Wokou, Nihonjin, Nikkeijin—Japan’s legacy in the Philippines

The Philippines’ history with Japan is well-documented in the context of World War II. But how about before then, and even further back, before Spanish colonization? In this episode, Carmina and Patch unearth the lesser-known presence of Japanese in the Philippines throughout its history. Listen in as they discover how deep the connection goes and how the two nations’ paths converged then ruptured in history’s unraveling. 

Learn more: In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, Capsule History of Dilao – First Japanese ‘Nihon-machi’ in the Philippines, Early Japanese Imperialism and the Philippines, Letter from Cebu (No.5) “Relations between Japan and Cebu – Before World War II”, The Father of Davao Development, Archaeological and historical insights into the ecological impacts of pre-colonial and colonial introductions into the Philippine Archipelago, UP Diliman Asian Studies archives-The Holocene Journal: "NEVER IMAGINE YOURSELF TO BE OTHERWISE …":
FILIPINO IMAGE OF JAPAN OVER THE CENTURIES”, and Instagram: IMIN Philippine–Japan Historical Museum. 

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Transcript

Welcome to FilTrip, a podcast where we explore everything fun, weird, and in between about the Philippines. 

Hi, Patch.

Hi, Carmina.

I'm really excited about our topic today because we are going to talk about the Japanese in the Philippines. Japan is so hot nowadays. It seems everyone I know either has gone or wants to go.

We thought about talking about this because we were wondering if Japan and the Philippines had interactions before Spain colonized us. So we're always talking about the Chinese and how influential they were on our culture, but we don't ever hear about Japan. And that's so strange because geographically, the Philippines is south of Japan and they were seafarers too.

Right. 

And also for most of us, when we talk about the Japanese history with the Philippines, we're always thinking immediately about the war.

Right.

Because obviously that created such a significant impact in our history, in our economy, in our politics. But we had Japanese immigration, pre-colonization. So it's exciting to dig deeper into that.

You know, this research just really reinforces to me how much of a melting pot the Philippines was.

Long before Spain arrived, the Philippine Archipelago was part of a wider trade network.

So I think first, it's important for us to acknowledge that Japan, like the Philippines, didn't start out as a unified country. And from the 13th to the 16th centuries, it was a collection of feudal domains. And they were engaged in constant civil war.

Aside from the fact that they were all warring, there was a presence that was felt abroad through what they called the Woku. And they're known as pirate traders. There was also a small population that were not pirates but traders.

So there was a lot of exchange.

There were ports in communities in what we call Luzon now, Cebu, Mindoro, and Mindanao. And the Japanese ships traded with us. They traded swords, ceramics, iron for spices, gold, and other local products.

But I was curious as to what was the difference between trading and raiding. As far as these pirates were concerned, apparently, you know, this relationship was not purely violent. There are records that show that we had these Luzon jars that were very popular in the Japanese tea culture. They couldn't have just always raided, right? Probably, there really was an active trading relationship.

As is usual for our history, there's really not a lot to find pre-colonially about the Japanese and our history except for anecdotal accounts in historical records of explorers from the West. It was very interesting for me to learn that there were several developments in Japan that changed the character of their interactions with, especially when the Spanish came. 

In Japan, there was a period called the Segoku Period, and that's between 1565 to 1600. And that kind of coincides, right, when Legaspi landed in Cebu and started exploring how to subjugate the Philippine Archipelago. During that period, it's called the Warring States, Hideyoshi Totomi, who was known as the second great unifier of Japan, was a legendary warrior, general and politician. He was credited for ending over a century of civil war, and by 1590, he succeeded in unifying Japan.

He established a passport system, stamped with a seal of his what was called the Shogunate, to ensure that the Wako or the pirates could be distinguished from legit traitors. So the ships, the legit ships carrying Japanese goods, were called red seal ships because the stamp color was vermilion, which is a brilliant red color. And that was a way for people that the Japanese were trading with to know that they were not Wako.

And then, through the years, the Spanish indoctrination machine was very active in Southeast Asia. And it was also super interesting for me to learn that there was a huge Christianization effort in Japan as well. By 1587, Totomi issued the first edict to expel these missionaries.

And in 1597, he famously ordered the crucifixion of 26 Christians in Nagasaki, called the 26 Martyrs of Japan, to discourage these conversions. These people who were subject to religious persecution, they started exiting the country. And one of the places where some of these Christians settled was in the Philippines.

And one of those areas was Paco, Manila, which was previously known as Dilao.

And that community was primarily a Japanese merchant community called the Nihonmachi. And by the way, Patch, the name Dilau, which translated to English means yellow, apparently has one of two origins. So, the first theory is the yellow amaryllis plants that used to grow there.

Or there was an alternative theory that, sadly, I think is the more plausible one. It was a Spanish reference to the skin tone of the Japanese. So, which one do you think is the real?

Probably the second, then.

Yes. So sad. Anyway, and we also have to remember that was the time when the Galleon Trade was booming.

But I did want to point out, because we were talking about the Galleon Trade and all of that, it seems that historically, the Spanish did prefer the Japanese over the Chinese.

Yes, they considered the Japanese elite merchants and warriors.

The Japanese migrants were mostly Christian converts. So I'm sure they had a lot to do with their preference as well.

So I was talking earlier about Hideyoshi Totomi. It wasn't like he exiled these folks and then left us alone. He apparently at some point was demanding tributes from us, from the Philippines, but the Spanish refused.

So there was always this threat of invasion from Japan that never materialized, but nevertheless the threat was always there. 

With this migration, there were also some Japanese rebellions similar to how the Chinese and the Parian occasionally rebelled against the Spanish. So in context, for example, in 1606, the Japanese population in Dilao had grown to approximately 3000.

“And there were tensions rising because of a colonial decree that the Spaniards placed on both the Chinese and Japanese residents. Around 1500 Japanese rose in arms, citing Spanish abuses as the primary cause for the revolt. This first uprising was relatively short-lived, and it was reportedly pacified because of the intervention of the Spanish friars.

But remember when, in 1603, when the Spaniards and the Tagalogs were in cahoots basically to suppress the Chinese rebellion in Manila, which killed tens and thousands of Chinese, the Japanese were also helping the Spaniards and the Tagalogs.

There was a lot of coalescing against the Spaniards, then helping the Spaniards because the Spaniards recognized that the Japanese were skilled warriors. Many of them were Ronin or mercenaries. And that wasn't really the first and the last rebellion.

In 1607, there was a second, more violent rebellion. But unlike the first one, the friars did not succeed in diffusing the situation. In fact, it resulted in a severe military crackdown.

The Spanish forces burned the Dilao district to the ground. And many of the Japanese residents there were expelled and sent back to Japan. But some of them managed to integrate into the local community.

And the settlement was revitalized in 1614. Because of the arrival of higher-profile Christian refugees like Takayama, Justo Takayama Ukon was its Christian name, right?

Takayama's father converted to Catholicism under the Portuguese Jesuit influence. And had his family baptized. He was a young warlord and participated in battles during Japan's constant internal conflicts that you mentioned earlier.

Takayama Ukon himself was not only a warrior but also a feudal ruler. They even have a castle. They built churches and supported the missionaries.

And in fact, he was called the Samurai of Christ, who chose exile in the Philippines over renouncing his faith.

Yeah, he arrived in Manila on December 21, 1614. But shortly after his arrival, he fell very ill. And he died sometime in early February 1615, which is about only 40 days after arriving in Manila.

And he was given a Christian burial with honors. His remains were initially buried in Intramuros, Manila, and later relocated.

Pope Francis declared him a martyr for hatred of the faith and beatified him on February 7, 2017, in Osaka. And his feast day is celebrated on February 3. And in religious art, he's typically depicted in samurai robes holding a sheathed katana with a crucifix hanging from it.

He was definitely an iconic figure in early Asian Christianity.

We have to visit Plaza de lao, which is a historic public square in the Philippines. There's apparently a statue of him. Okay, so moving on from that, it was so interesting to Patch to read.

That period was characterized as a volatile melting pot where the Spaniards maintained control by playing the Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino populations against one another. Through this system of segregation and strategic military alliances. So the interactions between these populations were unstable at best.

As we've talked about in many, many episodes, they relied on the Chinese for trade, crafts, services. They used the Japanese as mercenaries and craftsmen for particular types of crafts like the sword. And of course, the Filipino for agriculture and labor.

So the Spanish would use the Japanese warriors to control the Chinese. They would use the Filipino labor to support the colony. And then occasionally, they purged the Japanese when they felt their own military dominance was being challenged.

And this went on for centuries. By 1620, the Spaniards were becoming really paranoid of the Japanese. No surprise there.

And apparently, it wasn't totally unfounded because there were Japanese mercenaries that worked for the Spanish and presumably also for the other side too, right? So similar to what happened to the Chinese, they were feared, although enjoyed a particular level of respect that the Chinese never did. 

During this time also, the Spanish were continuing to try and failing to conquer Mindanao.

And in parallel by 1630, what was called the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan began restricting foreign trade and travel. And that culminated in the Sakoku or closed country policies that severely restricted foreign contact from that time on. But of course, there were Japanese in the Philippines already.

So curiously, this is the part that I'm not sure why, and probably it is because of the negative experiences we had with the Japanese from World War II, we really never talk about. So what happened to this existing Japanese population?

The Dilao settlement later relocated to different parts of the Philippines. And by mid 18th century, the Japanese numbers were much reduced and the community had largely merged into other populations.

And because of that assimilation, the distinct Japanese community gradually disappeared. The estimates of Filipino–Japanese Mestizo descendants range from about 100,000 to 200,000. But it's important also to note that there's really no accurate counts that exist because of this assimilation.

So a lot of these folks really lost their distinct Japanese identity. And then when the Spaniards lost the Spanish–American War, there was a whole new wave of Japanese immigration that began in the early 1900s under American colonial rule. 

From 1903 to 1905, there were many Japanese who went to Benguet, the North, to engage in construction work of the Benguet Road that's now connecting Manila and Baguio.

A key turning point in 1898 specifically, that year the United States annexed Hawaii, which disrupted the established flow of Japanese migrants to the Hawaiian plantations. In the same year after winning the Spanish–American War, the United States acquired the Philippines from Spain under the Treaty of Paris. In those early years of American colonial rule then, the Japanese workers began moving to the Philippines for labor projects, especially road construction.

And that's what you were referring to with the Japanese laborers' construction of the mountain road in Baguio, known as the Cannon Road.

And then, there was also huge migration to Davao for the Abaca plantation work, which created what became the largest Japanese community in Southeast Asia by 1941.

It was sometimes called Little Tokyo.

Right. And again, like the oldest Chinatown in the world being located in the Philippines, in Binondo, I had no clue that settlement in Davao was the largest at that time.

Right. I was clueless as well until now. I was today years old, as they say.

And this is the other part of the history of the Japanese that I hadn't really known about until now. So apparently, as early as 1899, there were about 200 Japanese prostitutes in Manila's Sampaloc district. They were patronized mainly by American servicemen and Japanese residents.

And a majority of the Japanese residents at that time seemed to have been connected with this business. So this image apparently lasted for a while. And as of 1910, 209 Japanese women who were listed as employed in Manila were composed of 122 prostitutes and 35 were nannies, and the rest were employed in miscellaneous jobs.

There were 800 Japanese laborers from Okinawa that were used to construct the Cannon Road that we were mentioning earlier. And the ones who stayed in Baguio became farmers. The ones who moved to Manila were artisans, but the bulk of them, around 500, went to Davao and the neighboring south to become farmers.

Before we move on from Spanish colonization though, there were accounts that the Japanese were also interested in our independence. And because the Japanese also owned real estate in the Philippines, they were farming as we said, the immigration rate continued to be high. 

And in fact, the fishing industry became almost a virtual Japanese monopoly.

In the 1930s, they established more manufacturing companies in the Philippines. 

And they produced beer, rubber shoes, slippers, candles, canned fish, and other items.

I did want to point out, because you mentioned that they owned real estate. Apparently, there was a Philippine law during that time that restricted foreign ownership. But the Japanese residents found a way to acquire their property.

Japanese could invest in a Philippine company, which then allowed them to lease land for farms, plantations, or commercial use. And also, marrying Filipino citizens or being naturalized allowed the Japanese to own property.

And of course, right, the political and economic interplay was very much alive and well. We were noticing, or the government was noticing, this really high rate of ownership and immigration to the Philippines. And there was concern that there was going to be a Japanese domination.

The US imposed on us as their Commonwealth the Immigration Act of 1940, which limited immigrants from whatever country to 500 a year. This was an attempt to protect local industries, not because of our interests, but because of US interests. 

However, a lot of our own Filipino intellectuals was also concerned because of this domination.

And then, of course, the next most significant period was World War II, which is a whole other topic in itself, and we're going to reserve that for another episode. Just want to mention, when World War II began, most notably, that little Tokyo in Davao that we were talking about, they were systematically dismantled because there was definitely chaos and there were mass arrests because of paranoia. And I don't know if it's really unreasonable to think, but of course, this is not something that we're proud of in our history, just as we shouldn't be proud of what happened here in the United States during that time.

There was a mirroring of the Japanese internment in the Philippines. Immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, the Philippine Commonwealth government and the US forces arrested and incarcerated Japanese civilians in Davao and Manila. And there was a lot of violence against Japanese residents.

And the remaining Japanese civilians were forced to serve as mediators, translators, or laborers for the Imperial Japanese Army. So Patch, there's so much photos that I found of all of the different remnants of this time in our history, both in Davao and Manila.

There's so much history there to uncover, and I would be really interested to know more.

And that's our episode. We hope you join us on our next trip.

O siya, siya.

Ingat.

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