 Okay, we're back. We're live. I'm Jay Fidel here on Community Matters, and our guest today is Pepe Nieva. She is the daughter of Antonio Nieva, and she, what, edited a book called After Pearl Harbor Remembering World War II. She's a PR person, and she knows how to do that. Thanks for having me, Jay. Welcome to the show, Pepe. So tell us about this book. Tell us about your father's story. Okay, so last week we did a book launch for my father's book, which is called Cadet Soldier, Guerrilla Fighter. Yeah, there it is. And another book also on World War II in the Philippines called The Battle of Ising. So these two books really tell some very rare first-hand accounts of the World War II in the Philippines, because right after Pearl Harbor was attacked, you know, a few hours, Japanese bombers decimated Clark Field, North of Manila, Cavite also, and Mindanao in the Philippines. And after that, because we were in American territory, the Japanese wanted the Philippines like they wanted the rest of Southeast Asia. Sure, and part of their plan is why they attacked Pearl Harbor to get clearance to do that. Yes, because they wanted the resources of Southeast Asia. And then they had something called the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. And their rationale for that, for the Asian countries, was that they wanted the Western colonial powers to be out of there. So they're telling the countries, oh, side with us, and we'll get rid of the Brits, the French, and the U.S. But that's not what happened. Well, then it would be, they would be the ones who would be the colonial power. We replaced one colonial power with another. Right. So these two books are available now. My father's book, Cadet Soldier Grilla Fighter, is available at amazon.com. And Marie's book, which is only available in the Philippines, is going to come over here at Kalamansi Books. Okay. Well, this is really important on a number of levels. One is, you know, on December 7th, we're celebrating the beginning of the war, and an event that led immediately to what happened in the Philippines. And on the other hand, there was an article in the paper yesterday about recognition of Filipino soldiers who were in the U.S. Army. Can you talk about that? Yeah. About 250,000 Filipino soldiers fought with Americans during World War II. They were either part of the United States Armed Forces of the Far East, or the Philippine Commonwealth Army, or they were guerrillas who fought after Bataan fell, then people went to the hills and fought. So they've been fighting a long battle for recognition so that they will get the benefits of veterans here in the U.S. Yeah. And they got something yesterday. Yeah. So yesterday was one of the big victories. I think that they were able to get Congress to sign a bill that would give them a Congressional Medal of Honor, and it's, I think, going to the President for signature. Now, before that, the stimulus package, Senator Dan Inouye, was able to sneak in a reparations package for veterans, about 10,000 or 15,000 for veterans. But you know, there's only like a few thousand of them left, of course. Sure. So you have to be alive to get this done. Sure. And there was one guy, with respect to the one that was just announced, yesterday was one guy that said, Gee, I hope I'm alive by the time I get it. Yeah. But maybe the medal, I don't know how they're going to get it, because they gave it, I think, to the 442nd. I don't think they give post-bosthumous. Yeah. So they didn't get the money if you're dead. So can you tell the story about how the Filipino soldiers were involved? I mean, I think people don't really understand. They think that the Philippines is a separate country, but at the time it was not a separate country. And when they, you know, got involved in the Army at the time of the war, they were working for, fighting for the American Army, because the Philippines was a territory of the United States. Yes. So when Pearl Harbor was bombed in America, declared war the day after, I think. They start, before that, they were already recruiting Filipino soldiers to join the, what, call you, SAFE, which is the United States Armed Forces of the Far East, as well as the Philippine Commonwealth Army. My father was one of those being recruited. He was a ROTC cadet. Is that right in college? Yeah, 20 years old. But in the book, he says, at first it was all, hooray, no more books, no more teachers, stuff like that. But then he said, it's also goodbye to good times where, you know, they could no longer go, make the paseo down the boulevard, you know, and they would say goodbye to their girlfriend, and stuff like that. So the book actually is part memoir, part history. So he writes in third person, but it's his story, like he went to say goodbye to his godfather, who gave him his pistol that he used during the Spanish-American war. And then he said goodbye to his girlfriend with a chaperone in the back. Yeah, then he had the last dance, you know, in the Philippines at that, in Manila, especially in the society there. It was very beautiful at that time, you