Dr. Legarda’s new book

The La Salle University Press has just published a book by Dr. Benito Legarda Jr. about the Japanese Occupation, but it is different from most of the other wartime books.

Many books have been written about the war: the fighting in Bataan; the Death March; the concentration camps; the sex slaves; the atrocities in the last days of the war. Dr. Legarda’s book is different. It does contain chapters on the atrocities (and these chapters should be read by all who wish to understand the history of that period). But most of the book is about the ordinary day-to-day things in Manila during the Occupation.

Many of these things seem trivial. After all, our daily lives are made up trivial things. But they give an idea of what life was like under the oppressive hand of the Japanese Army; the economy; the forms of transport after the Japanese had confiscated all automobiles; the occasional entertainment that relieved the monotony; the story of an ordinary soldier back from Bataan; how those from the provinces were housed in Manila after they were released from concentration camp and before they could return to their homes. And so on.

Dr. Legarda is perhaps one of the best persons to write about life in Manila during the Japanese Occupation. Besides having lived through the Occupation himself, he has the unusual advantage of having at his disposal his mother’s papers and his father’s wartime diary. Both his father and mother were prominent persons who were in the thick of things before, during and after the war.

Dr. Legarda himself is a good historian. Although his Harvard doctorate was in economics, his doctoral dissertation was on the economic history of the Philippines. It is a much-quoted book. He has written one other historical book since.

The chapters in this present book (entitled OCCUPATION ’42) had appeared as weekly columns in the Philippine Free Press. They deal with trivial things, but from a cosmopolitan perspective which renders them no longer trivial. They are the little things that cast long shadows.