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Methods to Avoid Speaking the Unspeakable: Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, the Death of Manila, and Post-World War II Filipino Memory and Mourning

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Abstract

The article will discuss "post war history" of a major object-loss, or PTSD as experienced by Filipino urban elites who suffered so much from the genocidal experiences during the Battle of Manila, February 1945, which slaughtered one hundred thousand civilians by Japanese atrocities, massacres, and U.S. indiscriminate shelling.
Hitotsubashi University Repository
Title METHODS TO AVOID SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE: CARMEN
GUERRERO NAKPIL, THE DEATH OF MANILA, AND POST-
WORLD WAR II FILIPINO MEMORY AND MOURNING
Author(s) NAKANO, SATOSHI
Citation Hitotsubashi journal of social studies, 48(1): 27-
41
Issue Date 2017-01
Type Departmental Bulletin Paper
Text Version publisher
URL http://doi.org/10.15057/28300
Right
METHODS TO AVOID SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE:
CARMEN GUERRERO NAKPIL, THE DEATH OF MANILA,
AND POST-WORLD WAR II FILIPINO MEMORY AND MOURNING
S
ATOSHI
N
AKANO
I. Introduction
The Battle of Manila (3 February to 3 March 1945), the single deadliest urban warfare
fought in the Asia-Pacic Theater of World War II, literally annihilated the downtown area of
the city and caused an estimated 100,000 non-combatant civilian deaths by “Sword and Fire,”
i.e., Japanese mass killings and the indiscriminate shelling of the U.S. While the tragedy of
Manila was widely publicized primarily as a showcase of Japanese war crimes in the early
postwar years, it had long been the subject of amnesia in Japan, the United States, and even in
the Philippines. The 50th anniversary of the battle in 1995 marked the quiet beginning of the
protest against forgetting with the erection of a small memorial by the civic group Memorare
Manila in 1945. Since then, both the media and scholars have gradually begun to give more
attention to the battle and its historical signicance with an increasing number of publications
reviving memories of the cityʼs “death” and all the suerings of the civilians under the siege.
In the hope of serving as a small addendum to the ongoing eorts for a meaningful
recovery of the battleʼs memory, I will focus on an essay written by Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, a
war widow and one of the leading writers and journalists in the post-World War II Philippines,
as an introduction to the pictorial coee table book titled Manila published in 1976. Nakpil
lavishly peppers her celebration of the cityʼs modern urban landscape with All-American place
names while referring to Ermita, a major tourist attraction of the 1970s and the place where she
was born and raised in the 1920s to the 1930s, only once as a place that “became tawdry and
down-at-heels.” Examining Nakpilʼs autobiographies published in the late 2000s, which so
vividly and tenderly recalled her childhood in prewar Ermita; Benedict Andersonʼs critical
anatomy of the 1961 English translation by Leon Ma. Guerrero, Nakpilʼs elder brother, of Noli
Me Tangere, originally written in Spanish by Jose Rizal; and one of Nakpilʼs well-known
columns in 1967 that poetically summarized her ordeal in the Battle of Manila, more details of
which were given in the late 2000s autobiographies, I will discuss how the memory of a major
loss as experienced by Manilaʼs Filipino urban elites who suered so much during the genocidal
experiences in the battle, has been deleted, restored, and mourned by them in their own way.
Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies 48 (2017), pp.27-41. Hitotsubashi University
Hitotsubashi University
II. Lollobrigida’s Manila 1976
It was in 1975 that Gina Lollobrigida, an Italian superstar actress then transforming herself
into a professional photographer was commissioned by the Philippine government to visit the
country and shoot photographs for a couple of coee table books, The Philippines and Manila.
These would later be printed in Florence, Italy and published in 1976 from a publisher in the
microstate of Liechtenstein “for the world.”1While people had already started to complain
about the broken promises made by President Ferdinando Marcos when he declared martial law
in September 1972, the masculine regime seemed invincible then. Taking advantage of the
enforced calm in the metropolis and tropical resorts around the country, the government was
promoting tourism with a passion. For this purpose, First Lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos
personally invited Gina Lollobrigida, whose contract was handled by the Philippine National
Bank.
Actual distribution of the two titles, however, was very limited. Copies of The Philippines
can be found in several libraries around the world including the Library of Congress in the
United States, while Manila can scarcely be found in any libraries except for a copy at
Columbia University in New York, which had the stamp of the Philippine Consulate General
Library on the front page. The latter title was full of unimpressive photographs showing clichéd
tourist subjects as well as facets of modern metropolitan lives such as the students of the
University of the Philippines not rioting but playing cards and cheerfully playing the guitar, the
brand new Makati Medical Center and rising skyscrapers in the Makati business districts, the
joyful workplaces of clean factories, and of course Mrs. Imelda Marcos posing in front of the
gigantic Philippine Cultural Center. Certainly, they are in accord with the ocial euphoric
representations of the New Society (Bagong Lipunan), which the Marcos dictatorship claimed it
was creating. The postscript by the actress titled “My Manila” conrms a stereotypical self-
image of foreign visitors as tempted by “a carefree and relaxed atmosphere” of the metropolis
under martial law:
In Manila, even the policemen played the guitar and sang and the people stayed up very
late, talking and laughing and simply being themselves... Talk of la dolce vita, thatʼs what
they have in Manila ̶the good life.2
Each of the coee table books has an introductory essay, which was the complete antithesis of
Lollobrigidaʼs mediocre postscript in its rhetoric, energy, and intensity. The author was Carmen
Guerrero Nakpil, who was born in 1922 into the Guerreros of Ermita, undisputedly one of the
most outstanding ilustrado3families that have produced prominent scholars, artists, doctors,
journalists, and even a bishop.4Nakpil herself has long been the leading Filipino female
journalist and columnist whose second memoir Legends & Adventures (2007),5a sequel to the
HITOTSUBASHI JOURNAL OF SOCIAL STUDIES
[January28
1Gina Lollobrigida and Carmen Guerrero Nakpil. The Philippines. Liechtenstein: Sarima, 1976; Gina Lollobrigida
and Carmen Guerrero Nakpil. Manila. Liechtenstein: Sarima, 1976.
2Lollobrigida and Nakpil. Manila, n.p. (The book does not have page numbers).
3The word usually refers to the Filipino educated class during the Spanish colonial period. Denitions and historical
roles of the class have long been the contentious subject of Philippine historiography.
4Wilfrido Maria Guerrero. The Guerreros of Ermita: Family History and Personal Memoirs. Quezon City: New
Day, 1988.
rst one Myself, Elsewhere (2006),6provides her detailed account on the making of these two
coee table books.
Nakpil recalls that, although having been a personal friend of Ferdinand Marcos and
supporting his presidency during the rst term (1965-69), the second term political storm
convinced her to join the ranks of dissident journalists. After the declaration of martial law (21
September 1972), however, Nakpil decided to make a deal with Marcos to secure the release of
her son-in-law, or Antonio Araneta, the husband of her daughter and the former Miss
International Gemma. Then she had no choice but to accept whatever assignments she was
commissioned by Malacañang Palace (i.e., the Marcoses) such as Secretary-General of the
Writers Union of the Philippines, UNESCO representative, Director-General of the Technology
Resource Center, and so forth. Nakpil recalls that writing introductory essays to The Philippines
and Manila was but a tiny addition to these assignments in Nakpilʼs “peonage under Marcos.”7
According to Nakpil, Lollobrigida and the party returned to Manila after touring around
the country with a bunch of photographs “mostly of beaches, forests, palm trees and
waterfalls”8and “[t] he great majority of the photos were of the Tasaday, a tiny tribe then
recently discovered and patronized by Manda Elizalde [Manuel Elizalde Jr.].”9Nakpil was
furious about Lollobrigidaʼs exoticism while Lollobrigida complained that Nakpilʼs essays,
having been written before the party returned to Manila, did not match the photos. She argued
that Nakpil did not “know what Europeans are interested in,” that the book was for the
European market and that Europeans were not interested in Filipinos living modern lives. As a
staunch nationalist, Nakpil insisted the book should not be about “a Stone Age tribe in the
jungles of Mindanao” but the “45 million people who donʼt live in trees.”10
The split was so deep and the women argued loudly every time they met. Nakpil went as
far as Florence, Italy to persuade Lollobrigida to include modern Filipino lives in the pictorials.
In the end Manila, separately published from The Philippines, was given a certain balance
between tourist cliché and cosmopolitan modernity. Even Lollobrigida seemed to yield to
Nakpil, admitting in the postscript “Manila was a complete surprise to me. I had expected a
city full of Oriental music, quiet, mysterious... But it was a familiar place with a lot of rhythm,
fast and modern.”11 The small victory over the Italian actressʼOrientalism and an opportunity to
visit Italy were narrated by Nakpil as a comic relief in the dark days of her “peonage” under
martial law.12
III. Nakpil’s Manila 1976
Nakpil in her memoir proudly claims she refused any revisions of the introductory essays
and not a single word was changed. Victorious as she was, todayʼs readers may not miss that
METHODS TO AVOID SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE: CARMEN GUERRERO NAKPIL, THE DEATH
2017] 29
5Carmen Guerrero Nakpil. Legends & Adventures. San Juan, Metro Manila: Nakpil Publishing, 2007.
6Carmen Guerrero Nakpil. Myself, Elsewhere. San Juan, Metro Manila: Nakpil Publishing, 2006.
7Nakpil. Legends & Adventures, 170.
8Ibid., 171.
9Ibid., 173.
10 Ibid., 171.
11 Lollobrigida and Nakpil. Manila, n.p.
12 Nakpil. Legends & Adventures, 173-175.
the text was but a victim of the enforced euphoria of the New Society: self-hypnotized, manic,
and jazzy, but something was missing, giving readers a feeling of hollowness. The essay begins
with the mantra of the enchanted city, which is not very far from Lollobrigidaʼs above quoted
praise for the city:
Nobody who has been to Manila is ever the same again. The rest of oneʼs life is forever
aected by that ardent urban clutter, the millions of smiling, cheerful people milling about
in a roar of music and raised consciousness, the psychedelic little buses, the innite variety
of the bright green, pink and white houses.13
It is probably only natural for any commissioned writer to avoid writing about the evil of
society in a pictorial book that promotes tourism, especially that of a country under martial law.
Self-censorship apparently cast a shadow over the whole text, in which the author praises the
city projects under Imelda Marcos as Metro Manilaʼsrst Governor: air-conditioned buses,
slum relocation projects, the Cultural Center Complex, and so forth, while any signs of the
growing mass poverty, the lost freedom of press, corruption, and more evils of martial law
society were certainly omitted. Self-censorship, however, may not be the single reason for the
essayʼs hollowness. The following is one of the authorʼs celebrations for the cityʼs diversity:
[T]he city is a plural personality, with multiple functions and many faces, each one more
colorful than the other. At one end it is Tahiti, then it turns into the New York waterfront,
changes into Las Vegas and fades out at Long Island and Miami.