know, before the war, and people had dances and, anyway. So then he went off and he was shipped off to Bataan, where MacArthur had designated Bataan as the last place to fight until they would get reinforcements. But they never got reinforcements because the U.S. decided to focus on Europe instead of the Pacific first. So there they were waiting and waiting, and they had World War I weapons, and they had hardly any food and stuff like that. But as they said, the Filipinos and Americans were able to stave off the Japanese for three and a half months, while the rest of Southeast Asia just fell like a deck of cards. And it was a huge defeat when the Japanese finally overpowered them, yeah? Yes. Bataan was the largest defeat of the U.S. military in history. And, you know, the last cavalry charge was also in Bataan. I read that, you know. So you had 75,000 people surrendered, both Filipinos and U.S. soldiers, American soldiers, surrendered on that day in Bataan. And they were taken prisoner by the Japanese. Right. And after that they went on the death march, you know, they had to walk like four provinces to the north. And a lot of them died. And, you know, the Japanese have a different mindset than Western people in that if you're a prisoner of war, you might as well be dead, you know. So while the U.S. people, if you're going to be prisoner, then you're going to fight to live again or live to fight again or something. But the Japanese, you know, it's Bushido. If you're defeated, you're going to kill yourself or something, right? Was a face. Yeah. So they didn't really treat them well because they're just prisoners. So a lot of them died along the way. And the remarkable thing was your father was captured among the 75,000. Your father was on the death march and your father survived to live another day and to have you. Yes. That's a huge historical context. Yeah. So next year in April is the 75th anniversary as well of the fall of Bataan. So it took three and a half years until General MacArthur would fulfill his promise to return. And he said, I shall return. That's where he said it, yeah, went into the fall of Bataan. Yeah. Actually he said it in Australia because after Bataan fell, there was still Correjidor, right? He was holed up in Correjidor and that was the headquarters. And then him and the president of the Philippines at the time of the Commonwealth escaped by submarine to Australia. And that's where he said, I will return. And he did. Yeah. These are huge events. Yeah. It took him a few years to get back. Three and a half years. So in the meantime, there was Japanese, the Philippines was occupied by Japan and they made everybody learn Japanese and all the street names in Manila were changed to Japanese. So it's part of the book as well. Some of it is funny because, you know, Filipinos, they like to have party and fun regardless, right? So they had everybody's parties where everybody could come. And then they had floating casinos because it would float from place to place. I love that. Yeah. So it says, you know, and then everybody was buying and selling and buying and selling just to survive. It's like a great story on the ground. It's a lot of great stories. So you know, when we had the book launch, I realized that there's a lot of great stories out there and that if we had some venues to talk about them, it would be really great. Well, let's spend some time, you and me, and we will also talk to Jojo Abinales, so we can get hold of him again and talk about all the implications here. But I would like to, do we have any footage on this? I think we have some footage. We have some pictures of, yeah, because aside from writing the book, my father was an artist and he drew a lot of his experiences. For example here, this is the Battle of Bataan. So what I did was I dug up all this. Some of his articles had been published in magazines and there was a little book that was published, but this is the larger version of the book. And so he would draw all of this while we were growing up because he wrote this book over a long period of time. And so it was published a long time ago in a very small version. So I figured it doesn't do it justice because of especially the drawings and stuff. So that's when I decided to publish the book through Createspace.com. So Createspace is great, but it's part of Amazon? Yeah, so you do the book, you upload a PDF of the book and then you set your pricing and then you say you want to sell it all over the world like UK, Amazon and stuff like that. Does it net your market? Yeah, does it net. And then it's up to you to promote it. So here we are. So here we are, yeah. So yeah, so it was a learning curve because what I learned was you have to have it perfect the first time because I kept uploading it. Of course when you do a book you always see typos and stuff, you know. So get it as perfect as possible before you upload it. But then again, like this version, it came out pink rather than red, you know, the banner. So I reordered it. But the good thing is when you do it this way, you don't pay a printer. Yeah, so