata asked that if they met each other in war, they should put down their arms and embrace each other instead.

In any case, the imin rendered services for strategic and non-strategic wartime activities of the occupation. ‘Tonying’ Shiraishi, a high school graduate of the College of San Agustin, was initially made an interpreter for the garrison headquarters and later made manager of the local office of the National Rice and Corn Corporation (NARIC). The elderly Senguro Tomasaki was charged with supervising the rice mills until he succumbed to ulcers in 1944. Morizo Suehiro no longer did independent work in the San Miguel, Alimodian and Leon areas since he was assigned to the carpentry shop of the military hospital. Like the marine engineer Tokamatsu Kawakami, Tokumori Miyazato served as an interpreter-

21 Nakano 1999; Terami-Wada 1992; Takahashi 1988; Kumai 1977 and interview with Junsuke Hitomi. See also the Hodobu publication on the expeditionary forces (Hirano 1943). 22 General Tanaka replaced General Masaharu Homma after the prolonged siege of the Bataan peninsula (Kumai 1977, 56-58). Kumai was garrison commander at Janiuay at this time and was witness to how shaken the Supreme Commander was soon after the attack .

guide for the ships of the guntai. Yoshiharu Wataki was technical adviser for public works and engineering to Mayor Ybiernas; thus, he supervised repairs on the Forbes Bridge that linked the city proper to Jaro that was bombed by fleeing USAFFE troops. Wataki and Shigeichi Umano helped repair and maintain the local electric facilities and were also involved in the construction of tall and rounded concrete sentry posts (tochka) at strategic intervals to protect the roads leading to the Tiring airfield at Cabatuan and the Duyan-duyan water reservoir in Sta. Barbara. Both married locally; but Wataki left no children when killed while inspecting the reservoir in 1943.

In 1942, Tsugohide Aragaki had taken over Takaezu’s leadership of the Okinawan fishers; around 20 of them provided food supplies for the guntai from their new base at the village of Lawe in Jordan, Guimaras. A new fishers’ union from Yaizu in Shizuoka prefecture led by a Mr. Kukai, also came into the scene to augment food supplies and provide transport from the Iloilo River port area. The ice factory at La Paz, operated by Kayamori’s son-in-law Kishu Hatade, continued to be an important support facility for the fisheries. A branch office of the Bank of Taiwan financed private industries, and later, also the Japanese military. When branch offices of the trading companies were reactivated in the later part of 1943, the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha was assigned the management of the harbor facilities and warehouses, and the procurement of sugar and copra. Shigeru Yamamoto continued to work for the coprabuying section of the Mitsui company, though he was occasionally called up as interpreter for the Tozuka battalion headquarters at the Iloilo City Hall. One large-scale project was cottongrowing with experimental farms at Sta. Barbara, Iloilo and Capiz, Capiz associated with a gin factory and the local branch of the Dai Nippon Boseki Kaisha (Japan Spinning Company). The Shimamoto Dock Yard Company at La Paz, a branch of the Shimamoto Marine Transport Company in Wakayama City, was set up across the port area along the Iloilo river to build armored vehicles, motorized and sailing vessels.

Since the early days of the occupation, the towns of San Jose and Sibalom in Antique were areas heavily guarded by the guntai. The Ishihara Sangyo Kaiun Kaisha, Ltd. branch in Iloilo City, where Shoichi Hotta and Akira Umehara were employed, pursued the military commission to mine copper at both Sibalom, Antique and Pilar, Capiz, at times visited by its chief, Koichiro Ishihara. Operations at the Antique mine soon proved to be more successful than that in Capiz. Here, the company engaged as many as 1,500 ‘idle residents’ supplied by ‘puppet’ mayors for the construction of roads linking the mines at the village of Bongbongan to the town proper of Sibalom in time for the start of mining operations in July 1942. In January 1943, they were joined by 385 prisoners of war (POWs) who were mobilized as Filipino ‘volunteers’ for industrial development from the internment camp at Capas, Tarlac. On the whole, however, Japanese forces were increasingly pressed by their own lack of reinforcements and supplies. Mining activities were suspended even before 1945 to devote dwindling guntai resources to the urgent need for oil production from copra as fuel for the diesel engines of the sequestered electric company in Iloilo City.²³

Employment in the city was primarily for the men among the imin for military and more general purposes: the Urakami Gumi Company were building contractors, the Okura Sangyo Kabushiki Kaisha bought up cured goat hides, the Scrap Iron Union collected scrap materials for the production of shovels for the army’s transport units, and the Liquid Fuel Distributing Union rationed this necessity. The Hitô Unkûbo (Philippine Islands Transportation

23 See also Ikehata 1999, 142-148. The mine was located near the boundary between the towns of Sibalom and San Remigio; some sources refer to it as located in San Remigio.

Division) managed by Tokisuke Ide provided civilian passenger and freight service across the archipelago. For some time, a private air company, the Nanpo Kôku (Southern Airlines), serviced the Manila-Iloilo-Cebu-Davao routes backed by troops guarding the Mandurriao airfield. From mid-1943 until the start of 1944, there were free rides on the Iloilo-Pototan- Passi-Dumarao-Capiz routes of the steam-powered locomotive of the Panay Railway restored with the help of volunteer staff of the Taiwan Railway Company. Imin like Kenichi Yoshida and Reiichi Ishii helped to repair and operate the Lopez-owned Panay Autobus vehicles, and, for a while, put them in service between Santa Barbara and Iloilo City. But in the long run, it was the Mitsui-managed bus service of the Utoku Transport that provided better links for the city with the surrounding towns. Some imin women (e.g., a daughter of Tadaichi Kono) worked as operators for the local branch of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) Company. Others were involved with a Confectionery Union that produced a sweet paste made from mongo beans (yokan), often brought by visitors to those hospitalized. Around 20-30 members of the Aikoku Patriotic Ladies Association, headed by Hisako Hanamasuya and including schoolteacher Mieko Hatade, got together daily to produce hand-made grenades from cut water pipes and dynamite of the Ishihara company. Apart from references to Gosuke Kimura, branch manager of the Mitsui firm, and Izô Takaezu as heading the association at various times, there is little information on the Iloilo Nihonjin Kai during the occupation. Yet it is plausible that the association had a hand in organizing its reservist members into volunteer civil defense brigades. Further, its concern for the children’s education was a consistent one. Following the inauguration of the Philippine Republic in 1943, classes resumed. Up to the early months of 1943, the classes of the shogakkô were held within the premises of the provincial high school at La Paz that also served as the initial headquarters of the Panay garrison. The classes later moved to the campus of the College of San Agustin where high school students among the imin were also enrolled. When guerrilla forays threatened peace and order conditions in the city, a squad was assigned to escort pupils to and from the Japanese School (Kumai 1977, 24). There was a much sterner learning system and environment at the Iloilo Nihonjin Shogakkô that vigorously emphasized discipline and loyalty to the Emperor revered as a deity. Needless to say, English classes were eliminated from the curriculum; so were the services of the English teacher and the local doctor. Moreover, the pupils were now required to tend gardens and do their own laundry. Japanese language classes, initially taught by guntai and later by government-sponsored teachers who studied the language in Manila, were also held at other schools, offices and firms. In these ways, guntai and imin as well as local recruits supported the program for a ‘New Philippines’ (Bagong Pilipinas) with the dissemination of Japanese culture and values.

