My media-oriented advocacy to expose the contradictions and undersides of two famous events in Philippine history that happened in the Leyte-Samar Region, where I was born and grew up, came quite by accident.

In 1994, the province of Leyte undertook feverish preparations for the 50th Leyte Landing anniversary on October 20 of that year. That celebration was promoted as the Pacific equivalent of a similar grandiose commemoration in Normandy, France held in June a few months earlier, which event was attended by U.S. President Bill Clinton.

By July 1994, the tentative program for the Leyte Landing anniversary was made available to the media, and this was promptly disseminated to the regional audience by the local radio stations. When I heard the names of the prospective awardees, I noticed something was amiss. The late President Sergio Osmeña, the late diplomat Carlos P. Romulo, the late Colonel Ruperto Kangleon, and retired General Rafael Ileto were to be given Philippine Legion of Honor awards. But I did not hear the name of Valeriano Abello, the Boy Scout hero of the Leyte Landing, among the honorees.

I thought then that it was not yet too late to make some noise for the purpose of effecting changes in the program. I thereafter wrote a letter to the editor of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the country’s leading newspaper. In my letter, I proposed some form of recognition for Abello, whose heroism had been habitually mentioned, although anonymously, by a succession of American speakers during previous commemorations.

Abello was the courageous solitary figure who appeared on the beach of Tolosa, Leyte, and signaled using semaphore flags to the U.S. forces aboard the ships offshore that civilian lives were endangered by their impending bombardment. After reaching the ships on an outrigger banca paddled by two local friends, Abello pointed out the Japanese artillery emplacements and defensive positions and helped spare many civilian settlements and populations from destruction by American carpet bombing.

In addition, I proposed the return of the Bells of Balangiga by the U.S. Government to the Philippines. I was referring to the two relics displayed near the flagpole at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, which were taken from a town on Samar Island where a company of the U.S. Army suffered its “worst single defeat” at the hands of bolo-armed Filipino fighters on September 28, 1901, during the Philippine-American War. As a researcher of this conflict in the Leyte-Samar region, I was worried that the 50th Leyte Landing rites would seriously cover up the disappearing memory of suppressed events in our region a century ago. By invoking the bells, I thought I could remind our people about a more vicious but forgotten war that cost the lives of more people of Leyte and Samar than any other conflict in our local history.

I did fancy about a magnanimous commitment on the part of the U.S. Government to return the Balangiga bells, which were more of an academic than popular issue at that time. As a gesture, I imagined this would resolve two basically contradicting issues of the American heritage in our region. One extreme was symbolized by the unreturned Bells of Balangiga; the other by the Leyte Landing of the Allied Forces under the command of General Douglas MacArthur in 1944.

My two proposals, all included in one letter, involved wishful thinking at best. Not all my letters to the Inquirer got published. Until July 1994, I was lucky if one-out-of-three letters saw print. Indeed, I would not have been surprised if my mentioned letter went to the editor’s wastebasket instead.

But then something big happened more than a week after I had mailed my letter. The Inquirer scooped me out with a front-page feature on Valeriano Abello, written by two of the newspaper's topnotch writers, who came all the way to Tacloban to interview Abello and photograph him in Boy Scout uniform (1). I knew the tip came from me, but my letter was not found in the “Letters” section.

After another week of waiting, I gave up hope that my letter would ever be published.

And then, unexpectedly, I received a letter from a staff of the chairman of the Committee on Veterans Affairs of the Batasang Pambansa, the national legislature, which tried to explain their effort to look into the case of Abello, whose application for war veteran status had been repeatedly turned down by the government in the past.

Sometime later, I also received mail from a former roommate back in the university days. It contained a photocopy of my published letter, entitled “Bells of Balangiga,” (2) which came out on a day a Philippine Airlines strike deprived Tacloban of its newspapers. Beside the article, the sender included his Japanese translation of my letter, which had been sent by his friend to a Japanese veterans’ publication.

What happened next was visible to the general public. After the Inquirer published a few follow up letters and a full feature story, my two modest proposals became controversial sub-themes that could no longer be shaken off the media focus of the celebration. The organizers eventually included Valeriano Abello among the awardees. And though he received only a Certificate of Recognition, Abello's human interest story got longer playing time on CNN than the actor who played Gen. MacArthur, who was shown tripping and falling into the water during the reenactment of the Leyte Landing.

As for the Bells of Balangiga, the government’s tourism director for Leyte-Samar told me years later that this issue was also discussed among the American diplomats who graced the Leyte Landing rites in 1994. They were reportedly dismayed by some national politicians who rode on the bells issue to keep themselves in the limelight.

Anyway, the publicity about the bells also got me in contact with other willing supporters. One was a Franciscan priest who was my father-confessor in my hometown before he was transferred to the elite Forbes Park Parish in Metro-Manila. He brought the bells issue directly to then U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte and his wife. Both reportedly sounded off the issue to then U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry, who represented U.S. President Bill Clinton in the Leyte ceremonies.

Pres. Clinton visited the Philippines a month later, on November 13, 1994, on his way to Indonesia to attend the annual APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Meeting. During his one-on-one talk with President Fidel Ramos, he reportedly offered to return the Bells of Balangiga to the Philippines “in the spirit of fair play.”

However, the news report about the Clinton offer was only published one month later, in the December 17, 1994 issue of The Manila Times, a national daily of limited circulation. A year later, I was informed by the person whom Pres. Ramos sent to the U.S. to follow up the matter of the bells that Pres. Clinton's offer was considered “illegal” in some State Department circles.

And so, my first serious attempt to clarify certain historical wrongs by exposing in the media the contradictions and undersides of two famous events of Philippine history in my home region brought about only “partial success” in 1994. But this was sufficient to influence subsequent events towards my original intention.

Negative impact

Since then, the Leyte Landing anniversary had virtually lost its symbolic value as an event that Filipinos could be proud of. This unabashed ritual glorification of the Americans as “big brothers” virtually self-destructed before a stunned national audience who watched the live TV coverage of the events on October 20, 1994. A major ceremonial accident contributed to this: the actor who played Gen. MacArthur tripped and fell into the water during the landing reenactment, the supposed climax of the affair.

Not only that. No foreign head of nation from Allied countries represented in Leyte during World War II attended the ceremonies, unlike the same event in Normandy, France a few months earlier.

Behind the scene, there was organizational chaos. Many invited Filipino veterans who had lined up since dawn failed to get the catered food intended for them. Yet truckloads of packed food brought in by Manila-based caterers were later buried underground by bulldozers after they had become spoiled. The veterans from out-of-town also complained about the shabby accommodation in the quarters provided them.

Many former guerrillas from northeastern Leyte were particularly bitter. They had made representations and hoped that the late Major Alejandro Balderian, their great guerrilla leader who had direct operational command over the areas where MacArthur and his forces landed, would be recognized by the national government for his wartime feat. But he did not get anything, apparently due to local politics.

The Balderian guerrillas learned a very bitter lesson that year: that it is a mistake to honor foreign “liberators” and their chosen Filipino buddies while ignoring the valiant local guerrillas who made the Leyte Landing possible with less cost on American lives. As a reaction, they organized later a parallel event that they called Balderian Day, which they commemorated every May 5 in Burauen, Leyte, which town had passed a local legislation to this effect. I was invited to speak before this group on their 2nd Balderian Day in May 1999 (3).

After 1994, the Leyte Landing commemoration was ignored by the Japanese Government by not sending any representative and trivialized by the U.S. and Australian Governments by sending in low-ranking embassy staff.

Last year (2004), the other ambassadors were back in full force for the 60th Leyte Landing anniversary because the main guest was President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. As in 1994, there was live coverage of the event on the government TV channels. But the event hardly merited any important mention in the national dailies the next day.

I narrated to you my general observations and my modest contribution to the media debate related to the Leyte Landing commemoration in 1994 because that year also proved to be a “turning point” in media-based history education in my home region. The overall effort to impose the American perspective of World War II and the Battle of Leyte backfired on the national and local organizers of the anniversary. It instead evoked a lot of negative local memories of the war, including alleged guerrilla abuses on the local population, as well as animosities related to the American duplicity and neglect of the “U.S.-recognized” Filipino guerrillas, who were clamoring for equitable veterans benefits from the U.S. Government.

In its aftermath, the lesser-known event that I introduced to the media debate, the Balangiga Incident in Samar in 1901, grabbed the media’s attention over the next decade and became the alternative rallying point in our quest for sources of regional pride and identity. Concerned intellectuals in Leyte also started to think it was time to look into the wartime era in this province from the previously ignored Japanese and independent Filipino perspectives to complement, if not to contradict, the American-influenced perspective.

