Cordillera Crossover: A Japanese Legacy (Book Review)

MANILA, November 15, 2004 (STAR) By Alfred A. Yuson - The cover for
this handsome coffee-table book is entirely appropriate, showing a vintage
photo of a newly finished wooden bridge spanning a gorge in the
Cordilleras. Standing proudly at one end of the successful infrastructure
project, built a century ago, is a row of men, albeit they're hardly
distinguishable because they appear so minute. The photo, in sepia, is
placed over a faded sheet with a grid-like construction plan. Above, the
title says it all: Japanese Pioneers in the Northern Philippine Highlands:
A Centennial Tribute, 1903-2003.

This admirable, 330-page volume sets a fine example of how a centennial
book ought to be: full of facts and narratives, superbly structured and
written, rife with oral histories and warm-hearted accounts, and
splendidly inclusive of old photographs that not only bring us back to the
period commemorated, but also makes us sigh for the pristine views,
sights, and album collections of groups of heroic people that the book
pays tribute to.

Edited by Patricia Okubo Afable and published by the Filipino-Japanese
Foundation of Northern Luzon, Inc. (with postal address at No. 3 Bukaneg
St., 2600 Baguio City, Philippines), the book should be a welcome addition
to any shelf, but especially to those lovingly maintained by readers who
are increasingly appreciative of how cross-cultural leaps are achieved
through migration, technology transfer and harmonious co-existence.

Now that countless Filipinos seek greener pastures for their skills, we
should remember that all over the world other peoples have traveled from
their natural confines to find other lands of promise, and not only made
good in their resettlement, but gave exceedingly well to the world. While
it's become unimaginable for the Japanese to engage in large-scale
migration, it should be noted that a hundred years ago, the Japanese
pioneers whose stories have finally emerged in this book constituted
migrant labor.

Over a thousand Japanese carpenters, masons and road workers joined
3,000 Filipinos and other members of a workforce of 46 nationalities that
built the Benguet Road, since renamed Kennon, for the Americans from 1901
to 1905. Most of them, and many more who came in succeeding years, joined
the multicultural community that became Baguio.

"The 1910s saw Session Road, which evolved into the city's main street,
become established as a major Japanese business area," Afable writes.

Indeed, the Japanese pioneers who came over from farming prefectures in
southwestern Japan engaged in multifarious activities in our northern
highlands. They established a cooperative in Trinidad and introduced the
production of cold-weather crops. Carpenters, masons and gardeners worked
on the Wright Park Promenade and Mansion House Gardens, and virtually all
of the major buildings and projects in Baguio, including the Cathedral,
the Dominican Monastery, Baguio Central School, the Stone Market, and the
drainage system under the parking lot which still stands at the lower end
of Session Road.

The boom years of logging and mining from the 1910s to the '30s involved
Japanese craftsmen and supervisors. Some turned capitalist and established
hotels and photography studios, or built up bus and truck fleets for
commercial transport. Many moved deeper into the Cordilleras, helping
transform the old Spanish Mountain Trail into the Halsema Road, erecting
government buildings in Bontoc and the magnificent stone church in Sagada.

Part 1, offering a "Historical Background," features a single chapter:
"Building Bridges in a Faraway Place: Japanese Pioneers in Baguio and
Benguet History." As with much of the book's six sections subdivided into
13 chapters, it is written by the editor, a highly accomplished scholar
who has spent long years at the Smithsonian Institute.

Afable writes: "Together with the natives of Baguio and Benguet, other
Filipinos, and the Americans and Chinese who flocked to this highland
region, the Japanese arrivals in the early 1900s helped to lay the
region's foundations for a prosperous economic and tourist center. Among
these settlers were skilled carpenters, masons, building contractors,
gardeners, sawmill workers, and entrepreneurs. They created a school, a
Japanese Association, a farming cooperative, neighborhood groups, and
construction and trucking enterprises. Theirs is the story of a small band
of Japanese strangers who came to this faraway place a hundred years ago
to help lay out a road into the highlands. In the three decades that
followed, they built many bridges that crossed not only the Bued River's
rocky gorges, but also spanned the distant worlds of many Philippine and
Japanese families, cultures, and communities."

Patricia's mother, the legendary Baguio journalist Cecile Afable, serves
as the book's project director. It is obviously a labor of love for both,
who trace their roots to the inter-racial marriage between Ibaloy Mateo
Cariño's daughter Josefa and Teruji Okubo, the maestro of a builder from
Hiroshima.

Teruji had worked as a teenager on the Benguet Road, and sent for his
younger brother Noboru for the tunnel construction of the La Union-Baguio
railroad in 1913, which was unfortunately aborted. The brothers went on to
supervise the construction of mine tunnels, schools, Teachers' Camp
cottages and private residences (including the Quezon and Muller
mansions), and various Catholic Church projects, foremost of which was the
Baguio Cathedral, whose renovated altar is credited to Teruji.

By all accounts, Teruji Okubo was an exemplary man. He helped build all
of the Cariño houses on Kisad Road and Camp 7, the structure that
eventually housed the Baguio Printing Press, the Dominican retreat, the
Jesuit house on Mirador Hill, and the first mess hall in Camp John Hay,
among many other projects. He also started a vegetable farm in Sto. Tomas,
"where he built a large fish pond and loaded it with carp and dojo
(Japanese loach)."

His son and former apprentice Bernardo Yoshikazu C. Okubo offers
reminiscences for Chapter 3: "Papa got to be a foreman (maestro or
capataz) because he was good at designing and executing building plans.
The old-timers remember him as a builder and carpenter, but he was more
than that. He was an artist. The appearance of his work was different from
that of the other carpenters. He paid attention to the grain of the wood
and he spent time matching the different shades of wood. He would often
use wood pegs and hide the nail heads. I could always recognize his work."

The boxed feature on Teruji's brother Noboru notes: "It is said that
Noboru Okubo knew pine wood so well that he could judge its quality for
construction by simply knocking on it."

Cecile Okubo Afable had older half-brothers from Josefa Cariño's first
marriage, to Reukitse Hamada who died early from a sawmill accident. These
brothers were Oseo Hamada, who managed the Baguio Printing and Publishing
Company, and became the first chairman of the Filipino-Japanese Foundation
of Northern Luzon; and Sinai Hamada, a lawyer who founded Baguio Midland
Courier and Cordillera Post, and whose prizewinning story, "Tanabata's
Wife," sourced to his early memories, is a much-anthologized classic as a
Filipino short story in English.

No doubt, the Cariño-Hamada-Okubo-Afable genes continue on their
cross-cultural, crossover roll: Patricia's brothers are the poet-carpenter
Fernando or "Andy," now Vice Abbot in a Zen monastery in the US; and
Silvestre or "Yongyong," peace pact honcho and Malacañang's top man for
communications.

For her part, Patricia's skill at research manifests itself in this
book's comprehensive treatment, including invaluable back-of-the-book data
such as "A Chronology of Japanese Settlement in the Northern Philippine
Highlands" and full appendix listings of early Japanese residents, second
generation, and third generation Japanese-Filipino descendants in the
Cordillera region.

There is so much to be said for this volume, and so little to cavil
about. Well, on a nitpicky level, "every day" is often misrepresented as
"everyday"; and occasionally the editor betrays her training by employing
that academic-paper technique of telegraphing one's punches, er,
explaining beforehand what a chapter will set out to do, which should have
no place in a book - or so this non-academic reviewer thinks. Other than
these, it is a centennial volume to be cherished and to draw many fine
lessons from.

Other chapter contributors include Kathleen T. Okubo ("Carpentry, Mason
and Sawmill Work"), Geraldine Fiagoy ("Farming, Gardening, and the Silk
Industry: The First Arrivals"), Dionisia A. Challongen ("Naojiro Aihara, A
Builder in Bontoc"), Hakumu Furuya - translated by Marie Dolores T. Escaño
("Hideo Hayakawa, Pioneer Resident of Baguio"), and Ann Loreto Tamayo
("Culture and Everyday Life in the Japanese-Filipino Community").

Utterly charming is Cecile O. Afable's chapter account titled "'You
Husband Me and I Wife You.' How They Got Started." Here we get to fully
appreciate the magic of custom and ceremony, and the power of their
acceptance by strangers in strange lands. Such material. (Our film
directors would do well to mine this book for potential scripts).

Appropriate too is this chapter's placement right before the poignant
epilogue on how this ideal world of four decades of crossover harmony
ended with World War II. In 1945, the Japanese men who had helped
considerably in building up Baguio and other Cordillera communities were
repatriated as "enemy aliens."

Patricia Okubo Afable concludes: "While the Japanese men returned to
Japan, all (except one or two) Filipino wives and most of their
half-Japanese children stayed behind. Grateful just to be alive, and
thankful for the support of kinsmen and neighbors, they became fully
resigned to the tragic family break-ups that the war had brought them from
its very beginning. As one Japanese-Filipino former internee asked,
reminding us of the atomic bombings, 'Why would we choose to go to
Hiroshima in 1945?' Another said, 'Our father told us it made no sense for
us to go with him. That was when we knew we were Filipinos.'"

From: lquesada@newsflash.org