I checked it out in Manila for the original part and they would have cost me $2,000 to $3,000 to print the book. But this one, it doesn't cost you anything but you're you're sweat. And then you just order it on demand. Okay, we take a short break. And when we come back, I want to talk about your experience in gathering the data and putting it all together, not only, you know, for purposes of understanding this book and its value, not only to you, but to us, but also the process of putting it together. That might be interesting for your techie people. We'll be right back. Thank you, Hawaii. Asia in reveal. I am Johnson Choi, the host. I'm looking forward to see you next month, December 15th, Thursday, 11 o'clock, right here again. Hello, I'm Marianne Sasaki. Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii, where some of the most interesting conversations in Honolulu go on. I have a show on Wednesdays from one to two called Life in the Law, where we discuss legal issues, politics, governmental topics, and a whole host of issues. I hope you'll join me. I'm Stan Energyman, and I want you to be here every Friday. Noon! ThinkTechHawaii.com. Watch the show. Be there. I'll pay you the full weight. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Law Across the Sea. Please join me every other Monday to hear lawyers from Hawaii discussing ways to reach across the sea and help people and bring people together. Aloha. We're back. We're live with Pepe Nieva, and she helped put a book together. She did put a book together about her father, and his name was Antonio Nieva, and he was in the Bataan Death March, and a Filipino soldier in the Second World War. But there's the companion book, companion project. Can you talk about it? Yeah, so this book, I gathered all the materials over a period of a couple of years because some of it was written in magazines, and some of it I was written in an original book. And then there were illustrations were all over the place. There are some in the house in Manila. There are some in my sister's house in Washington, D.C. So we digitized, we OCRed the mania script, and then we had to clean it up. We're here with Pepe Nieva talking about the companion book that goes with the one we were talking about, namely after Pearl Harbor remembering World War II by her, about her father. Now, what about the companion? Right. So during our launch last week, we also had another book called The Battle of Ising by Marie Valierro, and she used to live here as well. But this is about her father, who was the guerrilla commander in the southern island of Mindanao. He won a lot of battles that helped MacArthur return to the Philippines. The interesting thing about Marie's book is that while she was researching it, she interviewed 20 veterans who had been in that battle because her father is also dead. But anyway, while researching, she found all these records of World War II in the Philippines and the guerrillas in the Philippines at the U.S. National Archives in Maryland. So she raised some money to digitalize all these records that are all crumbling because some of them were buried in the jungle, and they're all falling apart, you know, and they're all moist. Nobody's really paying attention to them because there's a lot of other work that the archive is doing. So she raised some money. She and her team of four stayed in Washington, D.C., for four months to digitalize all these pieces of paper. And they had to follow the protocol of the archives as well. So it's categorized like what the archives does. So now it's all available at this Philippine Veterans Association website, pvao.com. And anybody can research it. It's a little bit difficult to research, but... What is it? What do you see when you look at a record? If you go to pvao.com, Military History or something, you will see all the folders, actually, that they digitalize. And then in each folder it has about this guerrilla unit in this certain area. It has a name. She herself does not know what is in there. She says there's tons and tons of materials that people can use to make tons and tons of books because they were just scanning and scanning and scanning. And they didn't have time to read everything. But for example, she says in file 61 there is a whole file on President Ferdinand Marcos. And because he was also a guerrilla. And then it has his Maharlika group. And then he was trying to get recognition from them, from the U.S. But he didn't get it. But anyway, stuff like that. And then if you go to a certain province, for example, it will list the guerrilla units that are there. And what's important with this is that for those people who are trying to get benefits, a lot of them have been denied because they didn't have the records. Maybe they burned down. These records would help them. Yeah. And these records would help them. So she's trying to get into all the libraries so that people can get it for free. Definitely worth studying, worth having that data. So that's a very, very important project. Yeah. So Marie was here, but she left already for Manila. Yeah. So