A few days after the 1994 Leyte Landing anniversary, I was visited at my school by Miss Kaoru Kato, a Japanese freelance journalist on assignment by the Asahi Shimbun. She interviewed me related to my critical views of the event that was featured in the Philippine Daily Inquirer a week earlier, and which article she had clipped (4).

When Miss Kato learned that I came from Biliran Island, now a young province separated from Leyte in 1992, she mentioned to me the memoirs of Mr. Kennosuke Nakajima, a Japanese war veteran who was assigned as radio operator in my home island in 1944 and later survived the Battle of Leyte.

Over the next few months, I kept correspondence with Miss Kato related to Mr. Nakajima’s memoirs. She also sent me several tapes of verbal English translation of the chapter “Sunset in Biliran” in Mr. Nakajima’s book.

I soon transcribed and edited the English translation and sought Mr. Nakajima’s permission, through Miss Kato, to publish the English text in local newspapers in Leyte. After permission was granted, I serialized the translation in 24 installments under my column in the weekly Bankaw News in 1995. This was re-issued under my column in the newly founded Leyte-Samar Daily Express in 2000. I have also uploaded the entire translated text in my Internet website (5).

Thanks to the translation of Mr. Nakajima’s memoirs, the people of Leyte have been provided with a sympathetic Japanese perspective of the war in our island. Surprisingly, many of my local readers who had lived through the war years shared Mr. Nakajima’s observations and analysis of the events in Leyte. At first, they were hesitant to express their private views about the war years that contradicted the American and textbook versions. Later, they expressed the same views openly and without inhibitions.

It might interest you to know that I had actually seen Mr. Nakajima, the Japanese with the signature white cap, while I was a young high school student in Naval town in Biliran Island in 1974. This was during his first trip that failed to recover the body of Mr. Hirano, a Japanese pilot who was captured by Filipino guerrillas after he had crash-landed his plane at the local beach during the Battle of Leyte in 1944, executed by his captors, and was buried behind the school building not far from my parents’ house. The pilot’s remains were finally recovered during the second trip in 1976. Today, the shrine erected in the memory of Mr. Hirano, the only one of such kind in Biliran Island, is being cared for by grade school pupils in my hometown.

In December 1994, I met in Tacloban a team from NHK, the Japanese national television, who were then in the process of conducting research and preparing for a documentary on the Battle of Leyte, the 1.5-hour documentary that was first shown in August 1995. I was consulted and interviewed by the director-producer during its making and I gave him copies of some useful documents in my possession. I was later sent a VHS tape of the documentary, and the video images provided me with a more expanded view of the war years from the Japanese perspective, even if I did not understand the Japanese narration and dialogues.

I have used the Nakajima memoirs and the NHK documentary in some of my Philippine History classes whenever the topic of World War II came up.

In 1995, I started tracking down some of the possibly still living personalities that Mr. Nakajima had described in his memoirs. I was not successful until 1999, when I was told about the existence of his second book of memoirs, titled Leyte no banka in Japanese. Translations from the second book provided me with precious clues that led me the real identities of “Elsa,” “Salucia,” and “Captain Sasaki’s fiancée” in Biliran town, as well as “Nene” in Leyte-Leyte.

My feature story on “Captain Sasaki’s fiancée” in Biliran was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer the day after the Leyte Landing anniversary in 1999 (6). It was my first major article in the country’s leading newspaper, and it created quite a sensation. The featured woman told me she received several letters of appreciation from various national officials and personalities who were impressed by her story.

The feature story about “Elsa,” who happened to be Mr. Nakajima’s best friend in Biliran town, appeared under my column in the Inquirer on October 18, 2003, two days before the Leyte Landing anniversary (7).

On October 23 last year, three days after the Leyte Landing anniversary, the Inquirer also published my feature story about Captain Katuisi Amano and his fiancée in Bato, Leyte during the war (8). The main feature of the article was a seaside picture of the two lovers taken during the war.

The story of Capt. Amano was voluntarily brought to my attention by Mr. Porfirio Kuizon, a 74-year old mechanical engineer from Bato, Leyte. He called me up by phone a few days after he had read the “Elsa” article in October 2003.

Long before the war, in 1910, Kuizon’s father adopted a Japanese from Hiroshima, named Yuichi Fujimoto. He turned Christian, was baptized as Manuel Kuizon, married a Filipina, and was helped to put up a bakery in town by the Kuizon family. The descendants of this Japanese, who died a prisoner of war in Tacloban around May 1942, just before the Japanese Imperial Army arrived in Leyte, still live in Bato.