The JMA takeover should have meant the return of some degree of security for residents to come back from countryside refuges. Yet even with the social order in the city, this was a radically different time. Every so often at Jaro, able-bodied local men were sought out from their homes and ferried to Cabatuan to repair the Tiring airfield. Then there were the ever-present guard posts and sentries, the not-so-courteous patrols of soldiers, the military police (kempeitai) and their allies, the interrogation and torture of suspected guerrillas and their supporters, the infamous brutality of Captain Kengo Watanabe, the slaughters attributed to Korean elements among the guntai, and yet the need to bow and hold identity cards. Commemorations of Rizal day and town fiestas, sports events, and contests like

‘Miss Flores de Mayo’ gave some sense of customariness. But then, occupation administrators and their associates were regulating the price of rice, setting banking hours and rationing fuel. In time, even if there was an abundance of wartime currency (locally referred to as ‘Mickey Mouse’ money), the lean and unkempt looks and rugged uniforms of the guntai attested to the lack of food, clothing, and soap shortages. Some comforts were available despite persistent problems of scarcity, insecurity and banditry. At times, the train and bus services were able to ran, dance halls, bars and bowling alleys were kept open. More often than not, Japanese tunes and recited Chinese classical poems drifted from crowded bars and restaurants such as the Sakura, Tokiwa and Kotobuki downtown. Under the Nihon Film Company (Nichiei-sha Iloilo), the two popular movie theaters (Palace and Eagle) usually showed selected American films for Filipinos much as in earlier times, though much publicity was given to Japanese films depicting sea battles at Hawaii and Malaya. At times, music and dance concerts were organized at the Cine Eagle theater and at the bandstand of Jaro plaza with imin children and local residents participating. On a peaceful interlude in 1944, high-class entertainment for all came in the form of the ‘Merry Widow’ musical, featuring young daughters of the wealthy Jaro residents, at the College of San Agustin auditorium. Early in 1945, the screening of ‘New Snowfall’ at the same place became the last movie for the Japanese in Iloilo (Kumai 1977, 116). The seemingly normal life also meant the opening of brothels and services by ‘comfort women’ (ianfu).²⁴ There were ‘comfort stations’ set up by the Japanese army (jyugun ianjo), the Number One Comfort Station and Asia Hall at the vicinity of Plaza Libertad, as well as privately-operated ones (ianjo). That with Taiwanese women was managed by a Mr. Tsukigata; that run by locals nearby closed early in 1943 when the proprietor allegedly joined the guerrillas. There were likely more women engaged here than the 12 Taiwanese and seven Filipino comfort women who joined the Japanese withdrawal from the city in March 1945 (Kumai 1977, 211). Services of the ianfu could be had even by guntai on field assignments: an officer was offered their services while on duty in Capiz (Takahashi 1988, 27-30). Many urban residents evacuated to remote rural areas where skirmishes often occurred and often moved around to evade the risk of being mistaken by patrols as combatants. Similarly, imin conscripts with the guntai were directly exposed to the harsh conditions in rugged terrains and the dangers of battlefields. A teenage Nisei named Ramon Arima was an interpreter-guide when captured by guerrillas and assigned menial tasks, like feeding the horses. An Issei fisher named Seiji Shimoji who had moved in with his Filipino wife’s relatives in Ajuy in northeastern Panay was forced to clean rice and do other odd jobs for his captors and often subjected to bullying and physical violence. In the end, Japanese troops on a punitive mission rescued him; thus perhaps in gratitude, he became their interpreter (Kumai 1977, 84).

At Capiz, Saburo Akamine had a dry goods store but was engaged to organize amateur singing contests for the guntai where he met the contestant who became his wife in 1944. Miyoshi Haraoka and his family remained at Barotac Nuevo, Iloilo but was drawn into the war. With ten others, Haraoka was captured and killed by guerrillas operating in the Sara-Ajuy area. His son, Yoshihito (Luisito), then a local elementary student, was

24 Sakamoto (2007) observes that comfort women in the Philippines were made so through abduction, rape and continuous confinement. However, contemporary witnesses in Iloilo City assert that this characterization may have been true elsewhere, as in more remote areas that came under control of the Japanese Army.

picked up and assigned as a houseboy in the city for a ‘Colonel’ Inayama; later, he also attended the Japanese school at San Agustin while serving the Japanese Consul at his residence in front of St. Paul’s Hospital. The gardener Jiro Higa was arrested near Janiuay early in March 1945 while supplying food for the occupation forces. He tried to argue with the guerrillas that he was a civilian, married and with a small child in the city but to his captors he was just Japanese; on a river bank, he was made to dig a hole and kneel before it before he was shot.

Perhaps the most grueling of the wartime experiences endured by the Panay imin happened as a result of their joint withdrawal with the guntai from the city (Kumai 1977, 165-175). On the morning of March 18, 1945, guerrillas were closing in from the north just as American forces were bombarding and landing on the southwest coast at Tigbauan. When low-flying US planes started to bomb the city center, some Japanese resistance was put up against the entering troops and tanks at Molo. But by early afternoon, Panay Garrison Commander Tozuka shared a confidential plan with his unit commanders as well as gunzoku and imin representatives. Strategic facilities for power and telecommunications, railway and shipping, military and consular records and notes, bombs stored at Fort San Pedro and the bridge connecting the city to La Paz were to be destroyed. Further, they were to abandon the city by breaking through guerrilla positions in Jaro to avoid its further destruction (given what had earlier happened in Manila); and, they were to establish a last stand in central Panay at the mountain village of Bocari in Leon, Iloilo, near Mt. Inaman. If imin families did not wish to join the planned withdrawal, they were to find refuge at St. Paul’s Hospital. Since most of their menfolk had been drafted as gunzoku, those who did assemble there were mainly the elderly men, women and children. In view of the dire situation, about 50 seriously injured soldiers at the Japanese army hospital who were unable to walk, also took their own lives, i.e., made their self-determination (jiketsu).

Later that evening of the 18th, the silent marchers – including about 200 imin, 80 gunzoku and 300 of the army hospital force and its more mobile patients – moved past the Jaro plaza and braced themselves to face the heavy cordon of guerrillas that greatly outnumbered them. The advance guards, numbering about 450, could not frontally break through as planned that night and battled with numerous casualties till dawn. Only then did they manage to get through guerrilla lines but was cut off from the main columns headed by the Garrison Commander. By afternoon of March 19, the arrival of American troops and tanks and more guerrillas from the east reinforced the encirclement of the retreating Japanese. The trapped main group sought cover just across the Carmelite Convent – in bamboo thickets, coconut groves, and the guerrillas’ own trenches – but their positions were soon pinpointed and they were peppered with bullets. Staying behind while that mortal combat raged, some imin and patients waited restlessly for guidance. Amidst the confusion, they heeded calls for them to follow across the Jaro river; under fire, however, their ranks broke up and headed into different directions. Quite suddenly, the intense exchange of firepower stopped just as darkness fell, when Americans and guerrillas appeared to move towards the city. Moving quickly during this lull, the main group dashed across the river before reaching Pavia; but they were soon once again pursued by artillery fire, flares and low flying planes. Yet they generally followed the planned route and made their way west into San Miguel and Alimodian and the mountains of Bocari by morning of March 24.

