Japan of my childhood

I missed “Undas” again this year. I missed the bonding, the family gossip, and the memories that bring the dead back to life for a day. My nephews and nieces went about the cemetery picking at melted candles to form balls of wax, the old folks sat around a grave to reminisce while balut, butong pakwan, puto and panara were passed around. All this I saw in my head as I completed the Asia Leadership Fellowship Program sponsored by the Japan Foundation and the International House of Japan last Oct. 31. Two months in Tokyo made me remember the Japan of my childhood and two people whose graves I missed visiting this year.

I was eight years old when I first visited Japan for Expo ’70 in Osaka, but my encounter with that country came earlier when I would visit a favorite uncle’s hotel in Angeles City named Tea House, for a structure that was saved from his former home to become the focus of the complex. The Tea House had a pond, stepping stones, and a landscaped garden. My uncle’s cook, we were told, was trained in Japan so we enjoyed sukiyaki, tempura and teppanyaki long before Japanese food became popular in the Philippines.

In a child’s eyes the hotel seemed decent though it was a “short time” place for US servicemen on R&R. When my religious aunt was at the reception desk she would ask to see the marriage certificate of the couples checking in, which wasn’t good for business. Looking at the famous landscaped garden every morning at breakfast at the International House of Japan brought me back to my uncle’s Tea House and reminded me of the English-speaking gardener who didn’t have a name and was simply called “Number One” because he was my uncle’s first employee and, as he claimed, was the best.

Before my actual visits to Japan I had a sense of the country and its culture from my experience in my uncle’s Tea House and the stories of my parents, uncles and aunts who, as major dealers in Japanese appliances from the ’60s to the ’70s, were rewarded with annual tours to Japan. When my mother passed away we painfully went through all of her belongings, and in one of her photo albums we found visual proof of a childhood story concerning my father who stupidly took the challenge to play strip janken pon (that’s jak en poy to Pinoys) with a geisha. The loser of each round had to remove a piece of clothing, so the Pinoys thought they were being clever by giving my father all their watches, handkerchiefs, socks and coats. But when the game started the geisha calmly took a hairpin from her head and before long my father was naked, while the geisha had more than half her hairpins and her clothing intact. At this point my mother grabbed an oshibori or face towel from the table and threw it at my father to end the game.

I remembered the Japan of my childhood when we visited Nagasaki on a field trip and wondered why in the Peace Museum Nagasaki the Japanese were portrayed as victims of the atomic bomb. Things should have been put in context to understand how the Japanese military brought on the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima on themselves because of their treachery at Pearl Harbor and the long record of atrocities they left in the Philippines and the rest of occupied Southeast Asia during World War II.

I remembered the Japan of my childhood when I took two ALFP fellows to Yasukuni Shrine and wondered why Chinese and Koreans howl when a Japanese prime minister visits this quiet and peaceful shrine. Why don’t Filipinos react in the same way? Is it because we have a notoriously short memory? I finally understood why the shrine is controversial, because to the side of the quiet and solemn part of Yasukuni is a museum that presents history in a skewed way. Outside the museums are other memorials: one to the horses that died during war, one for an Indian magistrate who dissented from the majority during the War Crimes Tribunal, one to the Kamikaze pilot, an exact copy of which now stands in Mabalacat, Pampanga, that is historically the birthplace of the Kamikaze.

In the context of all these conflicting memories of the same event, I asked myself: How could my father’s eldest brother be such a Japanophile and what made him build a Japanese tea house in the ’50s at a time when Filipinos who survived the war would contemplate murder and revenge at the sight of any Japanese? When I look back at my personal history, I realize that my parents grew up outside Manila during the war and were spared the orgy of murder, pillage and rape that saw the end of the war in February 1945. The worst that happened to my father’s siblings in Pampanga was this: An uncle was slapped in the face by a Japanese soldier because he forgot to bow in greeting and respect.

Looking back on the way I learned about Japan outside of school, I realized that my family’s experience of the war was better than most, and that the experience of the war differed from person to person—and this colors the way they remember the past. Textbook history didn’t teach me much about World War II either: The Japanese were portrayed as evil but not as bad as the Spanish who shot Rizal. From this viewpoint, the Americans liberated us twice: first from the Spanish in 1898, then the Japanese in 1945.

Two months in Japan made me rethink many things personal and historical. I will write about these soon.

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