MANILA, Philippines—Watching the archery events in the Beijing Olympics on TV the other night, I was irritated by the flashing advertisements that ruined our enjoyment of the games. Why do ads have to flash in the center of the screen to get noticed when there are four empty corners of the screen for ads?

I also wondered about the MTRCB ratings, because on the lower right hand side of the screen was the warning “Parental Guidance advised.” I’ve never seen this in the cable sports channels and asked aloud why they didn’t utilize the spot for ads. Perhaps children aren’t supposed to try diving, gymnastics and archery at home? Should children who indulge in sports be supervised by an adult?

TV and movies have a ratings system and have adequate warning for young viewers, or those who might find sex and violence distressing. I was wondering if we have the same system for books and magazines. In the United States, sexy magazines are wrapped in plastic and placed on the top shelves of supermarket or bookstore displays. In high-end bookstores in Manila, I have noticed that books with sex or nudity are also wrapped very well, not to guard readers’ morals but to preserve the book from too much browsing. Some wrapped books even warn browsers that, once opened, the book is considered sold! In more civilized bookstores, like those in Singapore, you just bring the wrapped book to a sales counter where they will gladly open it for the prospective buyer to check out. In the Philippines, the young and curious are shielded from sex and nudity but not from violence, which can be more dangerous.

I thought of book warnings when I brought “Occupation: The Later Years” by Dr. Benito J. Legarda Jr. to Cebu for weekend reading. As readers know, the Japanese period onwards is not my historical period. I rarely read books on World War II, but I felt that a compilation of columns by Legarda would be a light read by the beach. I was stupid not to have been alerted by the book cover showing reproduction of a painting by Diosdado Lorenzo of a mother shielding an infant in her bosom and looking over her shoulder to see a bow-legged Japanese soldier with a bayonet poised to strike, pierce and kill.

Filipino artists, including Fernando Amorsolo, captured the horrors of the war in their work: death, rape and pillage. Most of these happened in Manila as the trapped Japanese went on a killing spree in the last days of the war. What makes all this disturbing is the fact that the Japanese turned on helpless, unarmed civilians, making no distinction between man, woman or child. Even the old and infirm were not spared.

I knew all these hard facts, but none of this affected me as much as Legarda’s latest book. After takeoff from Manila, I opened it, starting as most academics or Japanese do, from the back cover. I passed through the author’s biography, the index, and bibliography. Then, there were 21 of the most horrendous photographs I have ever seen. The captions gave names to the faces and made the terror more real.

For example, there were two photographs of charred men on hospital beds. “When Angelo Gajo refused to abandon his house, he was bound and got severely burned when Japanese soldiers torched his dwelling,” the caption said. Then there was Jose Malco who “tried to save some personal belongings from his burning house, [so] the Japanese Imperial Marines drove him back into the fire with flame throwers.” There were photographs of grenade victims who survived while others were executed or beheaded. Some were shown in carts and ditches dead stiff as rigor mortis had set in. A faceless corpse from a tuberculosis ward was being feasted upon by maggots.

Then, there were two photographs of women on hospital beds with the captions: “Agueda Upson’s breasts were bayoneted by Japanese soldiers when she resisted their attempts to assault her.” “Rosita Carugtos was raped by Japanese soldiers after they bayoneted her baby in her arms. Her baby and two sisters died.”

I should have closed the book then, but I was compelled to read from the back to the front cover and felt sick afterwards.

My parents lived outside Manila during the war and their memories are quite idyllic because they grew up in places where rivers yielded fish and fields were sunlit, like Amorsolo landscapes. None of my parents’ relatives died in the war, or if they did, it was not part of family lore passed down to us. All I know was that an uncle, then a playful boy, was slapped by a Japanese soldier because he forgot to bow in respect. Legarda’s book made me remember the war, made me resolve to forgive but never to forget so that something like this may never happen again.

Still to be found on bookstore shelves are two other moving accounts of those terrible years: “Breaking the Silence” by Lourdes Montinola and “Myself Elsewhere” by Carmen Guerrero Nakpil who coped with her loss by taking “refuge in a self-inflicted kind of amnesia. Now, having spent more than half a century banishing all thought and remembrance of it, refusing to talk, read or write about it, I have succeeded so well that I can remember, even after great effort, very little about those years.” Montinola lost her family in the war and broke her silence only recently with painful memories that supplement the cold retelling in textbook history.

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Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu.