 Gandang hapon sa inyong lahat. Good afternoon, Minasan Konnichiwa. I have greeted you in three different languages this afternoon because what I intend to talk about is the cultural policy during the Japanese occupation. A period of time where it lasted very short, it was three years, but this was a period of time where you have a conflict among cultures. It was not just a military occupation, it was also a cultural battlefield. And so I'd like to introduce this to you. We're commemorating 75 years of this war having started this coming December. But during the war, we were very exposed to the United States. We had strong Spanish cultural influence still. Our own cultural tradition, we knew a little bit of it, but it was not entering the school system. It was more popular culture rather than formal culture. What the Japanese did was they tried to bring in their own perception of culture. They brought in a military occupation. They brought in their economic policies, but they also brought in with them an economic and cultural policy that would bring the Philippines closer into what they called the Greater East Asia Cropospirity Sphere. When the Japanese landed, they brought in for soldiers, they brought in their food, they brought in their own techniques, they brought in their own practices. And when they took over Manila, one of the first things they did was to try to restore normalcy. Normalcy in the sense that movie houses would be reopened, newspapers would be allowed to reopen, radio stations again broadcasting. About a month later, they put out their cultural policy in the form of educational principles. The educational principles basically were about four or five points, the first of which was that the U.S. was no longer a cultural power. The U.S. was gone. The U.S. period of rule of the U.S. had gone. And so replacing this was Japan. And the cultural policy that the Japanese did was therefore first to remove the traces of the United States, remove in fact or minimize the European tradition in the Philippines, and replace this with an Asian perspective, an Asian perspective led by Japan. And then secondary to that, bringing us into the fold by letting us look back and examine our own traditions and bring that tradition back so that we'd fit into the Asian mold. And then as a subsidiary to that, the Japanese also tried to bring in their own concepts, things like love of labor, decency, dignity, and all of this. They sounded very nice on paper. And when they tried to implement this in the field, it also started to be interesting insofar as the peaceful relations between Japanese individuals and Filipinos was concerned. When they introduced this in school, they did bring in the idea that you had to learn Japanese, but they also brought in the idea that you had to learn Filipino. You had to learn Tagano. You had to be proud of both the Asian concept and the Filipinized version of that, which was Filipino. So the Japanese would have had a very fertile ground to bring this on. And as the schools opened in 1942, you did have this cultural policy coming in quite strong. Not only in the schools, but even in the government offices. Government officials were told to take supplementary classes. They were asked to learn Japanese. And even Japanese soldiers in the streets sometimes tried to teach their own language. This would have been fine again, but this was war. And so we were introduced to a different system that we had not been exposed to before. We belonged to Southeast Asia. We had been trained. We had been reared in Spanish tradition, US democratic tradition. When the Japanese came in here, it was quite different. Japan comes from East Asia. This is a Confucian society. And the Confucian society prized hierarchy. Yet people on the top, people in the middle, people in the bottom. And you had to know your place in society. And therefore when the Japanese brought in this cultural concept, we would be under the Japanese. The Japanese were number one. We were number two. Japanese language was tough. Filipino was second. So there was that hierarchy built in. The second thing that the Japanese also tried to bring in was a sense of discipline and obedience. You had to follow the teachers. You had to follow the superiors. You had to accept that without question and so on and so forth. They felt that this was good because people in the Philippines were seen as undisciplined. And therefore if that sense of discipline and responsibility would be brought in, the Philippines could become a better place to live in. Again, nice to say this on paper. And some Filipinos at that time did see there was a possibility of the Philippines looking into a different perspective, coming into a different worldview. Some of the intellectuals did see that. That they saw we had not become part of the Asian world and that they thought it was high time to learn Asian practices, Asian languages, Asian history. Even UP at that time, UP opened in 1943 and UP began to look into the implementation of an Asian history course for the first time. Prior to that, we only had world history, which was largely European history, American history and Philippine history. But during the Japanese occupation, we began to look into Asian history, Chinese history, Korean history, Japanese history and we had not known about that at all up to that point in time. So again, it sounded nice on paper. It sounded very good. It was a good policy. Intellectuals looked into Japanese art. They looked into bonsai, they looked into haiku and all of this and it did seem something interesting. We could, some of our writers began experimenting writing haiku in Filipino or writing haiku in English, but on Philippine themes. So the cultural front was very wide open for discussion. The problem was, while you might discuss this in school and you might meet occasional Japanese who would point to the skin and say, we are the same skin color, we belong to the same race, the problem was outside the schools, outside these friendly Japanese that one occasionally met, the rule of the Japanese was essentially military rule. And what was the priority at that point was, culture not too much of importance. It was important, but it was not top priority. What