Sure we were insulted. True, diplomats aren’t supposed to badmouth the host country to which they’re assigned. Admittedly, some Filipinos themselves can’t sleep either for fear of the (to quote Takano-san) "unstable peace and order situation in the country".
Takano’s unapologetic "apology" which was bannered on the front page of yesterday’s issue was more than useless. It was arrogant, not penitent. The envoy didn’t even publicly bang his head on the tatami as Japanese officials and businessmen (caught with their grubby hands in the cookie jar) love to do on television back home in Dai Nippon to demonstrate remorse over having been caught. Neither did he offer to commit seppuku or hara kiri.
Takano, indeed, responded to a tongue-lashing reportedly administered to him by our Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs Franklin Ebdane with the hypocritical reply that he had merely stated ". . . his personal opinion" and had no intention of inflicting damage and harm to the Philippines.
Ambassadors are not entitled to give their personal opinions, as we’re already tired of repeating ad infinitum. If they can’t be diplomatic and insist on speaking out, then they ought to choose some other profession – like garbage collector, or dorobu, or – worst of all – shimbun-sha (journalist).
Since this poor fellow Takano insists he hasn’t been able to enjoy one single night of complete sleep since he was assigned to Manila a year ago, then for heaven’s sake send him home to Japan, where he can carouse all night in some native karaoke, drink himself to stupor in a shotu-ba, or indulge his insomnia in Kabuki-cho.
Naturally, the Japanese have come to the conclusion that all they have to do is throw our way millions of dollars in aid, trade, investment and so forth at us, and all will be forgiven, forgotten and a simpering type of "friendship" inspired.
Takano has obviously concluded that since we’ve already been "bought" as a nation, there’s no point in being civil to us.
The ambassador’s real sin, in the context of his own society, is that he has violated the norms of Japanese conduct. It’s customary in Japan to speak in tatamae language, or polite circumlocution. Japanese are taught from infancy to be deliberately vague in the use of language.
There are many levels of Japanese speech, as I was first warned when I struggled in my youth to learn Nippongo, later reworded into a more peaceful-sounding Nihongo. (One of my early postings as a journalist was early postwar Tokyo.) There is the language you use for the Emperor and his court. The Japanese you invoke when dealing with superiors; the forms of address used when speaking to the Boss.
There is the Japanese for equals, and Japanese speech used when addressing inferiors. (You can even tell if Filipinos or other male Gaijin learned their Nihongo from Japanese koibito or sweethearts because there are female expressions and inflections never used by the more guttural "male" Japanese.
Only with members of their own families, or intimates and familiars do Japanese resort to tough, harsh-sounding "straight talk" or honne-type speech. Takano wasn’t just being honne, but mocking.
A few years ago, this writer and other Asian editors who had gone to Tokyo to conduct a forum at the UN University there on Japan’s Role in Security and Regional Cooperation, visited the world-famous city of Hiroshima where we were shown the site of the tragedy which occurred there on August 6, 1945, when 100,000 persons, most civilians, were incinerated or hideously and fatally wounded or radiated in a flash of blinding light that was to usher the world into the deadly nuclear age.
Two years previously, I had also visited Nagasaki, the seaport city which had been devastated by the second American atom bomb dropped by a US bomber on August 9, 1945 and resulting in 35,000 deaths immediately inflicted.
The images of the museum of atomic death and destruction in Nagasaki will haunt those of us who toured the place to our dying day. Ironically enough, the American bomber pilots and crew had wiped out perhaps half of the very few Catholics in Japan, since Nagasaki had a large Catholic population converted centuries earlier by Portuguese missionaries, and, indeed, in that city many "martyrdoms" had occurred!
But the annual commemoration of those atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have lulled the Japanese and, sanamagan, many in the outside world into falsely believing that the Japanese were the "victims" in World War II when, in truth, they were the cruel aggressors and imperialists.
The 100,000 who died in Hiroshima for instance (the count grows by leaps and bounds in the annual "retelling" of the tragedy) are to be mourned. Unlike the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, the 100,000 victims who perished in Manila, were not faceless to the Japanese Marines and Navymen who ran amok and slew them – babies with their heads dashed on walls, women raped then their breasts sliced off, entire neighborhoods wiped out – including our next-door neighbors, the Spanish Consul and his family, and other families my parents had known for years. My future father-in-law, whom I never got to meet, a Justice of the Peace, had been seized by Japanese soldiers and used for bayonet practice. People were herded into buildings, which were then set on fire. Others were simply shot where they stood. Infants were thrown into the air and spitted on bayonets. The victims in Manila were not killed by bombs dropped from thousands of feet. The men who took their lives did so face-to-face, heard their pleas for mercy, listened to their cries of agony. What madness it was.
May I also remind Takano of what another contemptuous Japanese had sneered of Filipinos, after he conquered Manila and later Bataan in 1942. General Masaharu Homma had scoffed: "A nation which indulges in pretty dresses, nice food, physical enjoyment and expensive fashions can never succeed in establishing a strong nation."
Salamabit! General Homma might have been describing, in a harshly contemporary tone, our President GMA’s "strong republic"!
Homma, of course, was later captured, tried, convicted and executed for the heartless and brutal 75-mile Death March to which the Japanese Imperial troops under his command had subjected the men who surrendered in Bataan – a "forced" march to prisoner-of-war camp in Capas, Tarlac, under a pitiless April sun and in the course of which thousands of Filipino and American soldiers died – shot, bayoneted, or succumbing to starvation and thirst.
Owing to Japanese military occupation and punishment (because we fought back in a guerrilla war), we Filipinos lost one million dead in the three and a half years between 1941 and 1945. This is a significant loss of life since we then had a population of only 16 to 18 million.
Next to Russia’s ten to 12 million dead, China’s 2.5 million killed, and Poland’s two million slain, the Philippines had the highest mortality rate among Allied countries. One out of every 16 Filipinos died, thanks to Japanese invasion and occupation. (These statistics are not mine. They were culled from the research figures of The Economist of London.)
I won’t try to dissuade President Macapagal-Arroyo from going to Tokyo on her scheduled visit. But she must remember. We must never forget. Nor should we ever allow the Japanese to forget.
Should Ambassador Takano be kicked out? He ought to depart voluntarily. At least he, then, can go to sleep at last. I trust it will be dreamless, and not haunted by the ghost of the past.