FILIPINO FEALTY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 66, Issue 5598, 29 March 1943, Page 4

FILIPINO FEALTY

UNITED STATES ALTRUISM JAPANESE REGIMENTATION (By H.W.L.S.) Since the broadcast of the Japanese indicating their intention to switch Filipino production as far as possible from sugar to cotton, little has been heard of their industrial and agricultural control of the island. The move, however, is sufficient to show that they intend to do their best while in control to regiment the native population to further their own economic needs. The United States never exploited Philippine resources against the Filipino people’s will. Washington did not stop at the policy of merely keeping the Filipinos well fed and well protected against devastating tropical epidemics. Unafraid of enlightening the subjugated natives, the United States established compulsory education. Discarding the old imperial principle of divide and conquer, the United States taught the polyglot population to speak and write one universal language, English, and encouraged Filipinos to do away with ancient tribal animosities and to develop homogeneity and dynamic nationalism. To the other Western peoples who held territories in the Far East, the American policy toward the Filipinos at first appeared quixotic. But the United States, a novice in colonial administration, went on confidently with its colonial experiment. WHAT FREEDOM MEANS The Filipinos knew that in resisting the Japanese invasion they were not fighting merely for the United States but for their own country and freedom. The Filipino has no grievances against the United States. He never was forced to work without pay. His property was never taken without just compensation. He never was beaten for wanting more autonomy or for demanding (not asking for) independence. He never was subjected to the old imperialistic policy of keeping the native’s belly full but his head empty. He was free to go to any church or not to go to church at all. Unlike most of the peoples of the Far East, the Filipinos know what freedom means. They were free for four decades under the United States. Political independence was on its way when the Japanese moved in. In all essential qualities, the Filipino, the Malayan and the Indonesian are of the same race and come from the same blood source. The Burmese and the Tonkinese are perhaps the nearest to them of the neighbouring peoples, but all are kin. Split into many tribes, each with its own tongue and characteristics, and each with a strong provincialism, there are certain living habits and characteristics which all possess. There is a marked similarity, for example, between a Batak village in the highlands of Sumatra and an Ifugao village in the mountains of the Philippines. Both of these widely separated tribes live in little clearings of a few houses each, in the midst of irrigated rice terraces. The ground of the compound is clean and bare. Solid, windowless, one-room plank houses stand like four-legged mushrooms on fat stilts of peeled tree trunks that are girded with wooden contraptions to keep away the rats. In roof structure the Ifugau and Batak houses differ considerably, but the lower part of the houses and the children and dogs and pigs gathered in the shade of each house the women doing their weaving and all their work except the cooking outside of the dark, smoky nest houses—are of so identical a pattern one can scarcely realise that these tribes are separated by more than 2000 miles of ocean and have not for centuries known of the other’s existence. CULTURAL LINKS Intellectually there are two main

groups of Filipinos—the old Spanishspeaking man of culture, and the new generation of younger men and women, who have been educated under American methods, and who, considering their hasty preparation, had been given at the time of the Japanese invasion very large responsibilities. With ultimate independence in view, the American Government made U.S. colleges available to a number of Filipinos. After going through several years of preparation in America, they were returned and given official positions in the islands. As Elizabeth Clark, a well-known American authority on the Philippines, has said: “Americanised Malays whose parents can probably neither read nor write have been hurled in one generation from a position of despised servile colonials to places of power, influence, and responsibility in a nation that is entirely self-governing in the internal affairs.”

Even in the mountain hinterland, if an American walked through an Igorot or Negreto village 30 years ago the children would scream, “An Americano,” and hurry into the house or scuttle up a tree, or behind a boulder. Within a few years they had largely lost this fear, so much so, indeed, that after reaching such points of safety they would yell at the retreating Americans a taunting “Good morning,” or sometimes “Corn”—a nickname they first gave the Spaniards, who wore beards that reminded them of corn silks. Now the children stand their ground and say “Good morning, father,” or “Good morning., grandfather,” and want to be noticed.

Dr R. F. Barton, who has done much research work in this region, says:—“Probably the best single gauge of a culture is the extent to which it uses iron. Thirty years ago the Igorots were so eager for iron that they persistently stole the spikes out of bridges. The small amount of iron that was carried in was too precious for any use except for spearheads and knives. Government ‘exchanges’ were opened and sold iron in unlimited quantities. Then the Igorot began to shoe his wooden fieldsticks with iron and to make special instrdments for digging his stony soil. A few years ago the spading fork was discovered, and in many localities its use has become general. Kerosene, poured into a can through whose lid a home-made wick has been thrust, replaced the smoky fireplace fire that had hitherto been the sole source of light. This device is now giving way to table lamps brought back from the mines. Iron pots have largely replaced the ill-glazed clay ones that absorbed a little of the taste, smell and substance of everything that had ever been cooked in them, and were thus enabled to impart their own distinctive flavour to other foods cooked in them.”

, The courage and fortitude of the American-trained Filipino Army at Batan are eloquent of the national spirit, the spirit that has been shown alike by Filipino Christian and Moro Mahometan. Their acts speak for 16,600,000 people, composed of Moros, chiefly of Mindanao and Luzon, Negretos, Igorots and the Christian Filipinos. They speak for a country whose Christian spires are numbered by the number of its towns and hamlets; they speak for a country of free schools, with 2,000,000 children in them; they speak for a country using the Australian ballot system, holding frequent elections, where women enjoy the franchise; and they speak for a country whose real culture, far back of the mediaeval Christianity introduced only in 1565, is as old and rich as the hills. They speak indeed for the only country that is not English or did not begin as an English colony that voluntarily adopted the English language. Compared with the Indonesians, whose native world has remained essentially Oriental, the lowland Filipino has in many ways emerged as an Occidental in a brown skin.