𝘑𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘯 C𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘱𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴 F𝘪𝘷𝘦 T𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴. 𝘞𝘦 R𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳 O𝘯𝘦.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐀𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐬- From My recent Readings on Filipino-Japanese History

𝘑𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘯 𝘤𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘱𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴 Fi𝘷𝘦 T𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴. 𝘞𝘦 R𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳 O𝘯e.

1. 𝗠𝗔𝗡𝗜𝗟𝗔. 𝗠𝗔𝗬 𝟯𝟭, 𝟭𝟱𝟵𝟮.

A ship from Japan is in the bay. The ships for Mexico are about to sail.

Governor Dasmariñas has just sealed his letters to the king when a Japanese Christian named Harada walks in carrying a box.

Inside the box, on gilded paper wider than a papal bull, is a letter from Hideyoshi, the man who has just finished conquering Japan.

Harada translates it. The governor does not trust the translation.

He writes to Madrid that he has no interpreter who knows both languages, and that the only version of the letter he has is the one Harada chose to give him.

The part he understands is the demand. Submit, send an envoy, or be visited.

The Spanish have been in Manila twenty-one years. There are already Japanese traders living outside the walls.

The governor’s reply is courteous and slow. He sends a friar to Japan to talk.

The friar’s ship goes down off Formosa with Hideyoshi’s second letter on board. Hideyoshi goes to Korea instead. Manila never has to answer.

That is the first arrival. A letter, and a demand nobody could read properly.

2. 𝗗𝗜𝗟𝗔𝗢, 𝗢𝗨𝗧𝗦𝗜𝗗𝗘 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗪𝗔𝗟𝗟𝗦. 𝗗𝗘𝗖𝗘𝗠𝗕𝗘𝗥 𝟮𝟭, 𝟭𝟲𝟭𝟰.

A Chinese junk comes up the bay with three hundred and fifty Japanese on it. They are Christians.

The shogun has banned the religion and told them to leave or die.

Their leader is a former lord named Takayama Ukon, who gave up a castle rather than give up a baptism.

Manila receives them. The Spanish offer Takayama a role in a plot to go back and overthrow the shogun under the banner of protecting Japanese Christians. He declines.

Forty-four days after he lands, he is dead of fever.

The others stay. They settle in a district the Spanish call Dilao, the yellow place, where a few hundred Japanese already live.

The number grows to about three thousand. The Spanish like their trade and do not trust them.

There had been a Japanese rising there in 1606. Eight cannons on the wall of Intramuros are pointed at Dilao.

In 1636 the shogunate closes Japan. No more ships. The people of Dilao cannot go home, so they stop being Japanese and become Manileños. Their names dissolve into ours.

That is the second arrival. Refugees, under the guns of the people who took them in.

Then nothing for two hundred and sixty years. The door is shut from the Japanese side.

3. 𝗕𝗘𝗡𝗚𝗨𝗘𝗧 𝗥𝗢𝗔𝗗. 𝗢𝗖𝗧𝗢𝗕𝗘𝗥 𝟭𝟵𝟬𝟯.

The Americans are cutting a road up a mountain to build themselves a cool town, and the Filipinos will not die fast enough to finish it. So Washington imports labor.

In 1903 and 1904 a little over five thousand Japanese enter the country. Hundreds go up the gorge with dynamite and shovels.

Between October 1903 and August 1904, ninety-seven of them die on the road. Disease mostly. Some from the falls and the blasting.

The road opens in 1905 and is later named for the American colonel who ran it. Baguio is built at the top.

The laborers are laid off. Some go home. Some go to Manila.

Two hundred or so are taken south by a Japanese contractor named Ohta Kyosaburo, who has found a crop.

That is the third arrival. Hired by one empire to build a hill station.

4. 𝗗𝗔𝗩𝗔𝗢. 𝟭𝟵𝟬𝟯 𝗧𝗢 𝟭𝟵𝟯𝟵.

The crop is abaca. The whole world’s ships are rigged with Manila hemp, and the best of it grows around the Davao Gulf.

American planters have land and no workers. Ohta brings the Benguet men down, then opens his own plantation, then a company.

A Japanese worker invents a stripping machine, the hagotan, and output jumps.

The Japanese population of Davao passes one thousand, then ten thousand.

By 1939 it is about twenty thousand, the largest Japanese community in Asia outside Japan.

They have schools, a hospital, an association, a cemetery.

They marry Bagobo and Bisaya women, because land law keeps shifting under them and a Filipina wife can hold title.

Manila gets nervous. The Commonwealth assembly makes Davao a chartered city in 1936, and the museum in Davao today says plainly why: fear of Japanese control of the land.

People start calling the place Davaokuo. Little Tokyo.

That is the fourth arrival. Not an army. Farmers. By invitation of American capital and under the eye of a worried Filipino legislature.

5. 𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗚𝗔𝗬𝗘𝗡 𝗚𝗨𝗟𝗙. 𝗗𝗘𝗖𝗘𝗠𝗕𝗘𝗥 𝟮𝟮, 𝟭𝟵𝟰𝟭.

This is the one in the textbook.

General Homma lands at the same gulf the Spanish galleons used, and announces that he has come to free the Filipinos from America.

An old general named Ricarte, who has spent nearly thirty years in Yokohama refusing to swear an oath to the Americans, comes home behind him.

You know the rest, or you think you do.

Bataan. The Death March. Twenty-two months of a banned flag.

The Second Republic, with its one hundred and eight to nothing vote. That one gets its own essay.

And at the end, February 1945, a month in Manila that killed something like a hundred thousand civilians in a city the Japanese army had no plan to keep.

In Davao, the twenty thousand Japanese became a garrison overnight, whether they wanted to or not. The army used them.

After the war, their Filipino widows and mestizo children spent decades hiding their fathers’ names.

That is the fifth arrival. The only one that came without being let in.

𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗢𝗧𝗛𝗘𝗥 𝗛𝗔𝗟𝗙.

Hold both. In Davao, in the twelve days between the first bombs and the landing, Filipinos jailed the Japanese residents and killed some of them.

When the army came, some of the freed residents took their revenge, and an interpreter from Ohta’s company ran the office that decided which Filipinos were loyal.

The community that Manila feared turned out to be, in part, what Manila feared.

The occupation killed Filipinos by the hundreds of thousands.

Manila in February 1945 was one of the most destroyed cities of the war.

The women the army held in garrisons as comfort women have never received an apology their survivors accepted.

The reparations were five hundred and fifty million dollars. The Philippines had asked for eight billion.

And because the payment came as Japanese goods and Japanese contracts, Japanese firms were paid to deliver it.

The settlement for the war was also Japan’s first postwar export market in the Philippines.

Both halves are in the record. Neither one cancels the other. The essay you are reading is about the door, not about forgiveness, and the door is a smaller subject than the dead.

𝗠𝗔𝗡𝗜𝗟𝗔. 𝗠𝗔𝗬 𝟵, 𝟭𝟵𝟱𝟲.

Eleven years after the war, Japan and the Philippines sign a reparations agreement.

Five hundred and fifty million dollars. Not in cash. In “the services of the Japanese people and the products of Japan in the form of capital goods,” delivered over twenty years.

Read that twice.

The settlement for the fifth arrival was a sixth one: Japanese ships, Japanese machines, Japanese engineers, for two decades, as payment for what the army did.

The ports and plants they left behind are the start of the story in which Japan became our biggest aid donor and one of our biggest investors. That story is still running.

𝗠𝗔𝗟𝗔𝗖𝗔𝗡̃𝗔𝗡𝗚. 𝗝𝗨𝗟𝗬 𝟴, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰.

In the palace, a Philippine defense secretary and a Japanese foreign minister sign an agreement allowing the armed forces of each country into the other’s territory for training and exercises.

The Reciprocal Access Agreement. It is the first such pact Japan has signed with any country in Asia. The Senate concurs that December. It enters into force in September 2025.

Japanese soldiers, in uniform, on Philippine soil, by treaty, at the request of the Philippine government.

That is the circle closing. Eighty-three years after Lingayen. Four hundred and thirty-two years after a letter nobody could translate.

𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗢𝗨𝗡𝗧.

Five arrivals. A demand, a refuge, a labor contract, a plantation, an invasion.

Then reparations in the form of machines, and now an alliance in the form of soldiers.

Here is what the count shows. Four of the five times, somebody in Manila opened the door.

The Spanish let the traders in and pointed cannons at them.

The Spanish took the refugees in and watched them.

The Americans hired the road gangs. The planters hired the abaca men, and our own legislature watched Davao fill up and chartered a city to slow it.

The one time nobody opened the door is the one we teach. Which is fair.

It is also why the other four are missing.

And it is why the current arrival, treaties, Coast Guard ships, soldiers, reads to many people as a betrayal of the dead.

There is another reading. It is the newest line in a very old ledger.

The record does not say which reading is right.

Whose hand is on the door now is the question worth asking, and it is not a question about Japan.

My Food for Thought for Today: We Want to Live