Revisiting the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines: The Japanese and US occupations of the Philippines. The same difference?

There are two distinct destinies in Philippine history where we must circle back on their historical, political, and seminal struggles and on what those were all about. 

I’m referring to two imperial whirlwinds that occurred on separate paths. The first is the US colonization of the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century. The second is the Japanese occupation of the Philippine islands during World War II.

It is a long-held conclusion that the Japanese occupation was impervious to the enhancement of the “de-Americanized” Filipino identity. It was also taken as a given that the Japanese occupation was out-and-out  “evil” while the US colonization was far and away virtuous and beneficial for the Filipino people.

The truth lies somewhere in between the triumphalism of Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere in the Philippines and the wish-fulfillment of American colonial intentions.

Professor Reynaldo Ileto, notable for his nationalistic sources of representation, challenges the widely-accepted depiction of the Japanese occupation. 

Ileto broached a question not many would dare to ask: did the Japanese occupation have any advantageous impact for Filipinos? Was it an interplay of anti-Western colonial synergy and not purely a program of foreign Asiatic repression? 

Ileto and other overseers of historical modification re-explore the accumulative accounts and narratives of the Philippine-American conflict (1899 to 1902 or 1913 depending on one’s projection) and that of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines (1942-1945).

One major factor that has made a difference in historical perception is the impulse to wrap the US colonial occupation with a kosher bill of health. The “benevolent assimilation” mission promulgated by the United States in the Philippines served to uphold the promise of bringing civilization to the natives. It also gave a foretaste of the veneer of moral legitimacy for the sanitizing of history and the crimes against humanity that the United States committed in its imperial holding.

The deck of Philippine history has been rearranged by what could be described as a stoppage, a stoppage of the “redeeming qualities” of American benevolent assimilation. With all the relevant convictions in mind, Reynaldo Ileto in “Knowledge and Pacification: On the U.S. Conquest and the Writing of Philippine History”, contends that the “Japanese occupation had a positive effect.”

Such a statement shouldn’t necessarily come across as collaborationist in the darkest sense. Wartime Philippines saw its share of “collaborationists” who were accused of betraying the Filipino people and of kowtowing to the Japanese conquerors and being their puppets. 

But all partisanship aside, Ileto offered that the Japanese occupation created a salutary, protective split between the tour de force of American colonialism and a revitalization of Rizal’s Philippines, an impetus of which would be the 1896 Philippine Revolution. 

The occupation reconstructed the spiritual and cultural bridge that connected Filipinos to the ideal of self-determination.This journey back through the rearview mirror of history would leverage the Philippine Republic of 1943---being what it was---on the same vitalizing wavelength with the prestige of 1896. 

As the leaders of the 1943 republic—known as the Second Philippine Republic—President Jose P. Laurel, foreign minister Claro Recto, and National Assembly Speaker Benigno S. Aquino would strive to be the agents of this retro course. The risks of their decision-making was clear: their association with their Japanese overseers would open these figures to accusations of collaboration.

Historians have proceeded as if these figures knew exactly what they were doing in working with the Japanese, in effect selling their soul to the devil. Despite their claims of collaborating for the sake of the Filipino people’s welfare—the arch-collaborators would ostensibly act as a buffer from the worst of Japanese behavior—it was hardly a secret that President Laurel had been engaged in collusion with the Japanese during the pre-war years. Meanwhile, Benigno Aquino served as director-general of the right-wing, pro-Japanese Kalibapi political party.

However, Laurel and Recto and other nationalist leaders endeavored to bring about a reckoning with America’s passive-aggressive, guileful model of colonizing the Filipinos. With the profusion of Japanese influence and support, these “straddlers” of empires as Ileto called them, conjured the cultural and political spirit of Jose Rizal, the intellectual paragon of the 1896 Revolution against Spain. The revolutionary memory was ripe for co-optation by the 1943 Republic in its principals’ devotion to the cause of Philippine independence.

What also gets to the core of this separate historical reality is that the Japanese potentates fostered---among Filipino academics and artists---a public, nationalist-inflected review of pre-modern indigenous culture and of the Philippine Revolutionary period. For the Americans, the restoration of these two intersecting threads of Philippine history was a descent into ever-decreasing circles that would present a threat to their domination.

In “Knowledge and Pacification,” Reynaldo Ileto portrays the Japanese occupation as a “cultural renaissance.” Ileto characterized this picture as “the resurrection of the Filipino-American War as a key event in the national narrative.” 

Ileto writes that he has “shown how Japan, a third though short-lived empire, functioned to enable a creative tension to be established between the two major empires that figure in the Filipino historical narrative”. 

Ileto’s theme of a more cultivated historical discourse is not an instance of taking Japanese atrocities in the Philippines in stride. By no means is Ileto apologizing for the sadistic actions of the infamous Bataan Death March, the massacre of thousands of Filipino civilians by the fanatical Rear-Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi during the 1945 Battle of Manila, or any of the myriad forms of systematic violence perpetrated by the Japanese fascists. 

But Ileto’s argument puts the US colonization of the Philippines in an awkward light. How can the Americans boast of “benevolent assimilation” when the shadows of the Balangiga and Bud Dajo exterminations hang over them, when the death toll of Filipino citizens stemming from the imperialist Philippine-American War stands at 200,000?

The certitudes of history have molded countries yet they have also prevented the making whole of the Filipinos’ socio-historical consciousness. Nations atrophy when by force of habit, they passively accept the lessons of history. They progress forward only when they embrace regenerative dissonance  and variability.

ALLEN GABORRO