The Philippine Online Chronicles

A war baby, I was fed, while growing up, with stories about the difficult war years and the tenuous  peace of the Japanese occupation.

It should have been easy for me to hate the Hapon but the ambivalent stories impressed upon me made it hard for me to indict them or indict them absolutely. Sure, I was to be later shocked with accounts about “Japanese atrocities “ (why does that phrase sound almost like a cliché?):  how the Japanese treacherously bombed Pearl Harbor, how 10,000 Filipino and American soldiers perished in the Bataan Death March, how Japanese soldiers used some Pinays  for personal "comfort." But maybe because my immediate family was largely spared of wartime catastrophes, with no one dead nor hurt nor gravely abused, the tales twice told me were mostly benign.

The first story happened on Day 1 of my chequered life.

From Gagalangin, Tondo where we lived to Ermita where the Philippine General Hospital was located was an hour’s distance by karetela (horse-drawn carriage). My long expectant mom, whose time finally had come, would have preferred to be whisked away in a cab for she sensed, by dint of experience, the baby inside her was in a hurry to get out. But alas, taxis were as hard to come by those days as American Spam luncheon meat and Hereford corned beef were hard to buy. Sure enough, by the time the karetela ho-hooed to a stop, it's seat and floor had been splattered with placental blood, with baby’s head already bobbing out. My dad, by then a bundle of nerves, clambered down so hurriedly that he almost slipped on the pavement. Who would happen to come by and steady him with a swift hand but a Japanese officer who, summarizing the situation in one sweeping glance, later helped lift anxious mother and half-born infant from out of the carriage into the hospital’s obstetric unit?

When I was a toddler, another friendly Japanese soldier came into my life, or so my Lola loved to tell me. He was a sentry who would pass by our house to and from work. I reminded him of his own daughter whom he sorely missed, he would tell my Lola who subbed as my guardian every time my mom tended her rice store at the talipapa. For the entitlement to pinch my cheeks and make goo-goo eyes at me, the Japanese would give me pieces of bubble gum and candy.

These stories were, of course, third-person accounts but were told and retold so many times I sometimes confuse the memory of the telling with the first-hand memory of living the events. Actually, it would take about 30 years more before I made my first true Japanese friend.

The Nagoya International Training Center, Nagoya, Japan, where I was sent on a fellowship training on small business promotion by my office in 1974, became both school and home to me for three months.

I arrived at the Center early evening after a two-hour trip by shinkansen (bullet train) from Tokyo. The train ride had been pleasant but uneventful and I was reading a pocketbook some of the time -- until we reached tall, snow capped mountain ranges partly hidden by blue gray clouds --  whereupon a couple of Japanese gentlemen suddenly rose from their seats to jolt me away from my book, almost frantically pointing outward. “Look, Fuji, Fuji!” they chimed. Truly, what right had I to bury my nose on a banal story when I could feast my eyes on splendor and majesty just by looking out the window?! I was grateful for the magnificent eyeful, but more than that, I was amazed how proud they were of their Mt. Fuji and – as I found out later -- of many things Japanese.

I fell in love with the Japanese people overnight.

At the Center, I was met by smiling ladies of the front desk – Fifi-san and Sako-san – who quickly took me to my training program manager, Date-san, for a crash briefing. (I came late -- so what else is new? -- for the program; my co-participants from other developing countries had arrived a week earlier.)  Date-san would later convince his superiors at the Center to get him a lady assistant for the sole reason I was the only female among 30 attending that international program.  (When she was finally hired, Sasaki-san's task, among others, was to sit beside me during bus and train tours and room with me on overnight trips. She and Date became an item before the program ended and got wed the following year, both giving me credit for their coupling --  but that is another story.)

Fifi, most especially, soon became a friend. She was impressed I spoke good English and she wanted to hone her own grasp of the language by conversing it with me. She sat with me at breakfast at the cafeteria to chat and listened to my presentations in class. One night, she sneaked into my room with a Japanese kimono and accessories which she urged me to fit into, then fussed with my hair to make it into a bouffant, geisha-like. Then, she took pictures of me with my own camera. As the days wore on, she entrusted me with her own fragile story of a loveless marriage with a humorless Japanese businessman who didn’t know how to kiss and a budding romance with a  sweet-talking Puerto Rican who, like me,  was studying at the Center and who, presumably, was an expert kisser.

That first weekend, I woke up late and that was how I met the obliging cleaning ladies of the Center. They had to reluctantly knock on my door so they could change my bed linens. When I asked, they produced an extra pillow for me with alacrity. In turn I rummaged my still unopened maleta for a pair of shell-flower arrangements which I brought from home. The following day, the two ladies came back laden with real flowers for my room. When next I gave them small souvenirs from Nara prefecture when we toured there, they responded with offerings of Meiji almond chocolates , the first time I tasted those oval yummies which thereafter became my favorite. If I had not backed down, the exchange of gifts might have gone on forever. But that was how the Japanese are, I was told later. They are quick to return favor for favor, gift for gift -- fiercely zealous of their sense of self-reliance.

Everywhere I went, I felt warm and comfortable among this bowing, smiling people who seem to especially like foreigners. When I got lost on the streets – which was often – they would stop to give directions regardless they had to struggle with the language barrier. At an industry chamber we visited, our hosts announced they had a surprise for us. It was a lunch of rice, bangus, adobo, and papaya.

Toward the end of the course, an elderly visiting professor asked a question in class so unexpected he might as well have dropped a tiny bomb.  “Are the Japanese still hated in your respective countries?” I felt especially alluded to and for sure, the professor was directly looking at me.

Caught flatfooted, it took me time to blurt out an answer which I tried to carve out from my heart, knowing it might be important at least to this one person before me.

Personally, I said haltingly but honestly, there has never been hatred. Perhaps this is true of most of my generation, I qualified, who after all didn't really suffer the war.   But those older than I was,  those who remember, those who lost a parent, a friend or a brother – they might still have difficulty forgetting.

I added that war has a way of surfacing the worst among people of any nationality or race –  regardless Japanese, Filipino, American, or European. And a fighting man – away from home, at the edge of death, scared and tired and hungry, and virtually eating bullets for breakfast -- is not on his best behavior.

Then after all, I concluded, the Japanese also had their Nagasaki and Hiroshima. “You were victims, too.”

I remember Japan and the Japanese these days as almost the whole world pays tribute to the grace they are demonstrating under fire. How they never panicked in the face of the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and danger of radioactivity. How they never pushed nor shoved while queuing for rations or for transportation. How doctors and dentists treated the sick and the injured for free regardless they themselves had been ravaged. How repairmen fixed bicycles without charge. How the Fukushima 50 unselfishly stayed and plodded on to plug leaks at the nuclear plant, at great risk to life and limb, even as their numbers swelled to 700 strong.

All eyes look to Japan and wonder if they would have coped as well, befallen by a similar tragedy.

Photo: “Mount Fuji” by , c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved