Enduring alliance

Near Japan’s Imperial Palace in Tokyo is Hibiya Park, where there are two monuments to the country’s friendship with the Philippines.

One is a bust of national hero Jose Rizal, who arrived in Yokohama in 1888 and proceeded to Tokyo. Wednesday, Feb. 28 marked 130 years since his arrival in Japan.

From March 2 to 7, Rizal stayed at the Tokyo Hotel before moving to the Spanish Legation to stay with its secretary Juan Perez Caballero.

The Tokyo Hotel is no longer there. Rizal’s bust was unveiled at the site in 1998. Although he stayed in Japan for less than two months, leaving for the United States on April 13, Rizal fell in love with a Japanese woman, Seiko Usui or O-sei san, who acted as his interpreter.

I learned about this, and the existence of the bust, only in my visit last week to Tokyo. I’ve been to Japan a few times but didn’t know about the Rizal bust. Several history books mention Rizal’s love affair with a Japanese, but I must have been asleep when it was taught in school.

Near the bust, in the same park, a memorial was unveiled in June 2016 in honor of another Filipino: Elpidio Quirino, the man who started the nation on the road to healing the wounds of World War II.

Quirino, a senator when the war reached the Philippines, was tortured at Fort Santiago. His wife Alicia, three of their five children and more than a dozen other relatives were killed by the Japanese during the Battle of Manila in 1945. But in July 1953 during his presidency, Quirino pardoned 105 Japanese who were imprisoned in Muntinlupa as war criminals, along with 332 Filipino collaborators. The Japanese were repatriated in December of the same year.

In explaining the executive clemency that he granted, Quirino declared, “I am doing this because I do not want my children and my people to inherit from me hate for people who might yet be our friends for the permanent interest of the country.”

I know Filipinos from the older generations with indelible memories of Japanese wartime atrocities, who cannot forgive and forget. But for the most part, it looks like Quirino got his wish for wartime hatred to disappear. Since Quirino’s act of clemency, bilateral ties have grown progressively stronger.

Today President Duterte clearly has a soft spot for Japan, visiting that country twice in less than two years, meeting the Emperor and Empress, and welcoming to his Davao home Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. This is surely helped by the fact that the Japanese have said not a single word about the human rights situation and the war on drugs in the Philippines.

The survey taken by pollster Social Weather Stations Inc. late last year shows the public pulse: the United States, Canada and Japan are the countries most trusted by Filipinos.

And Pinoys consider Japan unthreatening enough to welcome the prospect of that country increasing its security role in the Asia-Pacific. The Indo-Pacific alliance being pushed by democracies in the region is starting to gain traction in our country.

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I was unaware of the story of Rizal and O-sei san. What I remember from history books, which I read long after graduating from journalism school, are stories of Japanese workers building Kennon Road, when the Americans were developing Baguio as a place where they could get some respite from the blistering tropical heat in the lowlands. The portly US civil governor William Howard Taft particularly needed cooling.

Of over 2,300 Filipino and foreign workers who built the road under the supervision of Col. Lyman Kennon of the US Army Corps of Engineers, some 1,500 were Japanese. Many of them settled in Baguio, which became the Philippines’ summer capital.

The war years showed a different face of Japan. But the nuclear attacks on two of their cities turned the Japanese into pacifists, with military non-aggression enshrined in their constitution.

Post-war Filipinos associate the Japanese with that pacifist principle, along with cars, household appliances, computer games, sushi, wagyu beef and animé.

During my visit to Tokyo, Japanese officials stressed to me that their pacifism remains deeply entrenched, and their nation plays by the rules. Filipinos, now losing the nation’s entire maritime claim to China, will agree with the Japanese.

It helps that the Japanese are calling for respect for international rules, including the ruling of the UN-backed Permanent Arbitration Court, which invalidated China’s entire nine-dash-line claim over the South China Sea.

China is increasingly challenging Japan’s ownership of the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, sending hundreds of fishing boats backed by armed civilian government vessels to the area.

Japanese analysts and officials told me they did not expect the Chinese to yield an inch of the artificial islands in the South China Sea to the Philippines. It’s a position that I believe is shared by many Filipinos.

On top of Japan’s support in the maritime dispute, Filipinos share democratic values with the Japanese, with both believing in the free and open exchange of goods and ideas. Such values form the bedrock of enduring alliances.

This is one alliance that requires no hard sell by President Duterte.

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PINK IS FOR WOMEN: The one million pink disaster preparedness handbook being distributed this month by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government aren’t meant specifically for schools, as I wrote, but are designed for women. The illustrated disaster precautions can be done with minimal effort, and includes tips on how to breastfeed in evacuation centers.

Mea culpa, for this and the mistakes I made in another column on Japan. It’s tough when I can’t speak or read the language.