going back to your book, I'd like to just discuss how you approach that. How you put it together. You decided you wanted to cover your father's story. You had some material from him. And he was alive when you started writing or he had already died? He actually, it's his work. It's his writing that he's been writing over a period of years. So like I said, there was a little book that had a different title. A smaller book way back away. And then there were some magazine articles. And so what I did was I edited it all together and I chopped the chapters up into smaller chapters because people don't have attention span to read long things, right? So in front of every chapter, I put an illustration of either his drawings or some historical pictures that I dug up that are, you know, don't have copyright and all that. So then I laid it all out. And then I found this createspace.com now. If you don't know how to lay out, you can hire some of their artists and stuff. And it costs like two to three grand or something like that. And then you upload it and then it appears in amazon.com. And then you have a Kindle version, which is a Word program. But this for the createspace, you have to do PDF. But for the Kindle, you have to do Word. And problem with Word, it doesn't keep the formatting, right? So things go like this. And so I had to redo it anyway. It was very tedious. But at the end of the day, you're uploading what, a PDF? Yes, at the createspace. And then for Kindle, you're uploading a Word document. You have to do two separate editions of that. And then you have to upload it in two different files. Although at createspace, you can just say, I want to publish in Kindle and they'll do it for you. So it's a very inexpensive way to publish a book. So this is very nice, actually. Looks like it's very well laid out. It's professional. Thank you. Yes, it has to be. That's my job. And it's readable. You know the way the font works? That's your job anyway, yeah? Yeah, I used to do desktop for corporations like HECO and the part of the education. So you were a natural for this. Well, I know how to do it, but I'm not an artist. So it could be better, but hey. You had to rewrite the copy. You made it into third person instead of fourth person. No, it's always third. He wrote it this way. He wrote it this way. Yeah, so what I did was I moved things around and I chopped things a lot. I mean, I chopped it into chapters, small, readable chapters. I was trying to follow how the Vinci Code does. So you can have this last sentence and you can turn the page. So you'll turn the page, right? So I tried that. But so my friends say that it's fast read. So what it is, it has his like third person accounts of his personal and then it also has history of like Corredor, what happened there. And then there's also a section on the guerrillas because after he was released from Bataan, see, they released the Filipino soldiers, but they kept the Americans into POW camps. So when he was released, he was doing a buy and sell business in Manila. And then the Japanese, I think, confiscated the buy and sell business. So he got upset and he joined the guerrillas. So he got out of the prison in 20 years. He had been activated. Because those were his friends, you know, other ROTC people. And the group was called Hunters ROTC. And his nom de guerre was Captain Lancer. So then he was in the bush then doing guerrilla? Yes. So I think he participated in the raid of prison camp to free like 500. According to my relatives in the province where I went to, they said, wow, he used to go there with these other cousins who were also guerrillas in the province. Wow, they were all brave. They had swords, they had guns. And he was a kid at that time. It's a great story. There's a lot of stories out there, you know. So it would be really nice if more people could hear about it. Well, you know, I wonder just exactly how it was to be in his skin at the time this happened. It sounds like this book takes you there. It does. And it makes you understand how it was day to day. So lucky my father is kind of a Renaissance man. He's a really good writer and of course he's also an artist. But he was a lawyer, you know, because in those days you don't become an architect or an artist, you become a doctor or a lawyer or something. Still today. Too many maybe. Yeah. So yeah, so I hope people check it out. It's called Cadet Soldier Guerrilla Fighter on Amazon that time. Okay. And also on Kindle. So you can bring it right down to Kindle as an electronic version. So the Kindle version is cheaper than the print version, of course. Yeah. Okay. You heard it. Now you have to go out and check it out at Amazon and Kindle. Take a look at it. Easy read. And it's a story that you won't really find anywhere else. That's right. And it's right down on the ground with people who are involved in some of the most interesting and in many ways tragic historic events of the time, especially now around the celebration of the commemoration of Pearl Harbor. Right. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jay. Yeah.