However, not much is written about how communities and an entire culture and society coped with the war years. This fact is particularly real for Leyte, which included Biliran Island before it became a separate province in 1992. The omission pertains to the block of time from the departure of Gen. MacArthur and top-level Filipino officials from Corregidor to Australia in early 1942, until the months prior to the Leyte Landing in October 1944. This monograph is intended to launch a process that would fill this historical gap.

I came across a sympathetic third-party account pertaining to this historical gap quite by accident. On October 21, 1994, the day after the spectacular 50th Leyte Landing commemoration, I was visited at UP - School of Health Sciences in Palo by a Japanese journalist. Miss Kaoru Kato, who covered the previous day’s ceremonies for Asahi Weekly, an English edition magazine of the Asahi newspaper chain in Japan, came to interview me about my critical views of the Leyte Landing celebration, about civilian deaths in Leyte during World War II, and about American-inflicted casualties during the Philippine-American War in Leyte and Samar at the turn of the century. She brought with her a clipping of an October 17 (1994) article in the Philippine Daily Inquirer which featured my views on some of these issues.

When Ms. Kato, a free-lance writer who specializes on Leyte, learned that I am a native of Biliran Island, the interview took a different twist. She informed me about the published memoir of a former Japanese soldier assigned in Biliran, somebody named Nakajima who was "known to the locals as radio operator and friend of the priest."

The local historian in me later took interest in the information Ms. Kato provided. In a letter, I asked her if it was possible for her to share with me the relevant contents of the memoir, by recording on tape her oral English translation of the texts pertaining to Biliran. This was an unusual and extra-ordinary request. But I surmised that the memoir could offer unique insights into the war years in Leyte, the existing literature about which mainly presented the hedonistic American viewpoint.

Ms. Kato fulfilled my request. In February 1995, I received the first tape of oral translations from her. The cover letter told me that the memoir, published in 1986, was written by Mr. Kennosuke Nakajima, a radio operator of the Japanese company stationed in Biliran town.

The translated contents were a cause for elation. Written by a Japanese war veteran in the style of a peace activist critical of his country’s wartime policies, the memoir takes a sympathetic view of the Filipinos during those years. He described the Filipinos and their way of life in an objective way, devoid of the name-calling and the "Americans are good, Japanese are bad" propaganda passed off as history in our elementary and high school textbooks.

I thanked Ms. Kato for her effort in a letter, where I also proposed to transcribe the tape and have its contents serialized as newspaper articles here. As I wished, she took care of some technicalities, like making representations with the author for his consent.

Mr. Nakajima agreed that the English translation of his memoir may be published here for the benefit of Leyteño and Biliranon readers. Ms. Kato relayed the author’s decision to me through a letter I received in May 1995, which enclosed two additional tapes of translations from the memoir.

The process went this way: Ms. Kato read from the Nakajima memoir and made direct oral English translations of the texts, which she recorded on a running cassette tape. (She was rather apologetic about her English, but I found her translation very understandable. In fact, I complimented her for this.) The memoir was written in Japanese in the first person, but Ms. Kato’s oral translation was initially rendered in the third person. In a later tape, she did the English translation as Mr. Nakajima wrote it — in the first person.

After transcribing the first tape, I rewrote the text in the first person. Then I sent batches of manuscripts to Ms. Kato in Japan for her correction of factual errors, or for clarifications by phone or letters from Mr. Nakajima, who lives in Osaka, Japan. She took note of the errors and pointed these out to me in her reply letters.

Ms. Kato informed me that the Nakajima memoir was written mainly for Japanese readers who do not know much about the Philippines. In the first tape, she skipped portions of the book and translated only those texts pertaining to Mr. Nakajima’s observations of the Filipinos, in Biliran and Leyte specifically, which elaborated items from a diary that he kept during the war. In subsequent tapes, her translations included the items she had skipped in the first tape.

I was told that the book, which title’s literal translation is Leyte Island: Wandering between Life and Death, was published by Mr. Nakajima himself in 1986. It is 325 pages long and contains four chapters, each of which was described by Ms. Kato as follows:

"Chapter 1, ‘Sunset in Biliran,’ describes in large part the days that Mr. Nakajima spent in Biliran town. This chapter includes observations of Leyte-Leyte where he joined the anti-guerrilla patrols.

"Chapter 2, ‘The Coming of the Americans,’ revolves around the Leyte Landing in October 1944.

"Chapter 3, ‘South of Danao,’ describes the author’s experiences while wandering with other Japanese soldiers in the mountainous area south of Lake Danao, in central Leyte, from the arrival of the Americans in October 1944 until late January 1945.

"Chapter 4, ‘Wandering the Battlefields,’ describes the author’s days before his capture by American soldiers in February 1945 and his days as a prisoner of war. He dropped off from the main stream of Japanese soldiers who headed towards Lake Danao and were hoping to cross Ormoc Valley towards Buga-buga (in Villaba).

"After dropping off from the rest, Mr. Nakajima wandered alone in the mountains until February 22, 1945, when he came down to Barrio Can-untog, near Bao River, some three kilometers east of Deposito (south of Ormoc).

"Mr. Nakajima was young then and too hungry. He had also lost his fascination with military life. So he decided to go down to Ormoc, hoping to eat some of those American foods in tin cans, and then to die."

I now have three 90-minuter tapes with me. All have been transcribed and written up. They contain the complete translation of Chapter 1, "Sunset in Biliran," which interested me most.

I would like to remind the reader that I originally transcribed the translated chapter of Mr. Nakajima’s memoir as a series of articles for a weekly newspaper audience. I was therefore subject to limitations of newspaper column and space. Thus, to spice up the narration, I assigned catchy subtitles to the texts and wrote short paragraphs. I also supplied texts in parentheses to clarify and comment on certain items in the narration. I essentially retained the newspaper version here.

Chapter 2 is titled "Orders are orders." I deemed this appropriate for Mr. Nakajima’s personal account and reflections on the war-related activities and operations of his company and the Japanese military in Leyte during the immediate months prior to the Leyte Landing on October 20, 1944.

US military histories claimed that Leyte was the "surprise" landing site of the Allied Forces under Gen. MacArthur. These histories were noted by historian Ambeth R. Ocampo to have been "written by Americans to glorify MacArthur rather than the forgotten Filipinos who died fighting that war" (Philippine Daily Inquirer, Oct. 19, 1994).

However, the Japanese military appeared to have guessed the American troop movements. They prepared for a possible Leyte Landing as early as April 1944.

In Chapter 2, Mr. Nakajima described the feverish Japanese military preparations in northern Leyte and Biliran Island during the few months prior to October 1944. The chapter title, "Orders are orders," aptly describes the underlying reasons for the inhumanities of war suffered by both the Filipinos and the Japanese in Leyte during that time. In Mr. Nakajima’s account, the reader gets a rare glimpse of a Japanese soldier’s perception of a reign of terror that elderly Leyteños called juez de cutsillo (bayonet justice).

home