was most important was the military, crushing the guerrillas and crushing resistance and also getting the economic benefits of Japanese control. So what people remember from the war is not so much the cultural policy, but they remember the Japanese soldiers slapping their mother or their father on the streets. That undid what the Japanese were trying to do. While the teachers were trying to say, we belong to the same group of people, we have a similar cultural base, the soldier who slapped at Filipino in the street undid that all. The soldier who slapped the Filipino did not know that he was doing harm to the Japanese, to the Philippine-Japanese relationship. They were following what they had been trained. In the Japanese army, it was believed that slapping was the most minor of the punishments that a soldier could be given if he broke the rules. So to a Japanese soldier, a slap was something normal, but in our culture, a slap meant something much deeper than that. Your whole person was affected by it. And so, while the Japanese were trying to bring in their culture, they also brought in parts of their culture that didn't fit into our own cultural sensibilities. One thing the Japanese, for example, did, because again, their cultural background was so different, they didn't know how to use western toilets. They didn't know how to use western bathrooms. And so one person I interviewed sometime ago said that when the Japanese entered their house, they looked at the toilet, they didn't know what it was, and they washed their faces in the toilet bowl. And then they looked at the sink, the lavabo, they didn't know what it was for, they stood on it, and there they urinated. So they didn't know how these things worked. And so when you have a conquering people doing these things because they didn't know what they meant, you wonder, what kind of conquerors are these? And we also had this cultural disconnect because how did the Japanese take a bath, for example? The Japanese took a bath in hot tubs, and what they did was they cleaned themselves outside, and then they put tubs of water on top of stones, put a lit fire under this, and then they took the bath out afterwards. The problem with this was it was done in that hierarchical system that we talked about earlier, the confusion system. The officer was the first to enter the tub, after which the second in command entered the tub, and then the whole platoon followed suit after that. So to us, who are so familiar with taking a bath every day by ourselves, seeing them go through one tub of water, 10 people, 100 people one after another, what kind of superiors are these? These we could simply not accept, which is why although there was this good, there were good policies that the Japanese tried to implement, they did fail. What was more successful was the inculcation of an Asian orientation, and more successful still, the inculcation of a more Filipinized identity. Not so much aligned with Japan, but more aligned with the Philippines, and this also aligned itself with the resistance movement and others who were outside the Japanese-controlled area. So when we look at the Japanese occupation, we do see all this fighting that took place. There was a lot of violence, but there was also a cultural aspect to it. And one thing that the occupation, short as it was, showed us and is still relevant to us today, is how Filipinos can adjust to fast changing times, adjust, make do, survive, and even make the benefit out of this. What were some examples I might give here? We learned the language, yes, the Japanese language, we learned bits and pieces of it, but we twisted it so that it could be a form of resistance. So instead of accepting the Japanese way, we made it a weapon of our own. Example of this was the words that I said earlier, konnichiwa, that is Japanese for good day. Good morning in Japan is ohayogozaymas. And when you bowed to the sentry, you said ohayogozaymas, but some Filipinos in Manila found out if you added one letter to ohayog, it became a Tagalog word which meant totally different. So they added the letter P after ohayog and they bowed as deeply as they wanted to the Japanese guard, saying ohayop, or ohayogozaymas. And the Japanese soldier would say very good Filipino, very obedient, but actually we had won over him, we were cursing him and saying hayoka, that kind of thing. So there were these reactions that we were doing. And we did survive the war. We made fun of the Japanese, we made jokes out of them, we made jokes out of the Americans earlier on, we made jokes during martial law. It's a point of continuity that we see we are able to survive by laughing at these things. We also survived even though there was all these difficulty, there were shortages, the Japanese controlled the economy, everything was had to be rationed. So one joke that came out during the Japanese occupation was, anoing din na lang mga kastila dito sa Pilipinas? Religion. anoing din na lang mga americano dito sa Pilipinas? Ah, education. anoing din na lang mga hapon dito sa atin? Ration. Because everything was rationed. And they said we should change the name Pilipinas to Pilapinas because everywhere you went you had to line up for soap, for rice, for sugar, for everything else. So we survived by making jokes out of that. And even though we had the shortages, we did try to subsist on what we had. We discovered our own local resources and we made our own substitutes for former goods that we imported. And just to mention one item that's still very much on the market is banana ketchup. Before the war, nobody touched that. It did not exist. During the war, no ketchup came from the United States. We wanted the taste of ketchup. Somebody invented it and advertised it as new. It was called, the inventor was Magdalo Francisco and the brand became Mafran Banana Ketchup. And that's why we have banana ketchup today. 1942, Philippine ingenuity. And so cultural policy of the Japanese might not have worked exactly the way they wanted it to work but we took over, in a sense, immediate work in our own sense. Showing that we were still the boss of everything else. So with that, thank you very much for listening and good afternoon. Konnichiwa, magandang hapon sa inong lahat.