Anyway, Mr. Kuizon had written his memoirs of the war years, which he titled “The Good War.” He titled it so because he said the war years were the happiest years for his united family, full of tension those times might have been. He soon requested me to review and edit his work, which provided an eyewitness account of the wartime era in his hometown. The Kuizon evacuation house in the outskirts had hosted some top ranking officials of the pre-war Philippine Government from other Visayan Islands, including future President Carlos Garcia, as well as Filipino and American guerrilla officers, who had sought refuge in Bato, which was known as “Little Cebu” during the war.

Of interest to this audience, Kuizon’s older brother, Quintino, was the teenage boy who devised machine parts for and repaired and conditioned the generator, and then installed the transmitter that enabled American guerrilla Major David Richardson to communicate by radio with the MacArthur headquarters in Australia from a mountain hideout in Southern Leyte starting in 1943. He also devised bullets for the guerrillas in Southern Leyte. Yet, like Abello whom I mentioned earlier, Quintino is an “unrecognized” guerrilla by U.S. definition, despite his heroic contribution to the American war efforts.

After reviewing and editing Kuizon’s memoirs, I submitted its manuscript to the Bulletin of the American Historical Collection, the journal of the American Historical Collection based at the Ateneo de Manila University in Metro-Manila. The editor told me this was included in the issue for the 4th Quarter of 2004 (9).

A complementary effort to expand the understanding of the World War II years in Leyte for the purpose of peace education and advocacy is my collaborative activity with Prof. Tomoe Shitaba of the School of International Relations, Tokyo International University in Saitama Prefecture.

From 1996, I had facilitated the spring study tour of the Shitaba Seminar in my region. This seminar has published books since then, and the royalties have been used to support projects and activities aimed at promoting greater understanding between Japanese and Filipinos through the Peace Development Fund (PDF), an NGO that we have established.

Among our beneficiaries is the Atitipalo Visual Arts Group of Palo, Leyte. Its members have received grants for a series of three exhibits of their art works in our region, which focused on the theme of Peace as a lesson learned from War. Representative works of the Atitipalo artists were also exhibited by the Shitaba Seminar in Hiroshima, Japan in August 2002. Their last exhibit, titled “Sunset in Biliran,” which was held in Biliran town in March last year, was featured in a major article in the Philippine Daily Inquirer (10).

I have made representation with Prof. Shitaba and his students to display some of these art works in this lecture venue.

My research, extension and advocacy activities related to history and culture in various provinces of the Leyte-Samar Region as well as in the Internet are also supported by PDF.

Recently, two of my friends have conducted research on the local guerrilla movements during World War II (11). One of them is writing on the guerrilla movement in Southern Samar, as a component of a general history of that area that we are collaborating on. This project receives some PDF support.

My other friend is taking a different look at the Filipino guerrilla movement in Leyte. He is focusing on its undersides and is subjecting to critical review the guerrilla experience of Col. Kangleon, the MacArthur-appointed guerrilla leader for Leyte.

Both of these on-going researches would view our region’s World War II experience from the Filipino perspective.

Parallel to my research on World War II in Leyte was my back-to-the-basic research on the Balangiga Incident in Samar in 1901. After the overall negative impact of the 1994 Leyte Landing anniversary, former President Fidel Ramos jumped into the Bells of Balangiga bandwagon, which was ironically the same issue that he scorned when the local media mentioned it to him in July 1994, during his visit to Tacloban to supervise the preparations for its commemoration.

In 1997, Pres. Ramos started a nationally coordinated campaign to have the Bells of Balangiga returned to the Philippines from the U.S. in time for the Centennial Commemoration of the Declaration of Philippine Independence on June 12, 1998.

Until that year, I only had possession of documents and literatures that mainly reflected the Filipino perspective of the so-called “Balangiga Massacre” of 1901. As June 1998 neared, it became apparent that the American side held a parallel, but also credible, version of the Balangiga story that contrasted with the Filipino version in almost every detail. As a result, the U.S. side found sufficient justification to hold on to the relics, and Pres. Ramos failed in his own bells campaign.

The failure of a Filipino president to have the Bells of Balangiga returned in 1998 prodded me to research the basic facts of the Balangiga Incident and attempt to integrate the contrasting Filipino and American versions of the story. The result was my doctoral dissertation research that was completed in 2002 and published as a book titled The Balangiga Conflict Revisited in 2003 (12). This was the first book ever written about the Balangiga Incident by a Filipino and by a native of the region where the event occurred.