Earlier on March 19, however, there had been about 200 imin, 50 gunzoku, some patients and personnel evacuated from the army hospital who had followed the advance

guards that were separated from the main group (Kumai 1977, 174-179). By the evening of March 21, they trailed behind the soldiers who inadvertently deviated from the master plan; they crossed the river at Pavia and moved northwest through Sta. Barbara into the Cabatuan- Maasin area south of Janiuay. Guerrillas were closing in and American artillery fired around them from Maasin. Burdened with heavy packs, it was difficult and dangerous for them to carry and guide the children while evading tracking guerrilla fire and volleys from incoming American tanks. Feeling vulnerable and helpless with numerous casualties along the way, some were even fearful of the wounded soldiers among them who threatened to still the hungry babies lest their howls reveal their position. Without food and water, disheartened and fraught with physical, mental and emotional fatigue in the dead of night of March 21, a desperate group elderly imin, women and children among them succumbed to selfdetermination or mass suicide (shudan jiketsu).²⁵

25 Alternative names have been commonly used to refer to the suicide site in Maasin, between these interior towns of Iloilo (e.g., Suyac and Tuy-an). The location has been verified to be at the edge of the village of Tigbauan adjacent to that of Tuy-an.

Kocho sensei Kayamori and association president Takaezu were with said group. On this third night of their travails, both leaders observed that the group should no longer be a further burden to the soldiers and others who kept up with them, and that they should all die in the forested hillside shelter where they rested. Anticipating the worst, some agreed that dying was a better option than to live with the humiliation of capture and torture, especially by guerrillas. Softly singing the Kimigayo as farewell, they bowed towards the imperial palace before retiring. At around midnight, the injured soldiers threw down the remaining three grenades on prone bodies at rest. Kayamori and Takaezu used the only two pistols on themselves and the wounded soldiers used bayonets to end their own lives. Some women covered the young from blasts that shattered their own bodies. Those who did not die immediately begged others to end their misery; passing straggling soldiers complied with bayonets and grenades.

Only 22 of at least 40 Japanese who perished here have been identified, including members of the Hanamasuya, Hirano, Kawakami, Miyata, Oshiro and Toma families (Kumai 1977, 175-176). Tami Oshiro and Chiyo Saki were among four adult women from Okinawa who lived to speak of the Maasin suicide.²⁶ Oshiro remained to be with her mother-in-law who could not walk anymore and decided to die with other family members. Saki, then 29 years, claimed that there were about 120 in the group that had been at the suicide site, including a few elderly men and two wounded soldiers. Hence, the total may be understated. But then it may have been that only the elderly and those women with children decided to stay and die. At any rate, this little-known event imparts a certain distinction on the nikkeijin who trace their lineage to the fatalities and survivors of this tragedy in Panay. Neighboring residents, guerrillas and American troops who soon reached the site could not find an explanation for this scene of the tragedy of war. Amidst children’s cries, they picked through the wounded and corpses to recover those who survived. Some Nisei children retrieved from the site that have been traced; parenthetically, they were given Spanish-sounding names by adoptive families evocative of having been resurrected or saved. The children of Tokamatsu Kawakami were raised by nearby families: Mihoko (‘Salvacion’)

26 Their testimonies on this event are in Japanese sources: the NNN 1983 television documentary and the Yomiuri 1983 volume, 136-173. One other adult survivor was the second daughter of Haruyoshi and Moyoe Hirano.

and Sumie (‘Gloria’) with the Morenos, and son Tadanori (‘Salvador’) with the Cabreras. Mihoko (5 years) and Tadanori (7 years) were old enough to remember that, fearful of the explosions and gunfire around them, they had fled from the group that night; upon returning when the guns were silent, they stepped over dead bodies to find their mother and younger brother among other acquaintances at the site. From beside a bloodied woman, a very young boy was picked up by locals and turned over to the care of parish priest who gave him his name; ‘Lazaro Tuban’, though deemed of Okinawan origin, his identify was never verified. Young Seizo Tôma, who grew up as Pablo Delgado in Negros, survived almost unscathed while his brother Diego sustained serious wounds. With stab wounds on her side, Chiyo Saki, awoke from a faint to see unwounded but crying children being taken away by Filipino soldiers, particularly the 3-year-old Isao Onaga. She had carried him throughout the retreat to help her friend Natsu Onaga who had her own hands full with a 4 year-old son besides a baby; the Onaga boy she carried grew up as ‘Salvador Maravillosa’ with a local adoptive family. With sharpnel wounds, Tami Oshiro regained consciousness to find that her parents had died along with 2 of the 4 children with them who were missing. The fate of her son was not ascertained; but unknown at that time, a guerrilla soldier who was among the first on the scene had carried away 3-year-old Toshiko Oshiro to his hometown of Cabatuan, where she was taken in by the Catalan family and named ‘Librada’. Kazuko Miyata (later Wakasa) was removed from the site where her mother and younger brother had died; she was brought by American troops with other wounded from Panay to a hospital in Cebu where she found her father with a bullet on his thigh from the escape from Iloilo City. Both recuperated and returned to Japan; but she still bears bayonet scars on her belly. Other testimonies also come from those who changed their minds. The teenage widow, Haruko Uehara Miyagi, made a last-minute decision to leave the site with her own widowed Filipino mother.²⁷ With other imin, they somehow made it to Bocari. Ritszuko, one of the younger daughters of Kayamori, also made her way there with an older woman she befriended along the way, Kiku Minezoe (Yomiuri 1983 and NNN 1983). Moreover, those who did not join the organized withdrawal fended for themselves. Elderly men, like Reiichi Ishii, and Filipino spouses and children of the Aragakis, Fujimotos, Higas, and Umanos stayed with the nuns at St. Paul’s Hospital until American forces moved them to Asilo de Molo. The good friends, Saburo Akamine and Hyoshiro Nakaya, had moved to the city when American landings were imminent. Since they did not wish to involve their families with suicide or imprisonment, they did not join the retreat nor sought refuge at St. Paul’s. Even if Akamine’s wife Margarita was 7-months pregnant, they moved around the city to evade the rounding up of remaining Japanese; the men were eventually imprisoned with guntai and other imin at the Iloilo Provincial Jail.

27 See NHK 1988 documentary on Miyagi, and personal communication, 2003.

Most other imin were able to join the soldiers who successively gathered at the designated defense position in Bocari. But after a while, food became scarce and illnesses beset those who made it to the Japanese war camp that faced increasing forays of enemy attack. Through it all, the imin assisted in patrol engagements and raised root crops and vegetables. Americans installed speakers in their direction that broadcast news of the Allied bombings on Japan and the surrender of their German allies; hence, the entrenched Japanese actually heard the Emperor’s surrender on August 15, 1945. Soon after, arrangements were made for their capitulation on the first days of September at the waterworks dam site in Daja, Maasin. After processing, they were transferred to the POW camp set up at the Tiring airfield in Cabatuan where the formal surrender ceremony was held on September 3, 1945, the day after Japan’s surrender to the Allies. There were 120 imin among the 1,560 who surrendered; from these numbers, it was estimated that about 850 guntai and 70-80 imin had died since the landing of the Americans (Kumai 1977, 207). In the end, Japan’s failure to hold on to occupied territories prompted the return of all Nihonjin to Japan.

While the American policy for the repatriation of Japanese nationals – guntai and full-blooded imin alike – was evident, it was not so explicit about local spouses and mestizo Nisei and Sansei. In interviews conducted at the Asilo de Molo to process their repatriation, officers of the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) asked Filipino spouses and children of the imin to choose to go or remain. Aragaki’s wife and six children at that time, for example, chose to move with him to Japan. For some families, members made split choices (e.g., Arimas and Nakayas), though most others opted to stay. In some instances, no choice could be made: Shigeru Yamamoto was captured with soldiers who had held out at Bocari; unlike most of his cousins who were deemed imin and chose to stay, he was regarded as guntai and had to be sent away. There were also those whose fathers or husbands were missing or had died and had neither the knowledge nor the means to communicate with their kin in Japan (e.g., Akamine, Miyazato, and Takahashi). The fear of the unknown, language and cultural barriers, reliance on local family ties despite remnant hostilities to them as ‘Hapon’ were common sense notions that factored in many of their decisions. Apart from casualties and fatalities on both sides, the war was just as unfortunate for the repatriated imin and the survivors in their local communities. All Japanese POWs in Panay were shipped to Palo, Leyte from which POWs from across the Visayan islands were finally sent back to Japan (Kumai 1977, 199-210). Many families got separated since men and women were boarded on separate ships and there was confusion upon their landing at various repatriation ports.²⁸ The returning Issei and Nisei arrived almost empty-handed, jobless and financially devastated and were met by the human and material devastations in Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Worse off than most were those from Okinawa who needed extended stays elsewhere.²⁹ Repatriation left veteran stragglers in the Philippines and drastically reduced the number of Issei and Nisei. With the break of official relations between the Philippines and Japan, the animated presence of the Japanese in Panay suddenly turned into near silence and invisibility. It was again another world changed for the imin and their descendants, today’s nikkeijin.


Postwar Scenarios for the Panay Nikkeijin

In the immediate postwar era, sympathetic Filipino families took in widows and fatherless children, the living remnants of prewar imin who survived the hardships of war and the long months of the Japanese hold-out at Bocari. However, most locals across the

28 Japanese POWs in Luzon boarded ships at Manila; those in Mindanao at Davao. Arrivals were at the prefectures of Wakayama and Kanagawa (Uraga, Yokosuka and Kurihama) as well as Kagoshima, Hiroshima, Oita, and Fukuoka. 29 Zushi City in Kanagawa, with employment opportunities at the nearby US base at Yokosuka, became known as ‘Little Okinawa’ where some returnees and their families remain to this day. Those sent back were only able to return to Okinawa from August 1946 until the next year.

country were prone to deride and harass them as ‘Hapon’30 – sometimes with physical abuse that gave cause for changes in residence. Many abandoned or destroyed incriminating documents and memorabilia and resorted to using the names of their mothers, wives, patrons or foster families. In some instances, unease and embarassment was also been due to unacknowledged paternity. Altogether, fears of social ostracism if not reprisal for direct or indirect association with atrocities and collaboration during the occupation as well as a sense of humiliation of national defeat and international condemnation led them to deny, sublimate or hide their Japanese identity and heritage. Few met each other outside of their family groups. Until the recent establishment of various nikkeijin associations, they rarely had occasion to gather, share experiences and compare notes. At the same time, their assimilation was fostered by the socializing forces of upbringing in simple Filipino home and school environments, religious and occupational affiliations, local entertainment and mass media, and their own growing families in the area. These conditions smothered their self-awareness and collective memories and, thus, effectively veiled the nikkeijin from public attention.

As elsewhere in the Philippines, sentimental visits and more purposive visits of former residents and soldiers to Panay occurred through the 1970s and 1980s. These concerns were predictable since the Philippines as a whole had the largest number of prewar imin in the Southeast Asian region and was one of the largest battlefields of Japan’s war. As individuals or in organized tour groups, these visitors had mixed agendas that included visits to former home and work areas, the search for family members and descendants, the setting up of memorial sites, and the collection of war-dead bones of Japanese soldiers and civilians. In the 1970s, a central figure for many of these visitors to Panay as well as to the author’s search for that essentially ‘lost community’ was a middle-aged mestizo Nisei named Arturo Sabido (Suehiro).31 The younger of two sons of carpenter Morizo Suehiro who married Concepcion Sabido of San Miguel, Iloilo in 1925, he was a proprietor of a motor vehicle repair shop in Molo. He carried his mother’s surname and could not join the repatriation since his father had died before the end of the war. Known widely as ‘Turing’, Suehiro had befriended some JOCVs promoting the sale of tractors in the city in 1968. Through their help, Suehiro soon established contact with his father’s siblings and other relatives in Toboshi, Yamaguchi. His father’s brother and his JOCV friends tried to arrange Suehiro’s travel to Japan in time for Expo ‘70; but this was only accomplished in 1973. Family members who had gathered from as far as Fukuoka and Hiroshima confirmed his parentage. A cousin even offered to share a riceplot with him if he desired to live in Japan; but Suehiro declined since he had a large family of 9 children in Iloilo City. On his own, he began to care for the Japanese charnel house at the city’s public cemetery that he supposed included the remains of his father. The modest support of the Japanese government for the maintenance of this cemetery after Suehiro’s death in December 1995 is coursed through his eldest son. It was Suehiro’s initiative and even some financing that the ‘war orphans’ and many other Japanese descendants became acquainted or reacquainted with each other, a fact that ultimately gained currency among Japanese authorities in the Philippines and in

30 Filipino vernacular languages derive the term ‘Hapon’ from Spanish to derogatively denote someone who was Japanese, even if mestizo. See Ohno 1991. 31 In the absence of any roster to identify Japanese descendants during the author’s research in the mid-1970s, many of the 29 Niseis who agreed to be interviewed were located with the help from Suehiro. Unlike the expansiveness of the nikkeijin at present, there was some vagueness, hesitancy and guardedness when they spoke of their backgrounds and experiences.

Japan. Suehiro became the conduit of Panay descendants’ inquiries and representations with the Japanese embassy; conversely, he also became the contact person, even guide, of family members and veteran visitors throughout Panay. Japanese returnees and other visitors who extended assistance and gifts for ‘war orphans’ and other descendants may have regarded Mr. Sabido’s informal group as an organization and channeled their communication through him. Yet Suehiro did not see his facilitative role as leading a descendant organization; rather, he was simply extending assistance to enable others to obtain information about their own family members in Japan. When the registration of descendants began to take place in the mid-1990s, he presumed that this process benefitted from the lists and other information from his investigations on descendants that he had supplied the Japanese embassy. He was wary about the new developments but encouraged his friends to engage with the process.32 Ironically, two of Suehiro’s own daughters married Nihonjin and now live in Japan. However, his widow received a copy of his father’s restored koseki only in 2002; and only one Sansei of his line has entered Japan as nikkeijin to date. Nevertheless, the links of Suehiro’s older brother Salvador and nephew Mauricio, residents of Cotabato in Mindanao, with the Southern Philippines Nikkeijin-Kai Foundation were also tapped by some Panay descendants to process their claims as nikkeijin.

