RETURN TO THE PHILIPPINES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 281, 10 November 1944, Page 15

RETURN TO THE PHILIPPINES

What Follows The Japanese Exit? —

Asks

A. M.

R.

in this

article for 66 The Listener"

VERYBODY to-day can find the Philippines on a map. But nobody, not even the Filipinos themselves, can place them. : Geographically, of course, the 7081 Philippine Islands are an out-rigger of Asia. Racially they are nearer the Japanese than any other nation is. Economically they are the usual rice-con-suming, food-and-fibre-exporting tropical country. But historically the archipelago is more tied to Europe than to Asia; culturally it resembles South America more closely than anywhere else; and politically-well, nobody knows that yet. .. General Douglas McArthur, heir of his father as Commander-in-Chief of the Philippine Army, promised when ordered from Bataan three years ago that he would be back in his penthouse flat on top of the Manila Hotel by this Christmas. Bold as the promise seemed at the | time, it now looks like being fulfilled. But what then? Elsewhere in the East, Japanese occupation has torn holes in the White Man’s prestige and brought nearer the day of local independence. In the Philippines, already scheduled for independence in 1946, it has emphasised © the tie, over four centuries old, between the Islands and America. Incidentally, . dating the return by Christmas means more to the Filipino than erasing that last December week when. the Japanese poured overland into Manila. For Christmas, which means nothing outside the minority of Christian homes in all the other countries of Asia, is the year’s greatest day in the Philippines. They were Christians, remember, before ever the first Briton settled in what is now the United States. : Christmas in Manila I first saw the Philippines on that Day of Days. In the morning ‘Manila’s 69 churches had been crowded to the window-sillsgIn the evening, as the flat steamy city awoke from siesta, the streets began to flow with slim young athletes parading in coloured singlets hanging outside white duck trousers, and with senoras and senoritas in gauzy dresses with high bunched shoulders packed inside the boxes-on-wheels called colesas and caretelas that trail behind tiny ponies and carry each a square of canvas overhead as a private cloud. But only at night did Manila really wake. The matchbox houses-on-stilts in their scented gardens blazed out electricity and laughter, the wooden cock-fighting pits bellowed delirium, and the down-town amusement parks and Japanese buzzars (department stores) scintillated neon and swing. Geysers of energy at, intermittent worship and play, the 16 million Filipinos are not so hot at continuous work -a feature noted by the Romans of our

own ancestors in a corresponding stage of development. But then why should they be? Their tough little carabaos (water buffaloes) "plough" the rice-fields with their hoofs and when off duty forage for themselves. Bananas, papayas (pawpaws), and coconuts come ripe the year round. Nipa palms grow specially (continued on next page)

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to make houses, and bamboos to make nearly everything else that a household needs. Streams and straits bubble with fish and the scraps you drop through the floor will feed pigs and hens to feed you. The Church and the Government keep society going (the "Archbishop’s Bank" will even lend you money) and when cousin José comes back from crushing quartz or sugar-cane for those rich Americanos the whole family-meaning half the village-will be rich too for several weeks. Money buys kerosene and salt, makes funerals possible, and even, if only there ever was enough of it, might get you free from the cacique (money-lender, landlord).

Some Filipinos work terrificallymost notably the heathen Ifugaos whose rice terraces amid the Luzon mountain tops are among the wonders of the world. But the outlook of the average Christian Filipino-and 90 per cent are Christians of decades’ or centuries’ standing-be he Tagalog from the north or Visayan from the middle islands-is much as I have sketched. American Imperialists, at whose urging the Islands were prised loose from Spain at the

start of this century, expected him to pour wealth into the United States. However, the increased productiveness which U.S. expenditure on roads, improved government and new industries has brought has largely disappeared into more than doubling the population (from 7,000,000 in 1900). Many of course toil, between holidays, in the gold mines or fetch out the world’s main chromium stock. But when it has been pointed out to the local politicians that the independence they vociferously demand will, by making sugar dutiable in U.S.A., throw out of work two million sugar workers on Negros and neighbouring islands, they have merely replied, (continued on next page)

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"Then these folk will grow papayas for themselves instead of profits for Americans." Under Spanish Rule To break or not to break the American connection was the one question that troubled the literature half of Filipinos in the years just before Japan bumped their elbow. The archipelago, which roughly is the size and length of New Zealand, but totally tropical, green, and jungled down to the water’s many edges, has never been independent. Magellan, who arrived in 1620 after his amazing non-stop transverse of the Pacific, wrote in his log of "kings" and "palaces"; but they would be local chiefs in nipa-palm bungalows-on-poles and their wholesalé conversion and promise of allegiance to Spain must have been extremely superficial. Spanish government, gradually gxtending over nearly all the islands for the next four centuries, was on the whole good, the Filipinos gradually entering" the heritage of Christian Europe as filtered through devoted missionaries and conscientious administrators. Its success showed politically-50 years after independence movements in the considerably similar Indiah Spanish communities of South America-in the revolts of Rizal and Aguinaldo. But before the latter could succeed, the Islands passed into American hands in 1899 as an unpre- meditated result of the Spanish-Ameri-can -War. Hence Filipino life now shows a four-decade veneer of high-speed Americanisation over a four century soaking in Spanish Christianity. z Some Probable Headaches Sergio Osmena, the half-caste -Fili-pino-Chinese President, has returned with. the latest invaders, bringing in his pocket, it is rumoured, a Rooseveltsponsored Declaration of Independence to be proclaimed immediately the last Japanese has left. This means, it is admitted, handing the Philippines over to some sort of Latin-American "DictatorDemocracy." But then both North American "Party-Machine Democracy" and British "Governing-Class Democracy" look just as undemocratic to outsiders; though they work, in their respective milieus, to a degree that Pure Democracy. has worked nowhere yet: on the earth. The real Philippine troubles are likely to come not from politics but from trade and minorities. Trade*® will give headdthes because the United States (which in 1900 was taking only 18% of Philippine exports) by 1935’ was taking 80%, and because imports: from America sprang from 9% to 64% in those 35 years. Minorities may give trouble because the Ifugaos and others remain persistently heathen and dirty, and, while an occasional hillman walking in less than underpants down the almost purely American main street of the country-club town of Bagio may look picturesque to tourists, he looks to his more civilised countrymen merely a disgrace to themselves-so that a reform--ing native government might rush in where foreign administrators have feared — to tread. More seriously, the Mohammedan Moros who recently were head--hunters and still actively despise the other 96% of the population, are un- | likely to continue lying down to the transfer of families from over-populated Cebu into their own vast but ‘scarcely- | occupied Mindanao. ee oe: