Under the Stacks*

In last Monday’s commemoration of Bataan day, Japanese Ambassador Toshinao Urabe once again expressed his country’s “heartfelt apologies and deep sense of remorse of the tragedy” that occurred 70 years ago.

It’s good that we commemorate what happened on April 9, 1942 so the younger generation would be told what our forefathers sacrificed for us to enjoy the freedom that we have today.

Time heals wounds but it is something to be concerned about when history is revised and mistakes are justified.The book “Under the Stacks” by Saul Hofileña, Jr. tackled a number of those historical distortions.

There is a chapter “The Yasukuni Shrine and the Japanese War Monuments in the Philippines” where he talked about his visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo which pays homage to the millions of Japanese war dead.

Hofileña said, “In the Yasukuni Shrine, the spirits of Japan’s war dead are enshrined as deities. They are their country’s guardians. The guardians or protectors of the Japanese nation who sacrificied their lives for their country.”

Hofileña said 11 of the enshrined heroes have been classified by the International War Crimes Tribunal as Class “A” war criminals. They include Hideki Tojo, Tomoyuki Yamashita, and Masaharu Homma.

He said in the shrine is an Imperial War Museum which displays countless weapons, guns, armaments, military impedimenta and war memorabilia.

Hofileña said, prominently displayed in the halls of the museum is a “ strange looking midget plane called an Oka aircraft.”

“It is an engineless, cigar-shaped suicide aircraft. When called to use, its nose was packed with explosives and bore a single kamikaze helmsman who would guide the plane’s deadly cargo to its predetermined target,” he wrote.

There is also a statue of a lone kamikaze pilot prominently displayed on the museum grounds, he said.

Hofileña continued his account of the Yakusuni Shrine: “ The statue is an identical twin of another statue which stands in an enclosed shrine in Mabalacat, Pampanga and erected by the Japanese with the help of a former mayor of the town.

“It is outrageous that a government official would agree to the establishment of a kamikaze statue on the Philippine soil when Filipinos suffered so much in the hands of the Japanese during the Second World War.

“Aside from that kamikaze monument in Mabalacat, there are two other objectionable war memorials erected by the Japanese and situated in Los Baños, Laguna. One honors the memory of Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita, the ‘Tiger of Malaya’, who was given the mission by Tokyo to defend the Philippines during the waning days of Japan’s militaristic empire.

“His monument is erected on the very site where he was hanged before dawn. There is a plaque written in Japanese without an English or Tagalog translation. Some say it is the last haiku written in Japanese by Yamashita.

“ The other monument shamelessly honors Gen. Masaharu Homma as a martyr to world peace when we know it was he who led the 14th Army responsible for the fall of the Philippines and for the infamous “Death March”.

“The twin monuments are disgraceful because Laguna was ground zero for the numerous massacres perpetrated by the Japanese in their ‘subjugation’ campaigns in Southern Luzon.

“The existence of these monuments on Philippine soil are beyond comprehension to those who have read their history. Maybe the alleged haiku extols Yamashita for a job well done.

“Why we have forgotten our past so soon should be the subject of another monument to remind us of our collective amnesia.”

Hofileña’s book is good material to jolt us out of that self-induced amnesia.

The eminent Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, former chairman of the National Historical Commission, said some of the essays in the book are “packed with historical dynamite…this is precisely what we need to rouse the dead souls among us from their colonial stupor.”

*( Under the Stacks – a phrase which means “buried under a pile or heap of books, papers, musty documents, unread volumes, and treasured ephemera bearing words embalmed by time. In a metaphorical sense, as used in this book, it refers to history interred in our nation’s bones and collective memory, long hidden and concealed, either to be retrieved and remembered or to be altogether forgotten.”)