Even before the peace treaty was ratified by the Philippines and normalized relations with Japan, activities of a particular visitor who got in touch with Suehiro led to much publicity about the full-blooded Nisei left behind in Panay, including those who survived the Maasin suicide. Junko Tanaka, the daughter of kocho sensei Kayamori who had moved to Japan before the war, had met a JOCV in Tokyo who informed her about Suehiro and his contacts with other descendants in Iloilo. She initially sought Suehiro’s help in 1972 to find news of a missing younger sister from among the survivors and he made local security arrangements for this purpose. Her televised appearance soon after her first trip made it clear that it was safe for Japanese to travel to the Philippines and attracted the attention of former imin in Panay. Their planning meetings for a possible reunion visit resulted into references to a Tokyo-based Iloilo-Kai (Iloilo Association) that included Reiichi Ishii of Fuji Bazar, Yosokichi Miyata of Tokiwa restaurant, and Shoiichi Hotta of the Ishihara Sangyo. On subsequent visits, Tanaka also called upon a former classmate, Hanako (Alice) Takahashi, and was accompanied by Japanese reporters such as NHK’s Shusako Kono. Among others, she also sought out the children of her father’s friend Shegeiichi Umano. In time, Tanaka’s group also called upon war veteran, Toshimi Kumai, to assist them to recover remains from the suicide site that included those of her father. As former adjutant of the Tozuka battalion that, in the end, withdrew from Iloilo City, Kumai was privy to the evacuation plan and routes to the intended mountain retreat in central Panay. Accordingly, Kumai sought clearance from Japanese authorities and participated in the war-dead recovery mission with other veterans of Panay organized by the Health Ministry late in 1974.33

Even before that undertaking, one of the larger tours that came to Iloilo was that of a battle site group visit (senseki hômon dan) in February 1974 that was welcomed by the Iloilo City government with a program at the Rizal Elementary School. This was adjacent to

32 Cf. Ohno 2006, footnote no. 33, 101. 33 The mission was in Panay from November 21 to December 17, 1974. Most of the bones gathered from Maasin and various sites (including Pavia, Zarraga, Tigbauan) were cremated at Oton beach on which the invasion landings had taken place in 1942. Most were brought back to Japan although some were interred at the Japanese charnel house.

where a concrete post that held up the marquee of ‘Iloilo Japanese School’ had survived all that had gone by. Arranged in Japan by the Philippine Information Center (PIC), the group included Saburo Akamine, Yoshihiro Arima, Shoichi Hotta, Haruko Uehara Miyagi, Yosokichi Miyata, Shigeo Morohoshi, Ritsuko Kayamori Tachikawa, Junko Kayamori Tanaka, Akira Umehara, and Haruko Miyazato Urasaki. Others were descendants of the Hashimoto, Hirano, Miyazato, and Otsu families. Hence, while touted by the Philippine press as balikbayans, some appropriately referred to themselves as osato gairi (persons returning to their place of birth). Among those who made private visits at different times were Shigeru Yamamoto and Chuichi (Pedro) Teruya (whose family had used the name Kanashiro in Iloilo). At other times, groups of veterans like Jôdo Takahashi and Yasauchi Minoura of the Senô batallion and others like Mikio Kai and Toshimi Kumai also touched base with not only with the old garrisons and battlefields but also with former enemies and their families. Many of these visitors caught up with former classmates and acquaintances at Pala-pala, viewed the remaining tochka, and even traced their paths to the mountains of central Panay. Meanwhile, inspired by news of the ‘war orphans’ reported by visits of war veterans by the 1980s, the Memorial Association of the Pacific War Dead (Taiheyo Sensô Senbotsusha Irei Kyokai) sponsored trips for Nisei family reunions in Japan. Among those assisted in 1990 from Panay were members of the Akamine, Miyazato, and Kawakami families.

These tourists also left some small reminders of their past. With donations and assistance from the Azabu Rotary Club and a counterpart club in Iloilo City for the Iloilo Kai, a memorial marker for war victims at the city center was inaugurated on February 14, 1976. Tanaka and other former imin and guntai were in attendance. The accompanying contingent from Okinawa included Tsugohide and Francisca Aragaki and their older children born in Negros and Iloilo. In addition, Kumai himself also undertook to raise funds from Japanese veterans for a simple memorial at the suicide site, completed with counterpart labor by ‘war orphans’ and their foster families in 1980.

Up to the late 1980s, family groups and Nisei descendants were primarily concerned with sentimental reunions in the Philippines or in Japan. Undertakings for this purpose were personally pursued through formal and informal channels. Since the 1990s, perceived favorable outcomes of the revision in the Japanese immigration law and the more concerted push for formal recognition of the Philippine nikkeijin encouraged closer interactions among descendants for self-organization and affiliations with national nikkeijin organizations. Moreover, soon after the turn of the millennium, imin presence in the Philippines was highlighted by centennial celebrations where their largest communities were established – Baguio in 2003 and Davao in 2005. These were occasions that gave homage to their accomplishments and contributions to their host communities. Though the imin in Panay were characteristically few and dispersed, they have also produced the nikkeijin in this ‘sending community’. With postwar and internal migration, the fluid mix of ‘original’ and ‘new’ nikkeijin becomes even more complex. Some nikkeijin cohorts of branch families have moved away; conversely, the same from elsewhere in the country or Japan have also come to live in Panay. Regardless of location, the Sansei and Yonsei who have come of age around the turn of the 21st century apparently have a more forward-looking appreciation of developments that open opportunities for them to make a living in Japan. Since its founding in 1992, the Manila-based nation-wide nikkeijin federation has attempted to consolidate and promote the demands of the nikkeijin for resolution of problems

ranging from war damage compensation, pensions and benefits as well as migration into Japan. Around the same time, various local organizations were also working to pool the interests of the nikkeijin in Panay. Since 1990, activities of Negros war veteran Junichiro Doi and the Nikkei Firipin-jin Shien no Kai (Filipino-Japanese Descendants Support Association or FJDSA) based in Kochi, Japan – with its scholarship program, job training and medical relief as well as language training across Negros and Panay islands – led to the organization of the ‘Japanese-Filipino Descendants Association in Iloilo’, the nucleus of what in turn became the Iloilo Nikkei-jin Kai, Inc. (INJKI).34 At this time, the initial organizers in touch with Doi were Sansei with connections beyond Panay; the first president of the INJKI drew his roots from Japanese in Surigao in Mindanao. They were not quite familiar with prior events in the 1970s related to the Nisei in Panay. In 1991, the Tokyo-based Japan-Philippine Volunteer Association (JPVA), led by its President, Masataka Ajiro of the Enjoji temple in Chofu City, Tokyo, also took an interest on the nikkejin in Panay and followed up support for the local organization when Doi died. Besides providing a residential lot and an office building, the JPVA invested in a rice farm for the descendant organization to cultivate for its organizational needs. Further, paralleling its help for the huge nikkeijin association in Davao, the JPVA provided tuition allowances as well as Japanese language lessons for deserving children of INJKI members. The INJKI assisted in carrying out the nation-wide surveys for the Legal Aid office as arranged with Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, problems related to the conduct of the nikkeijin registration process in Iloilo City in August 1995 eventually resulted into the formation of a separate Panay Nippi Association. Although the official registration process is over, the local associations continue to enlist additional claims and link them, as needed, with the FNJKP, the PNJMF or the PNLSC. Of late, however, internal problems in the INJKI have made the Panay Nippi, consecutively led by Jeffrey Roda (Takaezu) and Leonor Nakaya Flores, the more useful contact of local claimants for the processing of their identity claims. Private recruiters in Japan and the Philippines have not been far behind, directly offering ‘pay-back’ arrangements to prospective clients upon their employment in Japan.

Given these scenarios, overlapping developments linked the fate of various cohorts of the nikkeijin of Panay. Of the older Nisei survivors of the Maasin suicide, two of the Kawakamis lived to be adults and separately travelled to meet their parents’ families in Japan and confirmed their nationality – Mihoko in 1986 and Tadanori in 1990. However, Tadanori died without issue; and, not one of Mihoko’s children have opted to reside in Japan. Isao Onaga finally met his father Kotaro in Iloilo in 1974, but was not able to join him at his Okinawa home before Kotaro died in 1992. However, Isao met with an uncle and cousins in Tokyo when he joined the second delegation of nikkeijin petitioners in 1997 organized by the FNJKP, along with other Panay-associated Nisei such as Pablo Delgado (Tôma) and Gerardo Roda (Takaezu). Though fearful about moving to Japan, all five of Onaga’s own children are presently nikkeijin in Japan. Tami Oshiro met her daughter Toshiko again in 1984, almost 40 years since that fateful day at Maasin. Soon after, Toshiko went on to live with her mother until the latter died in 1998. Ultimately regaining her Japanese nationality, Toshiko has been joined by most of her own children as nikkeijin.

34 The core group of Sanseis were Jesus Enrique Matsui Solano, Ramon Tanaka, Archimedes Momohara Guartilla, Arnel Tomasaki, Zaldivar branch of the Nakayas. In time, they drew support of Nisei such as Antonio Takahashi, Pablo Delgado, Pedro Tanaka, and Jose Robinson Umano.

Apart from the Maasin survivors, the 6-year old Nisei, Katsunori Miyata was stranded near Jaro plaza when he failed to wake up after a lull in the retreat of the Japanese from the city in 1945. Making his way back to his father’s restaurant, he was taken into the family of Teresa Avelino (later Villaflor) who had been an employee there. Locally known as ‘Conrado Villaflor’, Katsunori or ‘Sunny’ spent his productive years as a laborer at the city port area. Though Miyata was able to contact Avelino as early as the mid-1950s, arrangements for Katsunori’s travel to join his family in Japan fell through due to problems with intermediaries. Finally in 1973, Katsunori met his father and two brothers in Iloilo. His story was broadcast in Japan and drew sponsorship of the Azabu Lions Club for his 1974 visit with his own family to Kanagawa and to the ancestral grave (bochi) in Hyogo, Japan. Yet even with the prospect of a better life, Katsunori could not conceive of moving to Japan given language and other cultural difficulties. Nonetheless, all four of Miyata’s own children have become nikkeijin in Japan.

Also at the time of Japanese withdrawal from the city, the young Nisei siblings, Kiyohiko and Setsuko Miyazato, were living at Sta. Barbara with the family of Lourdes Sequio who had been their caretaker. Their mother died at childbirth while interned at San Enrique at the start of the war; and just then, they were unaware that their missing father had also died in a bomb blast. Known as Francisco and Salvacion Sequio, they grew up basically uneducated and have persisted as farm workers and other peripheral rural occupations. Their father’s sister, Haruko Urasaki (nee Miyazato), met them in February 1974. The meeting led to Kiyohiko’s extended stay with kin in Okinawa and Kanagawa. However, Kiyohiko returned to Iloilo after a troubled two years for which he was unprepared to adjust. Setsuko (now Solasito), on the other hand, had only an occasion for a sponsored visit with relatives Kanagawa and Okinawa in 1990. Though she had kept her father’s hanko (personal seal), she remains an undocumented full-blooded Japanese national in Panay; unlike her elder brother Kiyohiko, her birth in 1941 was not registered in their father’s koseki in Ie-son, Okinawa. Since Kiyohiko is unmarried and without children, the prospective nikkeijin from their line are represented by Setsuko’s eight adult children.

Circumstances for Panay-associated Nisei and Sansei vary widely. Soon after the signing of the peace treaty, Hyoshiro Nakaya and Tadaichi Kono were exceptional Issei who returned to their families and communities in Kalibo, Capiz and Igbaras, Iloilo, respectively. In both instances, the presence of their patriarchs among them must have meant the renewal of severed ties and the creation of memories. While his wife and most children decided to stay in Panay, Hyoshiro Nakaya lost touch with his accompanying son Hiroshi (Roberto) at the crush of repatriated passengers disembarking at Uraga port. The latter went on to provide for himself in a strange yet familiar environment of the service community of the US naval base at Yokosuka. Ultimately, he wed a Japanese woman who actively aided his long-awaited reunion with Hyoshiro who had to remake a life for himself at Gifu. Like many repatriates, he had been brewing plans for at least a return visit in the early 1950s. As soon as Japan-Philippines relations allowed, Nakaya came and overstayed his visit to Kalibo in 1957; but he successfully petitioned to remain with his wife and 10 living children until his death in 1965. Interestingly, even with Nakaya’s return in 1957, some branches of his clan continue to use the less Japanese-like spelling of their name as ‘Nacaya’; nevertheless so many of them are now in Japan. Meanwhile, members of the Kono family, known locally as the Heredias, maintained slow mail communication with their patriarch

long before Kono’s return in 1963 until his death in 1969. At present, family members and their spouses now in Japan are pooling resources to have their last surviving Nisei, Consolacion Heredia Hingco, personally enter Japan to ensure the prospective nikkeijin status of her own and her siblings’ progeny.

With the help of able and willing kin in Japan, some other older Nisei acted on their aspirations to regain their nationality, as in the case of the remaining mestizo children of Genpan Okudaira from Okinawa and Consuelo Rondael of Pototan, Iloilo. This candy manufacturer who stayed briefly in Iloilo and eventually settled in Negros, was repatriated from Leyte and was unable to communicate with his wife and 12 children. But efforts of his eldest daughter Josefina (Yoshi) in 1956 to find his whereabouts in Okinawa were successful. Though remarried by this time, Okudaira personally assisted their entry into Japan since the 1970s. By the time he died in 1991, only Josefina was the remaining Nisei in Iloilo; nonetheless, she has since been able to visit her siblings and the large and growing clan. The offspring of Miyoshi Haraoka and wife Natividad Sarrol, who married in 1924 had been able to keep in contact with his natal family in Japan. Only 3 of their 5 children reached adult age and only their married daughter, Leonisa (Tomie), now Mrs. Cartagena, remained in Panay. The Metro Manila-based family members carry the surname Sarrol; but they all branched numerous Sansei (and Yonsei) as nikkeijin in Japan.

