Bitter memories of WWII revived in Pampanga, but war tourism booming

MABALACAT, Pampanga (AP) — Though just 7 at the time, Faustino Arceo vividly recalls the dogfights between Japanese and American pilots over the lush volcanic hills of the northern Philippines.

Now 68, it’s hard for the toothless gardener to forget. He makes his living cutting grass and planting flowers around a life-size statue of the first kamikaze pilot, who took off from an airfield here in October 1944 as part of Japan’s desperate attempt to turn the tide against the advancing Americans.

"The Japanese were very brutal, very hostile to Filipinos," he said. "Before, I was angry. But now, I can’t do anything. It’s the past."

As Asia marks the end of the World War II with the Japanese surrender 60 years ago, aging survivors of Tokyo’s occupation are again reliving often bitter memories. In China and South Korea, which suffered most under Japanese aggression, people protested earlier this year against Japanese textbooks which they say whitewash wartime atrocities.

But attitudes are different in Mabalacat, where the Japanese used the captured American air base Clark field to launch kamikaze suicide flights aimed at American ships. The kamikaze sank or damaged more than 600 Allied ships; they also fought off attacking US aircraft over the base, recaptured in 1945 and closed in 1991.

Here, peoples’ feelings have softened somewhat, and authorities seem less inclined to fuss over history than to make money from thriving war tourism.

"We have forgiven them, but it’s hard to forget what happened," said Adolfo Dizon, 68, a retired village chief.

Every October, Mabalacat welcomes Japanese tourists, war veterans, students and Buddhist monks, who come to pay respects to the kamikaze. At a former airfield overgrown with grass, a large gate welcomes visitors to the fiberglass kamikaze statue of a pilot in cap and goggles, staring expressionless into the distance.

The government here quietly put up the statue last year, replacing a marker erected 30 years ago, and has received a lot of criticism since, said Edgar Hilbero, head of the Mabalacat Tourism Office.

He admits to a dual purpose — history and tourism - and said he’s also working on a memorial for US Capt. Colin Kelly Jr., the first decorated WWII pilot whose B-17 bomber crashed at Clark three days after Pearl Harbor.

"We are not taking sides," he said. "We are using war history to promote goodwill, friendship and closer relationship between nations... not to glorify anybody, not even kamikaze. War is evil... not the people who fought the war. That is our message."

It’s a message that resounds around Asia.

Singapore, then a British colony where Japanese troops killed as many as 100,000 ethnic Chinese, is customizing its own "WWII travel packages" for veterans and former POWs from Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

Elizabeth Choy, 95, praised as a war heroine in Singaporean schoolbooks for withstanding torture by the Japanese, said she’s forgiven the Kempeitai secret police who tormented her for nearly 200 days.

"I have no ill feelings toward the Japanese," Choy said. "What I detest is not the Japanese, but war itself."

In Australia, war veterans in the farming town of Cowra voluntarily maintained the graves of 231 Japanese prisoners of war mowed down by machine guns during a suicidal escape attempt on Aug. 5, 1944. Now a five-hectare (12-acre) memorial garden there is a tourist attraction.

But bitterness has not faded for some.

Rechilda Extremadura, a spokeswoman for more than 100 Filipino women who were repeatedly raped as sex slaves by Japanese soldiers, said they protested about the kamikaze statue to the provincial governor. "Why should we have a monument to glorify that war? We were victimized," she said.

Still, forgiveness has been a recurring theme in Philippine history as a way of surviving successive Spanish, American and Japanese occupations. After the war, the newly independent government gave amnesty to officials who collaborated with the Japanese.

The man behind the kamikaze initiative is historian, Daniel Dizon, who became fascinated with the suicide pilots as a teen when many of them were in this area. He spent much of his life studying the kamikaze squadrons and built a museum in his house with rusty guns, yellowed photographs and Japanese uniforms.

"It was very agonizing because people hated Japanese so much. Anything that you bring about in public regarding the Japanese was met with intense hostility and anger, and nobody wanted to listen," he said.

In the early 1970s, Dizon tracked down a nondescript one-story house where the first 23-man kamikaze squad was assigned. For years, he tried to persuade the owners to allow a small marker on their fence but succeeded only with the help of a Mabalacat businessman who saw a chance to make money in a landlocked province with few other attractions.

Soon, authorities were prodding Dizon to mark other kamikaze spots.

"I do not want to dwell on wartime politics. I separated Japanese atrocities, Japanese invasion from the kamikaze episode," he said, adding the kamikaze were defenders of their homeland, not an instrument of Japanese expansionism.

Other historians disagree.

Writer Francisco Sionil Jose applauds the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"I haven’t changed my feelings, and I am 80 years old," he said in Manila. "If you were here during the Japanese occupation, you would understand how I feel."