Christopher Capozzola University of Minnesota Legal History Workshop Page 1 of 29 A Tale of Two Treasons: Adjudicating War Crimes and Collaboration in Manila, 1945 Christopher Capozzola Associate Professor of History Massachusetts Institute of Technology [NOTE: This essay is, more than usual, a work in progress, with the usual caveats. I value your feedback at [email protected], and I would be pleased if you cited this work, but by the time you get to it, the article may be in a revised form, so please contact me for the most recent version.] I. THE VIEW FROM MALACANANG PALACE On the morning of February 27, 1945, the flags of the United States and the Philippine Commonwealth once again flew over the Malacanang Palace. From its balcony, President Sergio Osmeña, who had spent the war years in exile in Washington, could survey the devastation of Manila. Perhaps no other capital city—not even Tokyo or Berlin—had suffered as greatly; only a few buildings in the city center remained, and on that morning smoke clouds still gathered over the neighborhood. Block after block had been destroyed; hunger and disease ran rampant.1 Physical and economic reconstruction would take years—in some respects, the city never fully recovered. Repairing the political wounds of war posed an equally pressing problem. In the space of just four years, the Japanese had imposed a military occupation, tapped thousands to work with them in administering it, and eventually granted independence to the Philippine Republic, a nominally independent puppet state that existed from October 1943 to August 1945. American and British civilians, along with citizens of other allied nations, sat out the war years in overcrowded internment camps. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos joined popular guerrilla resistance movements that effectively governed many regions of the Philippines by the war’s end. Others made compromises, petty and grand, simply to survive. Behind all this social upheaval and destruction lingered the postponed question of independence, for if the Japanese-installed Philippine Republic was a nominally independent puppet state, so too was the Philippine Commonwealth. Established by the U.S. Congress to govern the Philippines during a ten-year transition period from 1936 to 1946, the Commonwealth was never fully autonomous and that afternoon Sergio Osmeña knew that Philippine citizens still owed allegiance to the United States. The Tydings-McDuffie Act’s stated date of Philippine independence—July 4, 1946—was now just over a year away. But as holdout Japanese snipers fought pitched battles in the city’s neighborhoods, Osmeña must have seen the serious obstacles that stood in the way of Filipinos’ efforts to tackle their future and their past at the same time. After four years of invasion, occupation, re-invasion, and reconstruction, charges of collaboration and war crimes filled the air. Manila courtrooms witnessed two sets of high-profile trials in the immediate aftermath of the war: war crimes trials for Japanese commanders, particularly Generals Yamashita Tomoyuki and Homma Masaharu; and cases heard in the Filipino People’s Court, 1 “Return to Manila,” New York Times, February 28, 1945, p. 20.
Christopher Capozzola University of Minnesota Legal History Workshop Page 2 of 29 for those Filipinos accused of collaborating with the Japanese occupation forces. The outcomes of the two types of trials could not have been more different: the war crimes trials speedily reached convictions and carried out executions; the collaboration trials yielded only a handful of convictions, great ambiguity, and mixed feelings. Legal scholars have examined the trial of General Yamashita—and the unsuccessful Supreme Court appeal in Yamashita v. United States that preceded the Japanese general’s August 1945 execution—at great length. When they have done so, they have generally compared Yamashita’s case—the first of the world’s postwar war crimes trials—to later proceedings in Nuremberg and Tokyo. But Asian postwar justice proceedings were not simply “the other Nuremberg,” as many historians have described them. By contrast, this essay shifts the frame of comparison, and examines the trial of General Yamashita together with the indictments of thousands of Philippine collaborators, suggesting thereby a deeper and more local context to postwar adjudication of the war’s end. Questions of imperialism and territoriality haunted both judicial undertakings: American military authorities insisted that because the Philippines was still a U.S. colony during the war, Yamashita had committed crimes against the United States and should be tried before a U.S. military tribunal; State Department officials feared that continued insistence on U.S. sovereignty over the Philippines would alienate the residents of other Asian colonies—Korea, Vietnam, India, and the Dutch East Indies—at a crucial moment in world politics. Likewise, questions of sovereignty troubled the Filipino People’s Courts: had collaborators committed treason against the United States? Or was Japanese invasion analogous to the American invasion of 1898? Or had collaborators sold out a nascent Filipino nation in the moment of its birth? Linking questions of transitional justice and war crimes to trans-Pacific debates over European, American, and Japanese imperialism reveals the unfinished legacies of colonialism embedded in postwar American actions (and inactions), and the puzzles of territorial inbetweenness that would continue to appear decades after decolonization. Viewing postwar legal regimes from Manila gives us a new perspective that links post-World War II transitional justice to concurrent debates about imperialism and decolonization, and highlights the ways in which imperial problematics of territoriality and sovereignty continue to inform the legal structures of American power as it operates outside of U.S. territorial boundaries. II. THE WARTIME PHILIPPINES In January 1942, U.S. and Philippine Commonwealth authorities abandoned the capital city of Manila, retreating first to the Bataan peninsula and eventually to the island fortress of Corregidor, itself surrendered on May 6. The Japanese acted quickly to exert political control over conquered territory. As soon as the Japanese army established control in Manila in January 1942, officers installed a temporary administration that drew from existing members of the Philippine civil service. During the war, little changed at the lower levels of the national bureaucracy—civil servants, teachers, postal employees—but little changed at the top either. Some Filipino politicians, like Sergio Osmeña, fled before the invasion, but of those who remained, most assumed the leadership
Christopher Capozzola University of Minnesota Legal History Workshop Page 3 of 29 roles for which the Japanese tapped them; only one, Supreme Court Chief Justice Jose Abad Santos, was executed for refusing to do so.2 The persistence of many governmental officials in the Japanese regime should not obscure the size and radicalism of the guerrilla movements that fought the Japanese occupation. Utilizing tactics from armed insurgency to sabotage to passive non-compliance, Filipino guerrillas made military pacification and day-to-day administration challenging tasks for a Japanese army that quickly found itself spread too thin to accomplish the task by force of arms. In turn, the Japanese began recruiting political and military allies on the ground in the Philippines.3 There were a handful of enthusiastic collaborators to be found. For some Filipinos, wartime liberation arrived not in February 1945, but in January 1942. Some nationalist politicians, happy to see the Americans withdraw in defeat, welcomed the Japanese as fellow Asian liberators. Lifelong opposition to U.S. imperialism had made numerous leading intellectuals, writers, and activists receptive to the pan-Asian nationalism of Japan’s Greater East Asian CoProsperity Sphere. One writer, Pío Duran, had called for closer ties between the Philippines and Japan in his influential 1935 book, Philippine Independence and the Far Eastern Question: “no other sound recourse is open to the Filipinos than to side with their Japanese brothers of the North and help them preserve Asia for the Asiatics.” Alliance with a strong Japan, Duran wrote, would be invaluable “for the recognition of Oriental superiority in the Far East and Oriental equality elsewhere.” But prewar rhetoric was a poor predictor of wartime actions: plenty of Japanophiles did not join the new regime as collaborators. And those who did were often disappointed to find that the Japanese were no more receptive to a meaningfully sovereign Philippines than the Americans or Spanish had been before them. Asako Sueoki complained in a Tokyo journal that Filipinos’ “ideology has not yet advanced to such an extent as to advocate the ‘Asia for the Asiatics’ principle, because their aim is nothing beyond ‘the Philippines for the Filipinos.’” Nor could the Japanese tap such figures at will, lest it undermine their own authority among a civilian population less than enthusiastic about the Emperor. Perhaps the most telling fact is that the Japanese tapped the political leaders of the former Commonwealth for the new administration, rather than installing others such as Artemio Ricarte or Benigno R. Ramos, or pro-Japanese 2 [tk citation on santos in phil sup ct justices vol.]; David Steinberg, Philippine Collaboration in World War II (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 162, 170-172. More generally, see Teodoro A. Agoncillo, The Fateful Years: Japan’s Adventure in the Philippines, 1941-1945 (Quezon City: Garcia Pub. Co., 1965); A.V.H. Hartendorp, The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines (Manila: Bookmark, 1967); J. Michael Houlahan, “Reflections on Patriotism and Collaboration: The Philippines in World War II,” Bulletin of the American Historical Collection 31 (January-March 2003): 49-63; Ikehata Setsuho and Ricardo Trota Jose, eds., The Philippines under Japan: Occupation Policy and Reaction (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999); Claro M. Recto, Three Years of Enemy Occupation: The Issue of Political Collaboration in the Philippines (Manila: People’s Publishers, 1946). Local studies include Elmer Lear, The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines: Leyte, 1941-1945 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Southeast Asian Studies Program, 1961); Alfred W. McCoy, “Politics by Other Means: World War II in the Western Visayas, Philippines,” in Southeast Asia under Japanese Occupation, ed. Alfred W. McCoy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies Monographs, 1980), 191-245. 3 As historian Reynaldo C. Ileto tellingly notes, “[n]owhere else in Southeast Asia did the locals fight so hard on behalf of their colonial rulers.” Ileto, “Philippine Wars and the Politics of Memory,” positions: east asia critique 13 (Spring 2005): 225.
Christopher Capozzola University of Minnesota Legal History Workshop Page 4 of 29 intellectuals such as Pío Duran, men who had public reputations for being virulently pro-Japanese, but little political legitimacy.4 By the fall of 1943, Japanese control of the Philippines had stabilized, and military officers had found sufficient cooperation in daily governance that they took steps toward granting formal independence to the country. They hoped the move would discredit the Americans as imperialists, appeal to Philippine nationalism, and capture the attention of Japanese subjects in other occupied Southeast Asian areas such as Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, and Indochina, where anti-colonial movements were also active. (Indeed, a month earlier, in August 1943, Japan had announced Burmese independence.) Japanese Premier Tojo Hideki, who visited the Philippines in the spring of 1943, announced that independence would follow once order was restored and the Filipino people had returned “to their true Oriental spirit.”5 The Philippine Republic was a propaganda move by the architects of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, to be sure. It was also a useful governing tactic that allowed the Japanese to turn over increasing amounts of day-to-day responsibility at a time when Imperial forces—particularly in such realms as policing and civil affairs—were thinly spread across southeast Asia. Nor did the Japanese call all the shots: they depended on the Filipino elite for basic legitimacy as well as state capacity. Harsh measures against popular Filipino politicians, they knew, would alienate the local population and make the Philippines even harder to govern. And so Japanese military officers acceded in many of the demands—and turned a blind eye to many of the evasions—of those Filipinos chosen as collaborators. And Filipino politicians knew that independence was more than a political fiction: it would likely mean fewer Japanese soldiers in the country, and more control for them over increasingly scarce resources. Independence ceremonies for the Second Philippine Republic took place on October 14, 1943, in front of the Philippine legislative buildings in Manila. A crowd reported at 300,000 was in attendance, including some distinguished members—among them the aging Emilio Aguinaldo, hero of the Philippine resistance to the Americans between 1898 and 1900. Aguinaldo, out of the political limelight for some time, had emerged in the earliest days of the occupation, when he broadcast a radio appeal to General Douglas MacArthur to surrender, and later insisted that “[t]o oppose the white man and gain freedom and independence, the colonial races must join together.” On the republic’s independence day, the uncompromising Filipino nationalist who had served as president of the ill-fated First Philippine Republic led the day’s events, raising the Philippine flag while a military band played the long-outlawed national anthem. 4 Pío Duran, quoted in Agoncillo, Fateful Years, vol. 2, p. 912; Asako Sueoki, quoted in Willard H. Elsbree, Japan’s Role in Southeast Asian Nationalist Movements, 1940-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 66. See also Agoncillo, Fateful Years, vol. 2, pp. 909, 918; Grant K. Goodman, “General Artemio Ricarte and Japan,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 7 (September 1966): 48-60; Grant K. Goodman, “Japan and Philippine Radicalism: The Case of Benigno Ramos,” in Four Aspects of Philippine-Japanese Relations, 1930-1940 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies Monographs, 1967), 133-194; Lydia N. Yu-Jose, “Turn of the Century Emigration: Filipinos to Hawaii, Japanese to the Philippines,” Philippine Studies 46 (First Quarter 1998): 94, 101 n. 6. 5 Elsbree, Japan’s Role, 21, 42; Catherine Porter, “Japan’s Blue-Print for the Philippines,” Far Eastern Survey 12 (May 31, 1943): 109.
Christopher Capozzola University of Minnesota Legal History Workshop Page 5 of 29 “The birth of the glorious new Philippines is now a consummated fact,” announced Japanese military commander Lieutenant General Kuroda Shigenori. “I can well imagine your profound joy at obtaining independence.”6 No Americans were present at the independence ceremonies, but James Reuter, an American priest in wartime Manila, recalled the response of some Filipino seminarians who attended the ceremonies of the inauguration. They “wept when they saw that flag going up by itself. … [W]hen they came back …it was apparent that they were deeply touched, so much so that they gathered by themselves, talking Tagalog. We felt that they were separated from us by some emotional barrier. It did not last, however. But for a couple of weeks the events of November 1943 did make a difference.” The Republic was widely dismissed in the international press (columnist Walter Lippmann sneered that for the Quislings and Lavals of Europe, at least “there was a reasonable prospect of making their treason pay”), but debate raged behind closed doors in Manila about whether 1943 marked an abjection of Philippine national aspirations, or their fulfillment.7 At the head of the new Philippine Republic stood the wartime president José P. Laurel. Brilliant, reckless, and uncompromisingly anti-American, Laurel was the ideal president of the Japanese puppet state. His opposition to U.S. rule reflected memories of the American invasion in 1898, resentment of American cultural impact on traditional Philippine society, and disdain for the weakness of American democratic institutions, conclusions confirmed during three years of study at Yale Law School from 1917 to 1920. By contrast, Laurel admired Japan, not only for its rapid economic growth but its assertions of pan-Asian unity. When the Japanese invaded, they quickly named the fifty-year-old associate justice of the Philippine Supreme Court as the Commissioner of Justice in the temporary government.8 As a ruler, Laurel was a largely—and perhaps deliberately—ineffectual figurehead who spoke loudly against the Americans and worked inefficiently with 6 “Inaugural Address of Jose P. Laurel,” in Consuelo V. Fonacier, comp., At the Helm of the Nation: Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the Philippine Republic and the Commonwealth (Manila: National Media Production Center, 1973), 17-32; Emilio Aguinaldo, quoted in Elsbree, Japan’s Role, 6; Marshall Andrews, “Aguinaldo Plea for Surrender Amuses MacArthur’s Forces,” Washington Post, February 7, 1942, pp. 1, 2; Ileto, “Philippine Wars,” 226; “New Philippine Regime Off to Fidgety Start,” Chicago Tribune, October 18, 1943, p. 9; “Philippines Now ‘Free,’” New York Times, October 14, 1943, p. 6. It even briefly appeared that the Spanish had recognized the regime, although this turned out not to be the case. See Thomas M. Campbell and George C. Herring, eds., The Diaries of Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., 1943-1946 (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), 21; “Philippine Cable Explained by Spain,” New York Times, November 10, 1943, p. 15. 7 James B. Reuter Oral History, transcript, 12, Center for Oral and Public History, California State University, Fullerton, Calif.; Walter Lippmann, “Mr. Jose P. Laurel,” Washington Post, October 16, 1943, p. 7. 8 David Bernstein, “America and Dr. Laurel,” Harper’s Magazine 197 (October 1948): 82-88; Rolando M. Gripaldo, “Laurel: The Political Philosopher and the Man,” Philippine Studies 30 (Fourth Quarter 1982): 512-541; David Steinberg, “Jose P. Laurel: A ‘Collaborator’ Misunderstood,” Journal of Asian Studies 24 (August 1965): 651-665, esp. 654. After the war, General Wachi Takeji, who had served in the Philippines as Director-General of the Japanese Military Administration, noted that Laurel’s choice emerged from an understanding of his nationalism and his popularity. “He could not help thinking that the American way of thinking and the American way of life were bound to ruin his nation. Therefore, it seems that he also wanted to serve the interest of the Philippines through bargaining with Japan.” Quoted in Agoncillo, Fateful Years, vol. 2, p. 914.
Christopher Capozzola University of Minnesota Legal History Workshop Page 6 of 29 the Japanese. From his office in the Malacanang Palace, Laurel gave full voice to his opposition to decades of American rule. “Because I like my country to be free,” he announced, “I do not like America to come back.” “We are wearying with the pretensions of the ‘White man’s burden,’ which more often than not has only served to cloak exploitations of weaker peoples,” he wrote in a November 1943 issue of the Manila Tribune, the occupied city’s only major newspaper.9 But to judge Laurel solely by his speeches is both to misunderstand the power of speech in wartime Philippine politics and to overlook the significant gaps between speech and action in the collaboration government. Fulsome praise for Japan—whether Laurel had believed in it or not—would not have played well with the masses of Filipinos living under the political strictures and economic hardships of the occupation. And with armed guerrillas in the hills just outside Manila, full-throated declarations of Filipino nationalism might have sounded suspect to Japanese ears, even when coming from the president of a supposedly independent Philippine Republic. In such contexts, anti-American rhetoric was the safest bet: the Japanese were pleased to hear it; it resonated with the Filipino people, many of whom felt abandoned by their American colonial rulers; and most of all, nationalists like Laurel actually believed it. “[T]he offer of independence could not have been rejected,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Our ancestors had fought for it. … You shouldn’t blame a fellow for getting what you yourself promised but for reasons beyond your own control you could not give!”10 On September 22, 1944, the Laurel government went a step further: the Philippine Republic declared war on the United States. Manuel Roxas, Douglas MacArthur’s old colleague and confidante who served as Finance Minister in the wartime occupation government, signed the declaration. The Philippine declaration changed rather little; by September 1944, the guerrillas were already winning more and more victories, particularly in the outer provinces. Within a few weeks of the declaration, American forces would mount a massive invasion on the island of Leyte. In any case, there would be few Filipino soldiers to back up the Republic’s declaration, as Laurel refused to institute the draft in the Philippines. Laurel’s stand against conscription was hardly a devastating blow to the Japanese, who saw the Philippine declaration of war as primarily a propaganda move; in the midst of a massive guerrilla war, the Japanese were hardly likely to arm tens of thousands of Filipino troops.11 But even without conscription, some Filipinos took up arms on behalf of the Japanese. Some were former soldiers of the Philippine Army who had been captured as prisoners of war, of whom some 3,500 were said to have joined the Imperial Japanese Army, following their parole and “political rehabilitation.” 9 Bernstein, “America and Dr. Laurel,” 84; Laurel, quoted in Steinberg, “José P. Laurel,” 657. 10 José P. Laurel, War Memoirs of Dr. José P. Laurel (Manila: José P. Laurel Memorial Foundation, 1962), 58. For more on the restrictions on public discussion in the wartime Philippines, see Karl Ian U. Cheng Chua, “The Stories They Tell: Komiks during the Japanese Occupation, 1942-1944,” Philippine Studies 53 no. 1 (2005): 59-90; Vicente L. Rafael, “Anticipating Nationhood: Identification, Collaboration, and Rumor in Filipino Responses to Japan,” in White Love: And Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 103-121; Chris Schaefer, “Japanese Anti-Guerrilla Countermeasures in the Philippines,” Bulletin of the American Historical Collection 34/4 (2006): 9-25. 11 Laurel, War Memoirs, 24, 60; Steinberg, “José P. Laurel,” 659.
Christopher Capozzola University of Minnesota Legal History Workshop Page 7 of 29 Emilio Aguinaldo, the former revolutionary general, still claimed the loyalty of thousands in veterans’ organizations; he announced in April 1943 that some 15,000 veterans were working for Japanese firms in Manila. Later, after independence, another 5,000 or more joined the Makapili, the Alliance of Philippine Patriots, a pro-Japanese force recruited by Benigno Ramos after José Laurel refused to recruit soldiers through conscription. The Japanese recruited Filipino men into these volunteer militias after December 8, 1944, although the extent to which service in these regiments was voluntary remains unclear. Some joined out of nationalist desire, some out of coerced necessity; some responded to obligations in kin networks, others because they needed food to eat.12 Necessity was the mother of everyday collaboration for political elites and ordinary Filipinos. Many made do as best they could, dragging their feet and feigning sickness when ordered to take on unpleasant tasks. A few kept up contacts with Filipino guerrillas in the mountain regions, as did Arsenio Lacson, the future mayor of Manila, who pushed paper in the occupation government’s Department of Justice while working secretly on behalf of the Free Philippines underground movement. Inaction was also scrutinized; when Lacson told his boss, wartime Secretary of Justice Teofilo Sison, that he could not in good conscience march in any of Manila’s frequent wartime parades, Sison upbraided him. “I will be marching to celebrate, not the death of our comrades who died uselessly in Bataan, but to celebrate the fall of American imperialism and of the American exploitation in this country. … I advise you to be in that parade tomorrow.”13 The everyday experience of collaboration was both intense and mundane, a daily struggle to acquire a daily ration of 100 grams of rice, punctuated by the terrors that accompanied accusation, denunciation, and investigation. The Japanese governed through a series of “neighborhood associations” organized by the Philippine National Service Association, established in December 1942, which effectively coerced Filipino labor and controlled access to food and other necessities. The men and women most hated in wartime Philippine society were not the Japanese soldiers, or political leaders such as Roxas or Laurel, but the collaborators closest at hand: the captains of the labor details, the tax collectors, the Constabulary, and the black marketeers, men and women cynically dismissed by Filipinos as practitioners not of the larger-than-life crime of kolaborasyon, but of something more tawdry that they referred to as buy-and-sell.14 Collaboration is a touchy subject, all the more so for legal historians, whose work not only documents and analyzes the past, but frequently judges—or 12 Manila Tribune, December 9, 1944, p. 2; Porter, “Japan’s Blue-Print,” 110; Steinberg, “José P. Laurel,” 659. See also Association for Service to the New Philippines, The Kalibapi and the Filipino (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1943); People v. Julio Garcia, G.R. No. L-885, October 30, 1947; Terami-Wada Motoe, “The Filipino Volunteer Armies,” in Philippines under Japan, ed. Ikehata and Jose, 59-98. 13 Agnes G. Bailen, The Odyssey of Lorenzo M. Tañada (Quezon City: University of Philippines Press, 1998), 60; Claude Buss Oral History, CSUF, 18; Frederic Marquart Oral History, CSUF, 16. 14 Theodore Friend, Between Two Empires; The Ordeal of the Philippines, 1929-1946 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965), esp. 211-228; Midori Kawashima, “The Records of the Former Japanese Army Concerning the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 27 (March 1996): 124-131; Paul H. Kratoska, The Japanese Occupation of Malaya: A Social and Economic History (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997); Lora S. Weston, “Co-Prosperity Fails in the Philippines,” Far Eastern Survey 14 (January 31, 1945): 22-26.
Christopher Capozzola University of Minnesota Legal History Workshop Page 8 of 29 rejudges—it. Defining “collaboration” offers a thorny problem as well. Overbroad definitions, as historian Timothy Brook writes, “ignor[e] the peculiar dynamics of collaboration and reduc[e] all who lived under occupation to the degraded status of ‘collaborators.’” While I am sympathetic to the definition of Henrik Dethlefsen that “[t]hose who collaborate must exercise power to be said to have collaborated,” I also share Teemu Ruskola’s hesitation about issuing abstract definitions, which are too easily turned into “normative systems that posit a pre-given moral subject and then elaborate guidelines for proper action by that subject.” Rather, again following Brook, “[h]istorians must legitimately ask how the moral subject that collaboration presupposes was fashioned, not retrospectively judge that subject’s acts.” Given the tendency of literature on collaboration to pre-suppose a national subject as the actor of history, Brook’s call is all the more urgent when studying collaboration in the Philippine context, where national identities were multiple, fragmented, and often incomplete.15 III. THE WAR’S END In early 1945, as the invading American and Filipino forces approached Manila, the Japanese leadership fled to the Americans’ former colonial summer capital in the mountains of Baguio far outside the city. In Manila, a power vacuum ensued, with no clear lines of authority and no easy means of communication. In February 1945, frightened, desperate, and under attack, retreating Japanese soldiers and sailors unleashed one of World War II’s most gruesome assaults on any civilian population. While violence against the city’s residents had taken place throughout the war, the Rape of Manila brought an unprecedented wave of violence over the course of several days in the midst of the longer Battle of Manila in February 1945. Japanese soldiers and sailors, who numbered about 19,000, were nominally under the control of General Yamashita Tomoyuki in Baguio, but on the ground, they answered primarily to Admiral Iwabuchi Sanji, if they answered to anyone at all. None were spared; one of the battle’s most callous attacks took place at Manila’s Red Cross hospital. By the end of the violence, as many as 100,000 Filipinos—in a city with a prewar population of 700,000—were dead. It was their memories that prompted cries for postwar retribution.16 15 Timothy Brook, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1, 2, 5; Henrik Dethlefsen, “Denmark and the German Occupation: Cooperation, Negotiation or Collaboration?” Scandinavian Journal of History 15 no. 3 (1990): 198-199; Teemu Ruskola, “Legal Orientalism,” Michigan Law Review 101 (October 2002): 179-234, at 225. On collaboration in other World War II contexts, see David P. Barrett and Larry N. Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932-1945: The Limits of Accommodation (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001); Peter Davies, Dangerous Liaisons: Collaboration and World War II (New York: Longman, 2004); Sarah Fishman et al., eds., France at War: Vichy and the Historians (New York: Berg, 2000); Brian G. Martin, “Shield of Collaboration: The Wang Jingwei Regime’s Security Service, 1939-45,” Intelligence and National Security 16/4 (2001): 89-148; Martin Thomas, “Review Article: Crisis and Collaboration in France,” International History Review 24 (September 2002): 603-615; Fabrice Vergili, Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France (Oxford: Berg, 2002); Margherita Zanasi, “Globalizing Hanjian: The Suzhou Trials and the PostWorld War II Discourse on Collaboration,” American Historical Review 113 (June 2008): 731-751. 16 Alfonso J. Aluit, By Sword and Fire: The Destruction of Manila in World War II (Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 1994); John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 44-45; Forbes Monaghan, Under the Red Sun: A Letter from Manila (New York: Declan H. McMullen Co., 1946).
Christopher Capozzola University of Minnesota Legal History Workshop Page 9 of 29 And yet, even as this violence was unleashed, American and Filipino troops were winning battles across the archipelago. Before the liberation was even complete, the Philippine Army—a nominally distinct force under the command of the United States military—began to establish a program to deal with the problem of collaboration in a systematic fashion. In a March 1945 order, Commonwealth Defense Secretary Tomas Cabili announced the formation of a Loyalty Status Board and noted that, with exceptions for chaplains and medics, none “will be retained in such service or on active duty in the Philippine Army who have accepted appointment or performed service in a military or civil capacity in any activity controlled by the Japanese or by the so-called puppet ‘Philippine Republic.’” The American and Filipino forces’ impending victory gave added incentive for those ordinary Filipinos who had survived the war by not taking sides, or by serving both sides, to announce that they had been proAmerican all along. As thousands claimed that they had served as wartime guerrillas, Cabili tightened the chain, requiring that they document that they had joined the guerrillas at least one month before the Allied landings at Leyte.17 President Franklin D. Roosevelt had promised swift justice for collaborators. On June 29, 1944, as part of the announcement assuring a speedy Philippine independence, FDR insisted that “[t]hose who have collaborated with the enemy must be removed from authority and influence over the political and economic life of the country.” MacArthur was blunter: “[I]t shall be my firm purpose to run to earth every disloyal Filipino who has debased his country’s cause.” Rather than confronting the puzzle of whether such actions represented disloyalty to the Philippines or to the United States, the general lumped them together. “Such actions construe direct aid to the enemy in his war against the United States of America and the Philippine Commonwealth.”18 Filipino radicals also added their voices of denunciation, particularly the Communist guerrillas of the Hukbalahap, who hoped that exposing the wartime exploits of the collaborators would build popular support for a revolutionary transformation of Philippine society. Filipino guerrilla forces, still fighting houseto-house battles in the outer neighborhoods of Manila, enforced their own collaboration policies through summary executions and the facilitation of popular vigilante actions, most of which targeted economic collaborators and secret police informers. Sporadic reprisal actions were most common in the country’s minority Chinese community, where anti-Japanese feeling ran high. But behind the violent headlines, popular sentiment was hard to read, and the country’s civilian residents were notably uneasy. The fact was, of course, that thousands of Filipinos had made compromises with the occupation government and feared an overly capacious policy. Many adopted a quiet, wait-and-see attitude while busily assembling their guerrilla credentials.19 17 David Bernstein, The Philippine Story (New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1947), 206. 18 Roosevelt, quoted in “Signs Legislation to Free Philippines,” New York Times, July 1, 1944, p. 6; MacArthur, quoted in Bernstein, Philippine Story, 202. 19 Porter, “Japan’s Blue-Print,” 110; George Henry Weightman Oral History, CSUF, 10. Polly Babcock Feustal, a young American who worked with the YWCA in Manila in the aftermath of the war recalled that one of her colleagues had lost her husband to assassination at the end of the war. See Polly Babcock Feustal, “Finance Team,” Polly Babcock Feustal Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.
Christopher Capozzola University of Minnesota Legal History Workshop Page 10 of 29 The U.S. Army devised its own policies to sift the thousands of Filipinos who came under its authority as American troops reinvaded the Philippines. The Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) would investigate the loyalty of individual Filipinos; by September 1945, some 5,000 were held in detention, with the aim of turning them over to civilian Philippine courts for trial. Denunciations of kolaborasyon also reflected the contentious politics of the postwar moment: by the summer of 1945, nearly all the leading political figures of the prewar Philippines were under accusation, including two of Sergio Osmeña’s sons, accused of buyand-sell.20 But it was becoming increasingly clear that the thinly stretched occupying U.S. Army could not hold (or feed) five thousand people for the long period of time it would require to establish civilian courts and allow them to carry out trials, and so the Army steadily released most of the detainees. CIC detainees walked out of U.S. military imprisonment with a “clearance,” meaning they had been temporarily released from custody, not that they had been cleared of any charges; none, indeed, had been filed. This bureaucratic misnomer would drastically confuse the issue of collaboration in years to come. In practice, there was little else the U.S. Army or the Philippine government could do; even President Osmeña deferred to the release decisions of the CIC as de facto exonerations. Hamstrung and overwhelmed, the CIC more or less gave up punishing collaborators—most of them, anyway. They did continue to use the authority of the CIC to investigate, detain, and break up the Hukbalahap, the communist guerrilla movement that operated against the Japanese through much of Luzon in the 1940s and that remained active in the Philippine countryside even after the war’s end. By the late summer of 1945, regulations designed to prosecute those who had aided the Japanese were being employed to punish those who had risked their lives to fight them.21 U.S. Army leadership also actively used collaboration policy to intervene in Philippine politics. General Douglas MacArthur singled out Manuel Roxas for special treatment. Roxas’s wartime capture in the hills near Baguio was announced by American troops as the “liberation” of an ally, rather than a defeat of an enemy; others captured in the raid were described in the press as part of the “collaborationist cabinet.” Sergio Osmeña reported that MacArthur told him that Roxas was being “liberated” because of his connections. “I have known General Roxas for twenty years, and I know personally that he is no threat to our military security,” said MacArthur. “Therefore we are not detaining him.” Roxas was soon back in the uniform of a Brigadier General in the Philippine Army, detailed as an attaché to Charles A. Willoughby, a longtime MacArthur loyalist.22 The Philippine Army’s Loyalty Status Board issued a hasty “clearance” to Roxas, the man who had signed the Philippine Republic’s declaration of war against the United States, and the man who, as chief of the Philippine Republic’s Economic Planning Board, had rigidly controlled the wartime economy and the distribution of precious food resources. Offering no concrete evidence, Board 20 Teodoro A. Agoncillo, The Burden of Proof: The Vargas-Laurel Collaboration Case (Mandaluyong: University of the Philippines Press, 1984), 125. 21 Bernstein, Philippine Story, 209; Eduardo Lachia, Huk: Philippine Agrarian Society in Revolt (Manila: Solidaridad, 1971), 116-117; Kathleen Weekley, “The National or the Social? Problems of NationBuilding in Post-World War II Philippines,” Third World Quarterly 27 (February 2006): 93. 22 Bailen, Odyssey, 61; Bernstein, Philippine Story, 203-204.
Christopher Capozzola University of Minnesota Legal History Workshop Page 11 of 29 members announced that they “had personal knowledge” of Roxas’s loyalty. For years afterward, Roxas—and an American press uninterested in investigating the details—trotted out the “clearance” of the Loyalty Status Board as statesanctioned affirmation of his wartime allegiance. The news upset Defense Secretary Tomas Cabili, who considered bringing charges through the military avenue of the Counter Intelligence Corps, but the Philippine Army’s chief of Staff, General Basilio Valdes—another MacArthur loyalist—shielded Roxas by reverting the Brigadier General from active to reserve status—a move that, according to military law, meant that Roxas could not be prosecuted in a military court.23 Soon thereafter, Roxas went on the offensive against critics of his wartime actions, using the pages of sympathetic newspapers. One editorial denied the entire concept of collaboration. “[N]ot one of us was a collaborator. Every one of us who were left behind acted to the help the Filipinos themselves survive until America could come back. Why will there be punishment for a crime that was not committed?” Not long after, Manuel Roxas returned to his position as the President of the Senate, then still meeting in an abandoned schoolhouse on the city’s outskirts. The Senate’s membership had been thoroughly tarred with the brush of both political collaboration and the economic exploitation of buyand-sell. Still, Roxas remained defiant: “What is collaboration? There are no puppets and collaborationists in this house. … [T]he mere fact of service under the Japanese is not conclusive evidence of collaboration!”24 “Collaboration is a question that is obsorbing [sic] the majority of the Filipinos,” wrote Marcial F. Desiderio, a Manila lawyer, in July 1945. “I am also certain it will be a national issue in the coming National Election in the Philippines. Because many Filipinos worked in the Japanese puppet government, altho [sic] they are pro-Americans, to-day this group are called collaborators. That is the setuation [sic] in the Philippines to-day.”25 To outside observers in the United States it was perfectly clear that thousands of Filipinos had “collaborated,” but questions remained. Some were definitional: what precisely constituted collaboration? Was it to be measured by the act, or was it a more elusive quality of heart and mind? How should the Counter Intelligence Corps and the Loyalty Status Board account for the actions (or inactions) of those who used their positions of relative power to restrain the Japanese and defend the Filipinos? Were the Filipino collaborators belligerents or civilians, criminals or traitors, to be tried in military courts or civil ones? Practical and political concerns soon surfaced too. What would it look like to the rest of the world if American military officers dragged Philippine collaborators back to the United States to be punished? What would happen if thousands—or hundreds of thousands—of Filipinos were brought up on trial? Or if the nation’s political and economic leadership was destroyed on the eve of the Americans’ departure, as Communist rebels were gaining power on the outskirts of Manila, insisting that they were the true liberators of the Filipino people? 23 [tk cite abaya] 24 Agoncillo, Fateful Years, 917; Bernstein, Philippine Story, 204-205, 207, 210. 25 Marcial F. Desiderio to Homer S. Cummings, Box 142, Papers of Homer Stille Cummings, Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.
Christopher Capozzola University of Minnesota Legal History Workshop Page 12 of 29 Then there was the question of precisely which state the collaborators had betrayed. Collaboration is fundamentally a violation of allegiance. But to whom, precisely, did Filipinos owe allegiance in December 1941? To the United States, a colonial power? In the war’s final days, as national liberation filled the air from India to Indochina, it seemed hardly an opportune moment for America to insist on and enforce the political obligations of their colonial subjects. Did Filipinos owe allegiance to the Commonwealth of the Philippines even after it had ceased to function? To the Philippine government-in-exile in Washington? To the Japanese conquerors who had established sovereignty over their territory? To the independent puppet Republic that nominally governed from 1943 to 1945? Or, perhaps to something more amorphous, to the Filipino nation, which had been asserted and defended by the guerrilla forces? For American lawyers in the State Department and the War Department offices at the newly constructed Pentagon, questions of legal process presented a puzzle. In the United States, the law of treason was more or less moribund, “no longer … the principal bulwark of state security,” as Willard Hurst observed in a Harvard Law Review essay in July 1945. The general consensus in legal circles and at the War Department was that the charge of treason—which bore high standards of evidence and procedure, including a constitutional provision requiring two witnesses for any event—was too complicated to make stick. The Supreme Court had also shown a tendency to restrain treason’s reach: in April 1945 the Justices had overturned a treason conviction for a man charged with aiding a group of Nazi saboteurs. And in the wake of World War I, when charges of sedition and espionage had been widely applied “to cover unpopular opinions or attitudes,” Hurst concluded, as did many other Americans, that the previous war’s lesson was that Americans should tread lightly.26 In the Oval Office, President Harry Truman initially supported even harsher punishments for Philippine collaborators than his predecessor had proposed: Filipino quislings, after all, had been disloyal to the United States. Soon after the war’s end, Osmeña and Truman met to discuss the matter; because the Interior Department technically governed the Office of Territories, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes sent along to the meeting his young adviser Abe Fortas, who would later take a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Fortas recalled that Truman insisted that “the Philippine collaborationists ought to be hanged first—even before the war criminals in Germany—because the Philippine collaborationists had been guilty of treason to the U.S.”27 Such rhetoric sounded good in the U.S. press, resounded with the crusading spirit of New Deal liberals like Ickes and Fortas, and pleased Sergio Osmeña, who knew that the implementation of a harsh policy would surely take down his main political opponent, Manuel Roxas. But advised of the geopolitical—and the practical—complications on the ground, Truman stepped back, pursuing that most cautionary of political maneuvers: he ordered an investigation. In October 1945, Truman established a fact-finding mission under the direction of Attorney General Tom Clark. “The principal question to be decided is whether the Philippine collaborationists committed treason against the 26 Cramer v. U.S., 325 U.S. 1 (1945); Willard Hurst, “Treason in the United States,” Harvard Law Review 58 (July 1945): 806-857 (quotes from 806, 810). 27 Fortas, quoted in Gary R. Hess, The United States’ Emergence as a Southeast Asian Power, 1940-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 234.
Christopher Capozzola University of Minnesota Legal History Workshop Page 13 of 29 Commonwealth Government or the United States,” reported the New York Times. “Ascertation that treason was committed against the United States might necessitate creation of an American extra-territorial court in Manila, it was said.”28 In November 1945, the frustrated Commonwealth President complained that President Truman and his new Secretary of War Robert Patterson could not give him “a definition of a collaborator,” and so he came up with his own: “one taking part in the execution of the policy of the enemy.” Osmeña separated collaborators into three categories: “those prompted by a desire to protect the people, those actuated by fear of enemy reprisals, and those motivated by disloyalty to our government and cause.” Only the last, he felt, should be punished, although he offered few concrete means for figuring out how to distinguish the three groups. “The motives which caused the retention of the office and the conduct while in office, rather than the sole fact of its occupation, ought to be the criterion upon which such persons shall be judged.” Osmeña was concerned as well that the U.S. Army held custody of the records concerning collaboration, and resented accusations that the Philippine Commonwealth government was insufficiently stable to govern in the midst of economic devastation and peasant unrest—let alone to conduct politically divisive public trials. Most of all, though, Osmeña wanted action, as the American fact-finding mission stalled and thousands walked out of military detention, including his lifelong political rival, Manuel Roxas.29 Osmeña had one ally in Washington: Secretary of the Interior Harold I. Ickes. Ickes was more troubled than most by the machinations of Manuel Roxas and other collaborators, but he was also probably the one man least well situated to do anything about it; the death of Franklin Roosevelt left Ickes with little influence in the White House. But in September 1945, Harold Ickes intervened, warning Sergio Osmeña of the dangers of inaction. “Both official and press reports indicate that a substantial number of persons who adhered to the enemy and gave him aid and comfort through their service in the puppet governments during invasion are now holding important offices…. I am informed that you intend to release numerous persons against whom evidence was collected by the United States Army.” Ickes then reminded the Philippine government of Roosevelt’s stated insistence on removal, and played what he thought was his trump card. “I would call the attention of your government to the probable reluctance with which funds may be appropriated for relief, rehabilitation and support of the Commonwealth Government if it becomes generally believed that that government had failed diligently and firmly to convict and punish those guilty of collaboration.”30 Ickes’s hope to use the power of the purse to direct Philippine policy failed miserably. On the eve of independence, Ickes’s statement sounded like colonial meddling. Manuel Roxas denounced it as “reminiscent, if not worse, of 28 Bernstein, Philippine Story, 215-216; “Collaboration Case Examined in Manila,” New York Times, January 10, 1946, p. 4; “Manila Puppet Indicted,” New York Times, March 15, 1946, p. 6. 29 Sergio Osmeña, quoted in Bernstein, Philippine Story, 202. See also Hernando Abaya, Betrayal in the Philippines (New York: A.A. Wyn, 1946), 125; “‘Collaborator’ Defined,” New York Times, November 24, 1945, p. 3. 30 Harold Ickes to Sergio Osmeña, September 10, 1945, Box 78, Papers of Harold I. Ickes, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.; “Osmena Will Speed ‘Quisling’ Trials,” New York Times, September 18, 1945, p. 2.
Christopher Capozzola University of Minnesota Legal History Workshop Page 14 of 29 the abominable Japanese way.” One of Roxas’s newspapers rousingly noted that “[t]o put pressure … on our government in order that these people may be punished without leniency is both undemocratic and un-American.” Most Filipinos agreed, pushing Osmeña further toward political isolation. Any strenuous anti-collaboration policy was now sure to be seen as a sign of American interference in Philippine affairs.31 Looming independence made interventions in Philippine politics from Washington politically problematic. American diplomats didn’t want it to appear as if the United States was treating the Philippines differently than other countries despite the fact that it still had an undeniably distinct legal status as an American commonwealth. The U.S. could not use the power of the purse; making reconstruction aid conditional on strenuous policies against collaborators would smack of continued colonialism. Nor could the U.S. contemplate postponing independence, a sure signal to a volatile postwar Asia that the U.S. was not serious about its stated anti-colonial intentions. The fall of 1945, however, would bring attention to another round of postwar trials. IV. THE TRIAL OF GENERAL YAMASHITA In the shadow of devastation and liberation came retribution. If punishment for collaborators appeared elusive, demands for postwar justice found another target in General Yamashita Tomoyuki, who had been in command of the Japanese Fourteenth Army in the Philippines from October 9, 1944, until his surrender at the end of the war in the mountaintop retreat in Baguio. If collaboration policy was increasingly an arena in which Americans were reluctant to exercise imperial power in visible ways, the general’s trial brought that power unapologetically to bear. Yamashita was a soldier’s soldier: stocky, gruff, attentive to detail and respectful of the chain of command. A successful early career had brought him to the fore in the highly political Japanese Army of the 1930s; his daring February 1942 assault on Singapore stunned American and British military officials, and earned him the nickname in the western press as the “Tiger of Malaya.” But internal army rivalries blocked Yamashita’s continued advance, and the general spent most of World War II in minor command positions. His detail to the Philippines in October 1944—on the eve of an American invasion that his superiors surely anticipated—was by no means a plum assignment.32 Yamashita’s command in the Philippines was always uncertain. He arrived in the country on October 9, 1944; American and Filipino forces landed on the island of Leyte just eleven days later; U.S. naval forces destroyed the Japanese Navy in a major battle at Leyte Gulf a few days after that. As the course of battle progressed, Yamashita found himself increasingly on the run, fleeing from American bombing, under fire by Filipino guerrillas, out of communication with most of the Japanese soldiers who were nominally under his command. By the summer of 1945, the Tiger of Malaya had lost most of his roar, and when the sixty-year-old general finally came out from hiding in the jungles of northern 31 Bernstein, Philippine Story, 212. 32 See Chea Boon Kheng, Red Star over Malaya: Resistance and Social Conflict during and after the Japanese Occupation of Malaya, 1941-1946 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1983), 20-24; E.F.L. Russell, The Knights of Bushido: A Short History of Japanese War Crimes (London: Cassell, 1958), 243-251; “Chinese Want to Try Yamashita,” New York Times, January 17, 1946, p. 14.
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