Manila is H.G. WellsʼTime Machine, a lm by Fellini and the National Geographic
Magazine. In it, one moves through time and space ̶reckoned by centuries and
continents ̶in a celebration of anachronisms and geographic delusions...14
One may notice that the above text does not contain a single proper noun of the Philippines and
the Filipinos. In other paragraphs Nakpil carries the readers on “the time machine” to “a 13th
century graveyard in Santa Ana,” “a baroque Spanish church of the 18th century with ikons,
monks, and censer,” and “Fort Santiago in Intramuros.” Monks, however, are the only living
inhabitants and the past is dead silent in those places. On the other hand, the authorʼs words are
most charming and cheerful when she replaces Manilaʼs present scenes with foreign ones,
especially those of America:
The most obvious thing in some parts of Greater Manila is that the city is Little New
York, specially so in the new exurbia of Makati where handsome, high-rise buildings,
supermarkets, apartment-hotels and shopping centers ourish in a setting that could well be
Palm Beach or Beverly Hills. Here the houses look like stage sets for The Great Gatsby
and people lead lives out of a play by Neil Simon or Edward Albee.15
What is behind the combination of the dead past and the present “geographic delusions?” Why
does the author seem to be so comfortable with substituting New York, Palm Beach, and
Beverly Hills for the vernacular place names? The authorʼs recent memoir may answer these
questions. There is one place in particular, which was so vividly and tenderly recalled in the
HITOTSUBASHI JOURNAL OF SOCIAL STUDIES
[January30
13 Lollobrigida and Nakpil. Manila, n.p.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
memoir but was referred to only once in the introductory essay for Manila as the place that
“became tawdry and down-at-heels”16 despite it being Manilaʼs major tourist attraction in the
1970s. That place is Ermita. The near-neglect of Ermita and over-presence of America in
Nakpilʼs introductory essay to Manila requires several layers of explanation.
IV. Leon Ma. Guerrero’s Manila in Noli 1961
Nakpilʼs “geographical delusion” in her 1976 essay cannot but remind the readers of an
intriguing chapter in Benedict AndersonʼsThe Spectre of Comparisons (1998) titled “Hard to
Imagine,”17 acriticalessayonanEnglishtranslationofJoseRizalʼs novel Noli Me Tangere
(1887) by Leon Ma. Guerrero III, Nakpilʼs eldest brother, and published in 1961.18 Noli Me
Tangere and its sequel El libusterismo (1891), which exposed the corruption and abuse by the
Spanish colonial government and the Catholic Church, ignited the anti-Spanish sentiments
among the people leading up to the 1896 revolutionary revolt and thus have long been regarded
as the bibles of Filipino nationalism. They remain requisite reading in most high schools in the
country today. The novels, however, were originally written by Jose Rizal in Spanish and most
of the post-World War II generation of the Filipinos have to read them through English
translations among which Leon Ma. Guerreroʼs works stand out as the most read, while new
English and Tagalog/Filipino translations have become available in recent years.
Born in 1915, Leon had already started his career as a promising young writer, a lawyer
and a government ocial when Japan attacked the Philippines shortly after Pearl Harbor in
December 1941. He enlisted as an ocer of USAFFE (United States Army Forces in the Far
East) and was sent to Capas concentration camp as a POW after the fall of Bataan and
Corregidor. Once he was released, however, he started to work for Jorge Vargas, the Chairman
of the Executive Commission, an administrative body in charge of civil aairs set up under
Japanese military occupation. As the Republic of the Philippines was inaugurated under
Japanese occupation in October 1943 and the country now had the Ministry of Foreign Aairs
as well as the Embassy in Tokyo with Jorge Vargas as the rst Ambassador, Leon was
assigned to the embassy as Second Secretary in February 1944, which marked the beginning of
his career as one of the pioneering diplomats of the country. In March 1945, Jose P. Laurel, the
President of the Japanese sponsored republic and his small party arrived in Japan where they
took exile during the rest of war. Leon also stayed in Japan until July 1946 when he
accompanied Laurel and his party, who were released from Sugamo Prison for being suspected
war criminals in Tokyo and allowed to return to the Philippines. He was accepted at the newly
created Department of Foreign Aairs of the Philippine Republic, which was inaugurated on 4
July 1946, and continued to pursue a career as a diplomat. In 1954 he was appointed
Undersecretary of Foreign Aairs under President Ramon Magsaysay. His “Asia for the
Asians” speech in 1954, however, would eventually cause him to be de facto exiled to Europe
METHODS TO AVOID SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE: CARMEN GUERRERO NAKPIL, THE DEATH
2017] 31
16 Ibid.
17 Benedict Anderson. “Hard to Imagine.” The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World.
London and New York: Verso, 1998, 235-262.
18 Jose Rizal. The Lost Eden (Noli me tangere): A completely new translation for the contemporary reader by Leon
Ma. Guerrero. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961.
and later to India on ambassadorial assignments. He was the Ambassador to the UK while he
translated Rizalʼs novels.19
Examining Leon Ma. Guerreroʼs translation against Rizalʼs original at great length,
Benedict Anderson nds the translator deliberately adopted a series of “translation strategies”
including de-modernization of Rizalʼs world by dominantly using the past tense, de-localization
by eliminating “as much as 80 per cent of these still-recognizable place names” as well as the
names of real persons in the 19th century, and de-Europeanization by eliminating the Latin and
other European vocabularies and quotes, and so forth. As a result, the translation loses much of
the originalʼs color, contrast, humor, satire, obscenity, irony, and other traits, which made the
original novel so fascinating.
Anderson argues one reason Leon Ma. Guerrero adopted this “translation strategy” was to
make Rizalʼs world remote and irrelevant for the present generation and conceal the original
novelʼsavor of anti-establishment radicalism and actuality, which would encourage criticism
of the current Republic dominated by the elite or “post-independence establishment,” who were
“children of the revolutionary mestizo elite of the 1890s, who had gained enormously in wealth
and power under the American colonial system, who had collaborated with the Japanese
occupation regime, and who now intended rmly to be full masters in their own house.”20
Anderson, however, adds that the mere eliteʼs “bad conscience” and the requirements of ocial
nationalism cannot fully explain Leon Ma. Guerreroʼs strategy. It was fundamental transforma-
tion, Anderson concludes, under the American regime such as the substitution of English for
Spanish as a lingua franca as well as a fundamental reshaping of the Filipinosʼconception of
themselves that made the colorful “creole-mestizo” world of Rizalʼs novels “so hard to imagine
̶and impossible to translate.”21
Certainly in Rizalʼs Manila, its cosmopolitanism and “creole-mestizo” atmosphere had been
made possible and nurtured only through its placement within the late 19
th
century Asian trade
network largely controlled by the British Empire in which colonial seaport cities within the
region such as Singapore, Saigon, and Manila deeply connected with each other and beyond
with Europe. Since 1909, however, colonial bilateral free trade between the Philippines and the
United States gradually but steadily transformed the economic geography and thus reshaped the
Filipino mindset and mental maps, in which Manila and the cityʼs urban elite would eventually
be absorbed into the enclosure of material culture of the American Empire while losing contact
with the neighboring colonial port cities. The void was thus to be lled with things All-
American.22
HITOTSUBASHI JOURNAL OF SOCIAL STUDIES
[January32
19 There are several biographical sources on Leon Ma. Guerrero: Erwin S. Fernandez. “Leon Ma. Guerrero: Writer
and Diplomat; A Biography.” MA thesis, College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of the Philippines
Diliman, October 2010; David Guerrero, ed. LMG: The Leon Maria Guerrero Anthology. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing,
Inc., 2010; “Leon Ma. Guerrero.” Edilberto N. Alegre and Doreen G. Fernandez, Writers & Their Milieu: An Oral
History of First Generation Writers in English. Manila: the De La Salle University Press, 1984, 69-91; Wilfrido Maria
Guerrero. The Guerreros of Ermita.
20 Anderson. The Spectre of Comparisons, 252-254.
21 Ibid., 254-259.
22 This paragraphʼs discussion largely relies on Nagano Yoshikoʼs argument in the following work in Japanese:
Nagano Yoshiko. FiripinGinkōshi Kenkyū: Shokuminchi Taisei to Kin’yū (A History of Philippines Banking: Colonial
System and Finance). Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobō, 2003.
V. Ironies of the Ilustrado’s Nationalism
It is not dicult to see the similarity and connection between the siblingsʼworks published
in 1961 and 1976. Both authors were public servants at the time of writing/translating these
pieces and they were in such a position to know the requirements of the nation state or the
rulers. Both pieces consciously or unconsciously resulted in the elimination of lively features of
the cityʼs past by substituting American modernity for Eurasian or “creole-mestizo” diversity. It
appears for them to represent the desire of the “post-independence establishment” to be
comfortable with the present without recalling the past in which their ancestors as the
revolutionary leaders fought against Americans during the Philippine-American War (1899-
1902).23 A leading Filipino historian Reynaldo C. Ileto discusses that forgetting was indeed a
necessary survival strategy for the post-Philippine-American War generation of Filipinos to be
successful in “the new era,” and therefore, they had to forget “there ever was a war.” This was
the case with Iletoʼs father General Rafael Ileto (1920-2003), Secretary of Defense under
Corazon Aquinoʼs presidency, who was born in 1920 and grew up as a typical “Americaʼs boy”
without being told anything by his father Ysco (Reynaldo C. Iletoʼs grandfather) about his
involvement in the revolution. Ileto infers Lolo Ysco had maintained his silence since 1904
when Americans recruited him as a schoolteacher. 24
What is so ironical about the Guerrero siblings, however, is the fact that, unlike the
generation (born in 1915 and 1922) usually labeled as “Americaʼs Boys,” they grew up in a
family that was extremely proud of their Spanish/European heritage and the lost cause of the
Philippine Revolution. They never concealed their antagonism towards Americans, who stole
the fruit of the revolution, destroyed the republic and colonized their beloved homeland. The
Guerrero clan might have been somewhat exceptional, being able to maintain their anti-
American memories because they had a very strong professional background and did not have
to accommodate the American desire for the Filipinos to collaborate with as well as be grateful
for the Americans.
In her rst memoir, Carmen Guerrero Nakpil recalls the fondest memories of her
childhood in Ermita, surrounded by the uniquely intelligent Guerrero clan. Remembrance of the
Philippine-American War and the lost cause of the revolution was, far from being suppressed,
alive and being handed down from one generation to another in the everyday life of the family.
At the center of the clan was Leon Maria Guerrero Senior (1853-1935), Nakpilʼs grandfather,
who was an eminent botanist, the rst licensed pharmacist in the Philippines, and a
revolutionary. He joined the rst revolutionary republicʼs parliament as well as the rst national
assembly under U.S. colonial rule, preaching the sacred cause of nationalism to his sons and
daughters, and grandsons and granddaughters. His eldest son, Cesar Maria Guerrero (1884-
METHODS TO AVOID SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE: CARMEN GUERRERO NAKPIL, THE DEATH
2017] 33
23 The Philippine-American War is another contentious subject of debate among historians especially on the roles of
Filipino colonial elites as the revolutionaries, collaborators, and politicians seeking power, wealth, and national
independence. See Glenn Anthony May. Battle for Batangas: A Philippine Province at War. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1991; Reynaldo C. Ileto. Knowing America’s Colony: A Hundred Years from the Philippine War.
Honolulu: University of Hawaiʼi at Manoa, 1999; Brian McAllister Linn. The Philippine War, 1899-1902 (Modern War
Studies). Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000.
24 Reynaldo C. Ileto. “Colonial Wars in Southern Luzon: Remembering and Forgetting.” Hitotsubashi Journal of
Social Studies 33, no. 1 (July, 2001): 103.
1960) devoted his life to the Roman Catholic Church and became the rst auxiliary bishop of
the archdiocese of Manila, the highest clergyman among the Filipinos at the time. After World
War II, he was accused of collaborating with the Japanese and was prosecuted before the
Peopleʼs Court for treason. Though his case was dismissed in 1946, he slipped out of the
mainstream and was installed in the relatively obscure diocese of San Fernando, Pampanga in
1949. His collaboration with the Japanese was largely regarded as a result of his version of
nationalism pursuing the Filipinization of clergymen in the Philippines.25
Nakpilʼs father Alfredo Leon Guerrero (1885-1961) was the second son of Leon Maria
Guerrero Senior and a practicing doctor, who was not as much of an enthusiastic nationalist as
his father and brother, while his wife and Nakpilʼs mother Filomena Francisco (1886-1970), the
rst Filipino female pharmacologist and Leon Maria Guerrero Seniorʼs student, most denitely
was. One of the two lullabies Carmen was sung to sleep by her mother was Jose Rizalʼs“Mi
Ultimo Adios,” the last poem Rizal wrote on the eve of his execution by the Spanish on 30
December 1896. Another one was a remarkable song in pidgin English to the tune of “Thereʼll
Be Hot Time in the Old Town, Tonight,” a popular American campaign song during the
Philippine-American War.
One, two, tʼree, Americanong na sawi (became ill);
Four, Fie, Americanongnamatay (died);
Mini-hot tie, hot-tie, tonighʼ26
Carmen Guerrero Nakpil noted that Filomena became a huge fan of Ho Chi Minh in her last
years.27 Most possibly sharing with Carmen the lullabies sung by a mother who embraced the
Filipino version of the republican motherhood deep in her heart with contempt for Americans,
it is no wonder Leon grew up to be labeled as an anti-American diplomat in the age of the
“special relationship,” whose remarks of “Asia for the Asians” in 1954 as the Undersecretary of
Foreign Aairs and his subsequent “rude” attitude towards American ocials ultimately ruined
his once promising career because of the U.S. opposition. Leon died an alcoholic in 1982.28
Nakpilʼsrst memoir, however, also presents the other side of her childhood memories. It
was after all the American era that lled her with joy in the lap of luxury in Ermita, which
reached the pinnacle of material as well as cultural prosperity under American rule. One of her
fondest memories, as she narrated in the memoir, is “of being taken for drives around Ermita in
my fatherʼs car”:
[F]rom our house in Calle Mabini...a street that was like a bower, a long, shady, owery
tunnel, Isaac Peral (now United Nations Avenue), and moving on to “Dehwee,” Dewey
Boulevard, its imposing buildings surrounded by lawns, the American clubs and the
Manila Hotel on the Luneta. Then came sweeping, mammoth boulevards, huge buildings
with rows of Greek columns, anked by trees and lawns, down to Taft Avenue and the
Post Oce, and more new buildings of a dierent style, lower, with tile roofs and arcades
HITOTSUBASHI JOURNAL OF SOCIAL STUDIES
[January34
25 Terada Takefumi. “Japanese Religions Propaganda Program toward the Christian Churches in the Philippines.”
IkehataSetsuho and Ricardo T. Jose, eds., Philippines under Japan. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press,
1999, 255-290.
26 Nakpil. Myself, Elsewhere, 21-22.
27 Ibid., 19.
28 Anderson. The Spectre of Comparisons, 249-250.
which turned out to be the Normal School and the Philippine General Hospital. As
children everywhere do, I thought that all that had always been there.29
Of course, it was then a brand new urban landscape created under American rule. In this way,
the Guerreros of Ermita, just like the other urban elites in Manila, were consuming the
American material culture, which certainly gave comfort to the auent who could aord it,
while the dark memories of the American imperial oppression of the Philippine Revolution
probably remained rmly entrenched in their hearts. The ironies and ambivalence they had to
endure were thus painful.
It would not, however, have been so traumatic if there had not been another war. Ermita
during the 1930s as Nakpil remembers in her memoir did remain a micro cosmos of rich and
diverse “creole-mestizo” cultures, in which English was still only the third language to many of
the residents. Hegemony of English of course was about to transform Ermita lives. Nakpil
remembers Spanish speaking neighbors, who had been reluctant or given little opportunities to
learn English, could not help but live withdrawn lives and some of them used to appear
begging at the back entrance of the Guerrero residence. In this way, the “creole-mestizo” world
of Manila was slowly dying and was about to become something “hard to imagine.” It was,
however, an early state of euthanasia that the Filipino “creole-mestizo” culture was undergoing.
In other words, people like the Guerreros, remaining loyal to their Spanish heritage and the lost
cause of the Revolution while joyfully living the Ermitaʼs prewar social lives, had not been
prepared for such an abrupt and brutal end of everything as it really happened during the Battle
of Manila in 1945.
VI. Death of Manila
Three years had elapsed since Japanese Imperial Forces occupied the city of Manila when
the battle started on 3 February 1945 with the liberation of some 3,700 Allied civilian internees,
mostly Americans, at Santo Tomas University Internment Camp in the northern part of the city.
The almost bloodless liberation was made possible through careful negotiation between the U.S.
forces and a Japanese unit, which would stand in stark contrast to the near-total neglect of
civilian lives in the subsequent month-long urban warfare. By 12 February 1945, the U.S.
forces had completely besieged the downtown districts of Intramuros, Ermita and Malate, which
would become erce battlegrounds and horrendous scenes of Japanese war crimes. The US
heavy artillery barrage launched from the outskirts of the city wiped out most of the ammable
structures in the area, while Japanese forces continued to hold buildings of solid construction
such as the Philippine General Hospital, University of the Philippines and Manila Police Station
until being annihilated after close combat. Intramuros remained a nightmarish battle zone until
25 February. The Legislative, Finance and Agriculture buildings between the Intramuros and
Ermita districts, “huge buildings with rows of Greek columns,30” became the last strongholds of
the Japanese and were completely shelled to ruins by U.S. artillery re. On 3 March, 1945 the
U.S. troops took the Finance Building after mopping up all the Japanese soldiers remaining
METHODS TO AVOID SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE: CARMEN GUERRERO NAKPIL, THE DEATH
2017] 35
29 Nakpil. Myself, Elsewhere, 37.
30 Ibid.
inside and thus eectively nished the Battle of Manila.31 The body count of Japanese soldiers
was recorded as 16, 665, whereas American forces counted 1,010 killed and 5, 565 wounded.
There were no ocial statistics for the loss of civilian lives, but the postwar Philippine
government as well as most scholars have cited 100, 000 as the estimated number of non-
combatant civilian deaths.32
The Philippine National Artist Nick Joaquin used the words “by sword and re” in the last
lines of his play, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino (1966) to describe how the battle brought
about “the death” of “the old Manila.”33 “Sword” signies the Japanese soldiersʼbayonets, used
to kill so many civilians during the battle, whereas “re” signies both the re of Japanese
machine-guns, grenades, and mines and, even more poignantly, the destruction by U.S. shelling.
Military historians estimate the U.S. shelling might have been responsible for as much as 40%
of civilian deaths,34 arguing that MacArthurʼs politically motivated impatience for victory and
the eld ocersʼurge using the heavier artillery in order to minimize U.S. casualties should be
blamed for allowing the massive and unnecessary collateral damage to the civilians, who
“stoically and philosophically accepted decimation” of their families by the American
artillery.35 In one case, at the Remedios Hospital in Malate on 12 and 13 February 1945,
apparently misdirected shelling killed almost 400 civilians in and around the hospital.36
Criticism on the U.S. shelling, however, does not change the fact that mass killings and
other atrocities committed by the Japanese forces constituted the primary cause of the civilian
casualties. In order to secure the operational positions against U.S. forces and to eliminate the
hostile population that certainly would have assisted them in the coming battle, JapanʼsManila
Naval Defense Forces and the remaining Imperial Army units indiscriminately killed people
using bayonets, machine guns, grenades, and by setting res. Japanese defendants in the war
crimes trials as well as the surviving veterans all acknowledged the tactical diculties in
distinguishing guerrillas from civilians. The magnitude of atrocities committed by the Japanese
forces during the battle, however, could hardly be justied or explained by such claims.
The investigation reports of the war crimes committed by the Japanese forces during the
Battle of Manila might well be counted among the most extensive and accurate among all the
World War II war crimes investigation reports. This is partly because the atrocities took place
exactly during the time and on the grounds that U.S. forces in each theater were busily
organizing war crimes investigation units in preparation for future prosecutions. The atrocities
also took place in the exact locations being approached by U.S. forces and where liberation was
therefore imminent. This made it possible for the intelligence units to obtain well detailed
information and even adavits from the people including the very victims of rape and the few
HITOTSUBASHI JOURNAL OF SOCIAL STUDIES
[January36
31 On detailed accounts and chronology of the battle, see Richard Connaughton, John Pimlott and Duncan Anderson.
Battle for Manila. London: Bloomsbury, 1995; Alfonso J. Aluit. By Sword and Fire: The Destruction of Manila in
World War II 3 February – 3 March 1945. Manila: National Commission for Culture and Arts, 1994.
32 Robert Ross Smith. United States Army in World War II. The War in the Pacic: Triumph in the Philippines.
Washington DC: Oce of the Chief of Military History, Dept. of the Army, 1963, 306-7.
33 Nick Joaquin. A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino (An Elegy in Three Scenes). Manila: MCS Enterprises, Inc.,
1966, 116.
34 Cannaughton, et al., 121.
35 Ibid., 174.
36 Ibid., 145; Pedro M. Picornell. The Remedios Hospital, 1942-1945: A Saga of Malate. Manila: De La Salle
University, 1995.
survivors of mass killings. A vast number of adavits submitted to the war crime trials are
now available in the U.S. National Archives. While it was dicult to identify the individual
perpetrators from these adavits alone and many cases were closed without prosecutions, these
documents remain undeniable evidence of what happened to the victims during the battle.37
Another reason why Japanese atrocities during the Battle of Manila became one of the
most accurately recorded war crimes is because the survivors of the month-long urban battle
included the urban and auent elite, both Filipino and foreign. Warfare in general tends to
victimize the less privileged because more means are available for the auent to evade
conscription, to live in or evacuate to safer places, to bribe enemy ocers, and so forth. In
Manila, however, the privileged and the auent̶including European foreign nationals, and
even Germans and neutral Spanish̶could not escape the atrocities and were even targeted by
the Japanese soldiers. In the Intramuros and Ermita/Malate districts, the people were
indiscriminately targeted on the streets from both sides such as Elpidio Quirino, the Second
President of the Philippines (1948-53), who lost four out of seven of his family.38 In the Manila
Hotel and the Bay View Hotel, Japanese ocers disproportionally targeted women with
Caucasian complexion, especially those girls who were young and thus were assumed to be
virgins, as rape victims.39
These surviving victims among the urban elite of Manilaʼs dwellers, having been auent
and thus able to aord better education, were deemed more reliable witnesses in the war crimes
investigation as well as in the courtrooms. They also have had more opportunities to convey
their experiences and memories throughout the postwar years especially since the mid-1990s,
by writing for newspaper columns, publishing memoirs, novels, poems, theatrical plays, and so
forth. One of the earliest and most outstanding examples among them was Carmen Guerrero
Nakpil, who was Carmen Guerrero Cruz (married to her rst husband) during the battle, a
pregnant woman with a baby named Gemma. She was one of the rst writers who wrote about
the unspeakable experiences of Manilans including not only Japanese atrocities, but also U.S.
indiscriminate shelling during the battle. The following is from the well-known article rst
published in 1967.
I had seen the head of the aunt who had taught me to read and write roll under the kitchen
stove, the face of a friend who had been crawling next to me on the pavement as we tried
to reach the shelter under the Ermita church obliterated by a bullet, a legless cousin
dragging himself out of a shallow trench in the churchyard and a young mother carrying a
baby, plucking at my fatherʼs sleeve ̶“Doctor, can you help me? I think Iʼm wounded”
̶and the shreds of her ribs and her lungs as she turned around.
I had heard the screams of the girls I had grown up with as they were dragged by
Japanese soldiers towards the Bayview Hotel (to be raped, as we later found out) and the
mindless groans of the men, tied together by the elbows and machinegunned by stony-
faced Japanese. I had seen all the unforgettable, indescribable carnage caused by the
METHODS TO AVOID SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE: CARMEN GUERRERO NAKPIL, THE DEATH
2017] 37
37 The bulk of the investigation reports (“Manila Reports”) are led in RG331: GHQ/SCAP Records, Entry 1214:
War Crimes Files, 1946-1950, U.S. National Archives at College Park.
38 Aluit, 217-218.
39 “Manila Report No. 61: Investigation of the Rape of 40 Civilian Women and the Attempted Rape of 36 Civilian
Women of Various Nationalities, In Ermita, Manila, P.I., during the period 9-13 February 1945.” 12 September 1945.
RG331, Entry 1113, Box 1118. NACP.
detonation of bombs and land mines on the barricaded streets of Ermita and the carpet-
shelling by the Americans which went relentlessly on, long after the last Japanese sniper
was a carcass on the rubble.40
This is a summary of her ordeal and suerings, which could only be poetically narrated in 1967
probably because it was the only possible way for her to tell of the unspeakable events at the
time. It was in 2006 that Nakpil eventually managed to give more specic accounts in her
memoir. A U.S. bomber had been hit by Japanese anti-aircraft and had released a bomb on
Ermita as it exploded during a November 1944 air raid. The Guerreroʼs quarters were hit hard,
leaving Carmenʼs three maiden aunts and their father all dead (and dismembered). Then in the
evening of 5 February 1945, a platoon of Japanese soldiers broke into the Cruz house on
General Luna and California St., tying up all the men including Carmenʼs husband and even a
cook, and taking them away to be executed elsewhere. Carmen decided to return to Ermita
where she would spend about ten days of horror with her baby Gemma, trapped between
Japanese atrocities and U.S. shelling “both were equally deadly.”41 The constant carpet-shelling
instilled a great hatred within her towards the Americans “for their ruthlessness and callous
disregard for human, civilian, non-combatant lives”42 and she “spat on the very rst American
soldier” she saw on the day of her liberation, but she “was dry-throated and he was not aware
of my scorn.”43 Thus was created an anti-American woman whose PTSD through decades
would make it impossible for her to say a single word to the Japanese, the mere presence of
whom “would bring on a dizzy spell.”44
When the Battle of Manila ended on 3 March 1945, there was nothing left in the
Ermita/Malate district but piles of dead bodies and the stench of death. A year later, Carmen,
now a widow at 23 years old, was taken out to dinner in a U.S. army jeep by an American
lieutenant who was working for the U.S. army paper.
We crossed a bridge I did not recognize, and before I knew it, we were in Ermita, on
Isaac Peral, in front of a restaurant called New Europe... I stood beside the jeep gazing in
the direction of the chain-link fence, trying to make out the space that had been occupied
by our house, the third house from the corner of Mabini and Isaac Peral..
When she was asked “what is it?” she simply did not want to tell him that she “was looking for
a town called Ermita and the house where I was born, and turned away to walk into the
restaurant. I needed a drink badly.” Nakpilʼsrst memoir ended here.45
The ending suggests that we may add one thing to Benedict Andersonʼs analysis on Leon
Ma. Guerreroʼs translation strategy: the grave consequence “the Death of Manila” had on the
Filipino urban eliteʼs imagination. On the last page of Twilight in Tokyo, the memoir Leon
published soon after he returned to the Philippines with Laurel and the party who were released
from Sugamo Prison and repatriated in July 1946, he recalled what he saw from the sky when
the airplane carrying them was descending towards Manila:
HITOTSUBASHI JOURNAL OF SOCIAL STUDIES
[January38
40 Carmen Guerrero Nakpil. A Question of Identity: Selected Essays. Manila: Vessel Books, 1973, 204-205.
41 Ibid., 206.
42 Nakpil. Myself, Elsewhere, 186.
43 Nakpil. A Question of Identity, 204.
44 Nakpil.Legends & Adventures, 145.
45 Nakpil. Myself, Elsewhere, 190-191.
The plane circled lower, over the land now, that strange disgured city. We began to
recognize landmarks and to miss them, to puzzle over the odd new roofs in such peculiar
combinations.
And then a sadness pierced me suddenly. This whole battered stumbling city could t
nicely into only one of Tokyoʼsvastattened wards but the razed desolation of the
imperial capital was not half so tragic as this. There at least ruin was complete, nothing
was left to excite the memory, the sense of regret lost itself in the uniform gray anonymity
of ashes.
But Manila was not dead; or what was dead of it, was not yet buried, so that the
returning native must endure the horror of recognizing with a start the gaunt scarred face
he remembered as once lovely.46
VII. Conclusion
The Battle of Manila not only physically destroyed the metropolis and indiscriminately
slaughtered a massive number of civilians by atrocities and shelling, but ruined the culture and
way of life, which certainly had been on the decline but was still colorfully alive, to the extent
that the following generations could barely imagine what it had been like. Although the postwar
physical reconstruction was quick thanks to the U.S. rehabilitation money pouring into the
Philippines, prewar culture and society were never to be restored without the people bearing the
emotional cost of it. Even the survivors had no enthusiasm to rebuild their lives on the very site
of their traumatic experiences, which would soon evacuate elite families from the Ermita/
Malate district to Forbes Park and the newly fortied gated communities around “Little New
York” Makati. All that was left in Ermita was Asiaʼs largest night-time pleasure zone and the
center of prostitution that attracted the Japanese and other foreign tourists for “sex tours.” The
elimination of place names in Leon Ma. GuerreroʼsNoli might represent the depth of despair he
had of postwar Manila, or even a Manilanʼs desire to suppress the memories attached to the
place names. Such was the case of Carmen Guerrero Nakpil in 1976, the height of Japanese sex
tours to the district. What else could she possibly do but describe Ermita (and Malate) as a
place that had “become tawdry and down-at-heels.”
Nakpilʼs second memoir vividly depicts postwar Philippine society during the late 1940s to
the 50s in a manic state, in which she was working as a widow journalist, going to work late
morning and returning close to dawn, loving dances, drinking, and bar-hopping with a gun like
any other Manilan. Americans were everywhere as these were the days of the Cold War that
brought more Americans into Filipino elite society than ever before as government supervisors,
foreign assistance ocials, military advisors and other intelligence ocers, and businessmen
and carpetbaggers who beneted from the parity amendment of 1946. As U.S. War Damage
checks and other money poured into the devastated country, everyoneʼs life was dependent on
the former suzerain. The U.S. government was determined to restore every public building and
rehabilitation money from the U.S. quickly allowed Manila “to rise from its ashes, tragically
dierent and enormously challenged, to live again.”47 Then she writes in her memoir:
METHODS TO AVOID SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE: CARMEN GUERRERO NAKPIL, THE DEATH
2017] 39
46 Leon Ma. Guerrero. Twilight in Tokyo, Manila: Oriental Communication Company, 1946, 75-76.
Ermita of the 21
st
century is indistinguishable from the disorderly, eervescent ugliness of
most of the rest of Manila.48
It seems Nakpilʼs mourning of the lost city having been through several stages of grief, nally
reaches acceptance, more than six decades after the battle.49
The works of the Guerrero siblings, of Carmen Guerrero Nakpil and Leon Ma. Guerrero,
certainly represent all the ironies and ambivalence a certain generation of the Filipino elite had
to embrace, in which the United States played a myriad of contradicting and even schizophrenic
roles. Sometimes the enforced ties with the United States caused great loss to the Filipino
people. Eventually, however, every loss and void had to be lled up with things All-American
to the extent that an “anti-American” woman writer peppered her strange essay for Manila with
the comfort of American place names and an “anti-American” diplomat adopted a translation
strategy that made it extremely dicult for contemporary Filipino readers to imagine their rich
“creole-mestizo” past. Their methods to avoid speaking the unspeakable for many years show
that the violent Japanese intervention into the Philippine-U.S. ambivalent relationships during
World War II may certainly have prolonged and even dened the ties, in which the Death of
Manila will continue to haunt those who seek ways to remember and mourn the unspeakable
loss.
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