I was helped in my research by Jean Wall, the daughter of the first American soldier to be attacked in Balangiga, whom I have befriended and whose sentimental visits to Balangiga I facilitated in 1998 and in 2001. She provided me full access to her valuable archives of the event. Another help came from Bob Couttie, a British video director and former BBC correspondent who had also conducted research on the same event. The three of us have formed the Balangiga Research Group (BRG), which is now generally acknowledged as the authority of the Balangiga Incident by both the Filipino and American sides.

Last year, Bob Couttie published his book titled Hang the Dogs: The True Tragic History of the Balangiga Massacre (13), which complemented my book by providing its broader national and international contexts, and which he also dedicated to his fellow BRG members. Our two books provide the most comprehensive and documented review of the Philippine-American War in Samar at the turn of the 20th century. Both books also integrated the previously contrasting and contradictory versions of the events in Samar at the dawn of the American colonization. We have also established independent proofs of a third bell of Balangiga with U.S. Forces stationed in South Korea.

After completing the research on the Philippine-American War in Samar and expanding the scope of the research on World War II in Leyte, I am now in the process of researching and writing the manuscripts of other books on the general history of the Leyte-Samar Region. The manuscript of the book The Colonial Odyssey of Leyte: 1521-1914 is now with the publisher and would likely come out this year.

Ten years of eclectic research on the history of the Leyte-Samar Region have offered me valuable lessons and insights. The most important insight was the need for us Filipinos outside the national capital, which is called Imperial Manila in the intellectual community, to willfully write about our local historical experiences from our own socio-cultural and geographic perspectives.

To this day, I still could not adequately explain why it took nearly 60 years for the first Filipino eyewitness accounts of the Balangiga Incident in 1901 to be published in the Philippines. And this was ironically researched and written by a German missionary priest in 1959 (14). I do not wish to speculate the reasons for the long silence. I would only offer a parallel phenomenon.

Until 1994, it was virtually taboo in Leyte to write and discuss World War II accounts that contradicted the American perspective and the textbook version of the events, i.e., that the Japanese were bad, that the guerrillas were heroic freedom fighters, and that the Filipinos awaited the return of General MacArthur. You were likely to be rebuffed if you did so. Indeed, my initial interviews of several people in Biliran, whom I thought were the ones mentioned in the Nakajima memoirs, and which generated independent views of the war years in Leyte, were done in guarded language and even whispers by the informants.

The inhibitions disappeared during follow-up interviews after I had serialized the English translations of the Nakajima memoirs in the local newspapers and published feature stories about Japanese-Filipino friendships during the war in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. At present, the people in Leyte could freely discuss other aspects of the war, even those that contradicted the views prescribed in the history textbooks. I hope this trend would continue until our people could acquire a better understanding of our forebears’ World War II experiences from our own perspective.

Ideally, such broader knowledge should reckon not only the American-influenced perspective but also the complementary, though previously ignored, Japanese and other Filipino perspectives. This task has been accomplished in the media environment for the Balangiga Incident and the Philippine-American War in Samar. I do not see any reason why this same process could not be done for the World War II history of Leyte in the future.

A related observation is the virtual absence of any regional and national mechanism to formally recognize the deeds of local heroes. The likes of Valeriano Abello, Major Alejandro Balderian, and Quintino Kuizon could not get special guest seats during the annual Leyte Landing commemorations, despite their significant and verifiable heroic deeds during the war. They were always merged with other unnamed former guerrillas in the crowd. When Abello passed away a few years ago, representations by his family to have him buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Cemetery) in Manila were disregarded because he was an “unrecognized” war veteran.

In contrast, in Balangiga, the protagonists on both sides of the 1901 battle are equally honored during the annual commemoration programs that were started only 15 years ago in 1989.

The media certainly played a key role in drastically changing the public perception related to the two famous historical events in my region during the past decade. The timely publication of newspaper articles featuring the contradictions and undersides of these events appeared to have expedited the process.

Before 1994, the Leyte Landing anniversary was virtually uncontested as the biggest history-related annual event in the region. It is no longer so at present. The anniversary of the Balangiga Incident has assumed equal, if not greater, prominence in the media domain.

Hopefully, in the years ahead, other local historical events of national importance that were previously ignored or forgotten could catch up and find their proper place in the public domain, as part of our continuing quest for socio-cultural and historical links to our proud past in the Leyte-Samar Region.

Thank you and good evening.

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