The mayor of food-loving Osaka has spoken and his statement is extremely hard to swallow. Mayor Toru Hashimoto said that the so-called “comfort women” of World War II served a “necessary” role to enable beleaguered soldiers to let off steam.
I imagine a mass serenade dedicated by thousands of Filipino “superold” veterans of World War II to President Aquino and his officials, regarding the long-unpaid Total Administrative Disability benefits mandated by Republic Act No. 7696 (An act amending certain sections of RA 6948 otherwise known as “An act standardizing and upgrading the benefits for military veterans and their dependents”). The serenade goes (with an old familiar tune) thus:
The act of laying a wreath at the Dambana ng Kagitingan on Mount Samat every year, on the anniversary of the Fall of Bataan, is potent with meaning. The collapse of American and Filipino defenses on the Bataan peninsula in 1942 and the horrific Death March that followed have long formed part of the national narrative; the martyrs of World War II help define our collective sense of nation.
With the veterans of World War II and the surviving spouses in the province of Camarines Norte diminishing in number as one by one they are called by their Creator to that “undiscovered country from whose borne no traveler returns,” Roderick Barbado, the new branch manager of Development Bank of the Philippines, introduced another innovation that facilitates withdrawal and deposit transactions for all senior citizens. Before him, the branch manager he replaced assigned a staff to facilitate pension withdrawals by veterans and surviving spouses.
Seventy-one years ago in 1942, Maj. Gen. Edward King Jr. surrendered an army of 76,000 Filipino and American soldiers to a Japanese force of 54,000 under Gen. Masaharu Homma. Of the 76,000, some 10,500 were American officers and enlisted men. It was the single largest capitulation of a US-led military force in American history, culminating in the Bataan Death March.
When, oh when, will Budget Secretary Florencio Abad and Philippine Veterans Affairs Office Administrator Ernesto Carolina ever release the unpaid Total Administrative Disability (TAD) benefits due the living World War II veterans, as provided under Republic Act No. 7696? The Araw ng Kagitingan and Araw ng Kalayaan have come and gone. Every year they are [...]
To the generation of Filipinos who went through the horrors of World War II, the Korean War (1950-1953) signaled the advent of another global war that had to be stopped before it could spread any further. On this understanding, the Philippines sent 7,500 of its soldiers to fight in the Korean civil war on the [...]
The CCP president, reacting (Inquirer, 2/4/13) to Ambassador J.J. Rocha’s critique of the timing of the Philippines-Japan Friendship concert in February (Inquirer, 1/28/13) denies “any intent to dishonor the memory” of the 100,000 noncombatants who perished in Manila in February 1945, the bloodiest month in Philippine history.
We write in response to Ambassador Juan Jose P. Rocha’s letter which was published in the Inquirer last Jan. 28.
It has been 71 years since the “day of infamy” at Pearl Harbor that marked the beginning of an agonizing four years in the Pacific known as World War II.
Sometimes I wish I were born 50 years earlier, if only to have the opportunity to meet and interview people who went through the Philippine Revolution against Spain and the Filipino-American War. Perhaps it would have been better if my area of specialization was not the Spanish period but World War II or the martial [...]
I am Arthur Stoddard Johnson III, in my 90th year on this planet, and I am compiling a memoir of my World War II years. I grew up in Boston, and during my service years, I enjoyed looking up friends and family wherever I went. Shortly after meeting the Lichaucos, I was posted to Tokyo, Japan. My grandparents made a round-the-world cruise in the 1930s and stopped in both Manila and Japan. (I try to get bits of history into my writings.)
