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Feb 29, 2004 With the onset of Lent, the Fall of Bataan is very much on my mind. Bataan fell to the Japanese on Maundy Thursday, April 9, 1942. In the 1960’s I read an account of it by a Filipino officer in the USAFFE in the defunct Sunday Times Magazine, a supplement of the original The Manila Times. He narrated that after the surrender by the Filipino and American defenders of the tiny peninsula, the Japanese asked the USAFFE battle officers to line in formation and kneel. Then by some method, the Roman decimation I suppose, Japanese officers and sergeants began lopping of the heads of some of the unarmed and helpless former defenders of Bataan . He said he heard one of the Japanese officers saying as he went about his grim task: “So sori, but you spoyr our tymtabor” (So sorry, but you spoiled our timetable.) Apparently, the high command in Tokyo gave Admiral Nagumo and General Homma a deadline for the conquest of the Philippines that they weren’t able to meet. As part of the generation born right after the war, I became the recipient of an oral tradition of stories about the sufferings of my people at the hands of the Japanese. Thus, I heard about the Japanese abduction, rape and mutilation of Filipino women, the indiscriminate torture and execution of Filipino males as retaliation for guerrilla activity or just for the heck of it, throwing babies into the air and “catching” them with bayonets. Some of the stories were so horrific that I had difficulty understanding the reasons for them. It was only later when I read that there was indeed an order from the Japanese high command in Tokyo for their soldiers in the Philippines to kill as many Filipinos as possible when they realized that they were going to lose the war that I understood the mindset that led to the atrocities. That, and the Japanese ideology and theology of Yamato Dama-shii by which they concluded that they were not mere human beings but divine, led them to commit acts of unspeakable cruelty. As a precocious youngster I saw a movie about Japan that deeply disturbed me. Produced by Americans, it was a love story between an American woman living in Japan and a Japanese working in that country’s Foreign Ministry just before the outbreak of the Pacific War. The foreign ministry was widely believed to be staffed by pacifists and moderates who allegedly tried their best to dissuade the Emperor and his government from making war. Thus, the Japanese man in the movie was presented in a very positive manner. In one of the scenes, the man brought his American sweetheart to a bath house and she was shocked to see that men and women were there in common and the women did not bother to cover their breasts. The man explained that among Japanese, the female breast was not a source of shame and was not associated with sex since it was primarily an organ for nourishment of offspring. In another scene, the couple surrounded by beautiful scenery, engaged in a prolonged kiss. Later, however, the Japanese man told his girlfriend that they should avoid kissing in public as it is considered improper and vulgar in Japanese society. What disturbed me about the movie was that it obviously presented certain aspects of Japanese culture as superior to Western culture. While there may indeed be some such aspects, I am certain that sexual morals and mores are not among them. Let me explain by telling you another story: I worked for a while for a Japanese-run company that used women as door-to-door sellers of their products in the much the same way as Avon Ladies. I was asked to bring a delegation of such ladies to the factory as part of an educational tour. They were received graciously by a young Japanese manager about my age. One of the ladies, old enough by my estimation to have survived the war seemed oddly hostile to him. She asked if he went to a certain district in Manila then known to cater to sex tourists (It had since been cleaned out by authorities.). The young manager was taken aback and asked why she should ask that question. The woman responded that Japanese after all went to places like that just like they went to comfort rooms because they needed to. I interrupted the exchange by moving on to another item in our visit’s itinerary. It was only some time later when the issue of “comfort women” hit international headlines that the significance of that brief exchange between a woman old enough to have been a victim of horrific sexual enslavery during the war and the Japanese manager impacted my sensitivities. Some scholars characterize Japanese thinking as “naturalistic,” a term which brings to the contemporary mind mostly positive and pleasant things. Indeed the Japanese love of nature as expressed in their art is considered unique and much admired all over the world. However, naturalism in the Japanese sense when applied to life, morality and consequently, to sex, can hardly fit into traditional Western (and by that I mean Christian) values. Thus, we find ritual suicide (seppuku) an honorable way out in Japanese thinking when life becomes too difficult. The conflict between naturalism and moralism becomes even more pronounced in matters of sex. As the old lady correctly implied, Japanese attitude towards sex as being natural leads them to rank sexual intercourse along with such bodily needs as eating, sleeping and defecation. Thus, the Japanese soldiers went to the latrines to answer the call of nature and to the brothels where “comfort women” were kept as prisoners for the “same” reason. Naturalism as a philosophy and way of life is, of course, not original nor exclusive to the Japanese. It had a following in the myriad philosophies of Greece and Rome and when Christianity took over the Graeco-Roman world, it was rejected. Naturalism is incompatible with Judaeo-Christian ideology because when applied to human behavior, it results in argumentum ad animalibus, which inevitably leads to the conclusion that what is proper to animals (which are natural beings) is proper to humans. Judaeo-Christian thought is adamant in its belief that man is not entirely a natural being but also a supernatural one owing to his having a soul made “in the image and likeness of God.” For this reason we find Christ repudiating the Saducees’ practice of serial marriage and upholding the sanctity of monogamous marriage as Divinely instituted “from the beginning.” ------------ The author studied at the Colegio de San Juan de Letran, a four-centuries old Catholic school within the medieval walled city of Intramuros, Manila, Philippines where towards the close of WWII, Japanese soldiers engaged in an orgy of torture, murder and rape of the Filipino population in revenge of their anticipated defeat by the returning American forces aided by local guerrillas. Email Crescente G. Villahermosa: cresoganus3@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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