Others were helped by contacts established in the 1970s. The widow and children of Shegeichi Umano (Raymunda Britanico) were able to get in touch with their paternal kin in Yamaguchi with the help of Junko Tanaka in the early 1970s. Acknowledged by a paternal uncle in Yamaguchi and with most of his children already in Japan since the late 1990s, Jose Robinson travelled to Japan in 2003 to obtain his Japanese passport and citizenship. To date, he has been the only one from Panay who has been able to do so and returned to live in Iloilo City. Evelina Vidal (now Soluta) only learned of her Japanese parentage from her mother Margarita Vidal who had married Saburo Akamine at the Capiz cathedral. Upon his repatriation, Margarita destroyed his papers with other memorabilia for fear of being associated with the Japanese in those yet hostile times. With the help of Suehiro and other helpful descendants, she met her father for the first time in 1974 at age 29. By then, however, he had remarried in Japan. Perhaps because he had a previous Japanese wife and child even before he moved to the Philippines, Akamine could not convince his new wife to understand his wish to recognize Evelina as his child. Hence, when Evelina was granted a chance to visit him in Japan in 1990, she was unable to even see him once more before he died. As a result, she is not as hopeful of being able to provide an opportunity for her own children to be recognized as nikkeijin.

Still other families were able to pursue their claims only when local nikkeijin organizations began to function in the area. The carpenter Kashiro Takahashi already had a wife and child in Hiroshima before coming to the Philippines around 1920; but he married Esperanza Dayaday of Pototan, Iloilo in 1937 with whom he had three children. Upon the order for the Japanese to evacuate the city, Takahashi had brought his family to St. Paul’s Hospital where he kissed them goodbye. Esperanza learned of his death at guerrilla encounters at Sambag, Jaro in March 1945 from the Wataki’s widow Natividad. Hence, they simply returned to their home but found it looted while they were gone. In time, they all adopted the surname of their maternal kin, Parrenas. Through the initiative of the youngest Nisei, Antonio (Taro), they actively joined the emergent INJKI in the early 1990s, registered

in the surveys in 1995, and finally obtained their koseki-tôhon just before Esperanza died in 2000. Hence, many Sansei from all three lines have entered as nikkeijin in Japan. There were peculiar circumstances involving mixed Filipino-Japanese families, not all of which have been success stories that confirm nikkeijin identity. Primitiva Sumalapao of Sta. Barbara, Iloilo married a carpenter named Yamazaki who died when their daughter Angelina was just 3 years old; then in 1928, she married his friend Motozo Tanaka from Hiroshima and had two more children, Teodora and Gonzalo. Teodora had sought the help of Suehiro to find news of their father who went missing from the hacienda where he worked in Negros; only recently confirmed that he had died in the mountains therein towards end of the war. With other imin families, Teodora was captured in Negros, brought to Iloilo, and then to the POW camp in Leyte where there were about 20 Japanese children. When asked whether she wished to go to Japan, she opted to stay with the intention to look for her brother and mother who had been left behind in Negros. She left the camp with a woman from her mother’s home town that she befriended there; for a year she became a household helper while studying Grade IV before coming to Iloilo. As Mrs. Maquiling of Pavia, Iloilo, she had seven children of her own. Like other Nisei in the 1990s, Teodora went through the registration process and patiently awaited confirmation of her nikkeijin status. In October 2006, she was among the FNJKP delegation to the Tokyo Family Court and her presence was reported by local media in Hiroshima. In the end, she was able to establish connections with surviving family. Aparrently, Motozo had a previous marriage and three children in Japan before coming to the Philippines. Teodora, then 75 years, was met by a nephew in Tokyo and was welcomed by his mother and her father’s younger brother, Motoyoshi then 91 years. At present, she awaits further developments to obtain a shuseki through action of the Japanese Family Court. However, there has not been much progress in the case of her elder half-sister, now Mrs. Angelina Macarse of Maasin. Her younger brother Gonzalo went by the surname Dellera where he settled in Mindoro and died there in 1989; his family has not been able to accomplish the late registration papers needed for the processing of his claim as nikkeijin.

Soon after the start of the war, Nisei Gerardo Roda and two sisters were sent away from Iloilo to Zamboanga by their father Izo Takaezu whom they knew only as the leader of the Japanese fishers in Iloilo. In their youth, their mother had changed their name from her own (Rudas) to ‘Roda’ to diminish danger and discrimination due to any connection with the Japanese. In due course, Roda himself moved to work in Dumaguete and had his own family. Upon learning of Suehiro’s experience and help for others, he started to compile evidence of their Japanese ancestry in 1995, including affidavits from persons who knew Izô ‘Takayes’ and his family and their baptismal certificates that carried his name, all of which were endorsed by Suehiro to the Japanese embassy. Roda’s efforts were given a push at the time of the surveys for Japanese descendants; his own married son Jeffrey was already working in Iloilo City. Jeffrey became active with the Panay Nippi that he led in collaboration with the FNJKP, and, in 1997, Gerardo was among the delegates sent to petition for nikkeijin claims in Japan. In the process, he was visited and acknowledged by half-siblings, Kiyoshi and Hideko, of the six children of Takaezu in Japan. Eventually, Jeffrey was associated with Mirox Incorporated, a recruitment agency that also strove to assist the registration of nikkeijin claimants from Panay. Since then, all branch families of the Takaezu family have nikkeijin members in Japan.

During the author’s research in Japan in 2003, a few remaining Issei and Nisei as well as war veterans were informants who shared memories, insights and memorabilia of their links with the prewar settlement in Panay. In addition, a purposive search located over 70 Sansei of associated families; outside of Tokyo and Osaka, they were found in towns and cities of the prefectures of Aichi, Chiba, Ibaraki, Nagano, Okinawa, and Shizuoka. The majority come from the family lines of the imin prominently included in this exposition, though there were a few with whom no prior contact had been established in the Philippines. Like other Philippine nikkeijin, they did not congregate in particular areas as did the Koreans in Kawasaki or the Brazilians in Hamamatsu. Most of them first entered Japan between 1999 and 2000, the earliest in 1994. The PNKMF and the Southern Philippines Nikkeijin- Kai Foundation were important vehicles for their entry, with some cultural orientation and rudimentary language lessons. The oldest among these nikkeijin at that time was the 59 year-old granddaughter of Haraoka, though the great majority were in their late 20s and early 30s. Most have been joined by non-nikkei spouses; and at least 3 family groups have been joined by Yonsei members. Their ranks include a few college graduates (commerce, engineering, and architecture), a bank officer, a social worker, and two former town and village elected officials. Only one was encouraged to invest in formal Japanese language lessons in his spare time.

Outside of contracts arranged through foundations for most upon their initial entry into Japan, most were hired by job brokers whose arrangements usually included their apartment housing. However, two couples then had already accessed local facilities for public housing. Many had started in fish processing companies, but most were by then employed in small contractor companies supplying parts of the automobile industry, printer and copiers, cameras, leather products, cleaning and maintenance, construction, or gardening. At that time, most had already been employed by more than one company; but only one among them handled an office job. Their hourly wage rates varied according to the newness of their presence as nikkeijin, and jobs for females often began with lower rates than males. Yet each one is able to generate a low 130,000 and a high 400,000 yen a month, though these monthly incomes are erratic (dependent on the extent of allowed overtime or access to extra take-home work). They generally worked in factories that had other nikkeijin employees from other countries.

These nikkeijin of former imin in Panay lived outside of the home areas of their ancestors and often did not know or have any contact with local kin members; the Okudairas, Umanos and Tômas were exceptions. Those who belong to the same branches of family groups tend to live together or close to each other. Two families with children of school age were able to integrate them into the local school system. Church services and an occassional hanabi (fireworks) festival were instances for them to interact beyond family and company groups with other Filipinos in their area, particularly the married entertainers who usually help them to adjust in new areas. Since in Japan, a couple of Sansei are known to have married Nihonjin. Despite early difficulties and angst with employers and/or brokers, they seem to be more than just content with their situation in cramped quarters and with aching bodies from unfamiliar manual aspects of their work. They are happy to earn and save sufficient pieces of lapad (10,000 yen bill) to remit for needs back home in the Philippines. Mobile phones (keitai) and telephone cards were valued items that enable contacts back home. Yet many are prone to splurge on Coca-cola and adobo, even as they scour flea

markets for gifts to send through balikbayan boxes that crowd their sleeping areas. Only in two families (Umano and Okudaira) was the idea of applying to become Japanese citizens under consideration. Yet most of them spoke of other family members’ plans for joining them in Japan.

Despite the strides made by these nikkeijin, there are those who, for various reasons, have not as yet voluntarily (or successfully) pursued these avenues and opportunities. For one, there are the yet undocumented claimants, e.g., from the Akamine, Ando, Hayashida, Miyazato, Naka, Nakamura, Nishimoto, Takara, Yanada, Yano, and Yotoko families. In some instances, advances offered by various agencies have been side-tracked for daily necessities or have been insufficient for claimants to complete requirements for registering applications as nikkeijin. Other descendants have also taken the option to migrate elsewhere: Nisei Carmen Tajitsu-Javier, mestiza daughter of carpenter-contractor Ichiji Tajitsu who had died during the war, moved with her children to Australia in the 1980s; Maasin survivor Mihoko Kawakami who married an American citizen permanently moved to the US in the late 1990s. While reunion visits and memorializing rituals may have provided some closure for returning Isseis and Nisei, the surviving Nisei and older Sansei have long carried the stigma as collaborators of the regime that had killed 1.1 million Filipinos, a figure almost double that of Japanese killed in the Philippines. This has been less of a burden for the most Sansei whose youth has shielded them from such memories and have largely assimilated with Filipino life ways. Yet the disadvantages of being Japanese in the postwar period prejudiced their chances for normal lives and opportunities. Consequently, the pragmatic prospects that the Sansei and Yonsei expect from the opportunity to claim their identity and, at least, try out lives as nikkeijin in Japan are motivating them to stake their claims whatever it takes.


Concluding Statements

The narrative situates human elements and specific conditions of Panay into the story of migration between Japan and the Philippines, particularly since the early 20th century. As a whole, the entry of the imin was a gradual process and they did not noticeably engage in undertakings that directly challenged the livelihood of the local population. Yet as they integrated with the local community, they maintained a separate ethnic identity and strong links with their home culture and country. Mobilized by the guntai with responsibilities throughout the years of the occupation, imin ventures and relations were altogether drastically altered by the state of conflict with the host community. The once peaceful coexistence that the Issei and Nisei enjoyed turned to one of distrust and enmity. Many of them suffered from the strains of intermittent hostilities and the struggle to survive on scarce resources and amenities. Eventually, the terrible outcomes of the retreat to the mountains of Maasin and Leon took a heavy toll on lives and national pride. Without a doubt, they suffered too when they saw the marks of defeat on Japan.

Distressing ruptures in official, socio-cultural and psychological ties obliterated many fond memories of the imin’s earlier important (even dominant) existence, even in ‘Davaokuo’. The repatriation of imin with the guntai put an end to their physical presence in Panay and the rest of the country. In many instances, whatever memories and memorabilia remained were inadvertently lost or even actively suppressed. Most of those who stayed behind lived below the poverty threshold; only a few were able to practice a profession due to problems of access to proper education. Lingering ill feelings and vivid memories of the

cruel war shaped their marginal lives and effectively hid these Japanese from the general public’s attention and, to a certain degree, even their own collective memories. Since they lost their frames of reference by which to cultivate their ‘Japanese-ness’, until recently, the surviving Nisei and Sansei groups in Panay, as in other parts of the Philippines, have had little or no awareness of their distinct cultural roots.

Along with the attention to the ‘war orphan’ Nisei located in the 1970s, the intermittent gatherings due to visits of civilian and veteran groups were occasions that stirred memories and revived connections. Yet these links did not hold as much significance for younger Sansei and emerging Yonsei since they had not witnessed the vitality of community life during the prewar era or experienced the traumas of war and repatriation. Through the 1980s, efforts to locate descendants linked issues of identity and ethnicity to practical questions of nationality and residence status for work in Japan. Only when imin descendants came to be regarded as nikkeijin in the 1990s have their attitudes become more open to acknowledge their ancestry and become ‘more Japanese’. Many persistently strive to confirm their Japanese roots and gain access to the opportunities proffered by current Japanese immigration policies.

Moreover, along with the global influx entering Japan, the ranks of the Philippine nikkeijin have grown not only from natural increases but also from fresh sources. Their composition has become more varied not only from the earlier imin to the Philippines but also from movements of Filipino migrants into Japan – the young ‘new Nisei’ of postwar movements and intermarriages, particularly since the 1980s. Emigration has transplanted them into new social spheres that define the terms by which they are allowed to stay. Clearly, various implications of the experiences and prospects of these cohorts are beyond the scope of this exposition and need to be more fully studied.

For now, laying down these antecedents of the nikkeijin story enhances presentday local knowledge and understanding of the Japanese in Iloilo City and the rest of Panay. This account engenders an appreciation of how the original dekasegi who came to the Philippines transformed into the imin whose descendants, the nikkeijin, are once again the contemporary dekasegi into Japan. Given the favorable prospects in Japan, many descendants now aspire for lineage legacies that entitle them a ‘normal’ (formal) nikkeijin identity. Parallel to the transformation of the Japanese who came to the Philippines in the early 20th century, from dekasegi to imin, we may yet see the day when the Philippine nikkeijin – perhaps as Nihonjin – are able to become more than just dekasegi of old in the Philippines. War had aborted the continued stay of the imin in the Philippines; the road is not so clear as yet for the nikkeijin in Japan. Hence, it is worthwhile to track the unfolding saga of the Sansei and Yonsei in Japan as well as in the Philippines in the years to come. Finally, since migration processes are motivated by specific conditions and needs and produce differentiated effects, looking back lends to the consideration of complex factors that impinge on the continued arrangements of the nikkeijin as a whole within contemporary Japanese society. Whether or not Philippine nikkeijin, among others – as individuals or collectivities – adjust and adapt in Japan is affected not only by the niches they establish and the variable reception they obtain in their workplaces and settlement areas. In the end, their decision to enter or stay in Japan would also be colored by Japan’s acceptance of the combined impact of the increasingly global labor market and the diasporas that engender a multi-ethnic society.



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