Filipino Resiliency during the American Period

After the treaty of Paris on 10 December 1898, the Filipinos were led into passivity; they
became partially discouraged because of being “adopted” to the Americans. Filipinos held a
silent resistance although at the same time they were being Americanized in many aspects which
is predominant until now. Although the Filipinos had resistance movements, they didn’t showed
an act to revolt against the Americans, however Filipinos were resilient enough to submit their
selves to be colonized by the Americans.
The primary interest of the United States was not to Christianize and civilize the native
Filipinos and to help them prepare a government of their own, but precisely to expand American
trade in the Philippines in particular and in Asia. The strategy of the United States was to make
the Philippines a source of cheap raw materials like sugar, hemp, copra, etc. for U.S. industries
on the one hand and a market for U.S. exports on the other. Through this strategy the Philippines
remained a completely agricultural economy during the American regime. Because of “free
trade” introduced in the country, the Philippine economy became completely dependent upon the
United States ─ the country imported virtually all her requirements of finished goods. That is
why American influence is predominant in our country; food, cars, clothing, lifestyle, language,
etc. The Americans used propaganda in the form of colonial education, colonial politics, and
American-oriented media. Colonial education had reshaped Philippine society in the image of
the Americans, colonial politics had converted the Filipino elites who had collaborated with the
Americans into adjuncts of colonial rule, and the American-oriented media had Americanized
the Filipinos.
The introduction of American education and the imposing of English as the language of
medium in the Philippines would fulfill the goal of transforming the attitudes of the Filipino
masses toward the American interests and policies in the country. The Filipinos, although they
held a silent resistance to the Americans, were just submitting themselves to the American
Constitution. Even Pres. Manuel Quezon was under the American rule. Because of the
compulsory public elementary and high school education with English language as the medium
of instruction, the Filipinos, especially the elites and the middle and upper middle classes, easily
became avid supporters of American press and other American products.
 The Filipinos, especially the masses, bitterly fought for independence against the
Spaniards for more than three centuries and against the Americans for about a decade. It can also
be observed that it was during the Filipino-American War that the Filipino revolutionaries
experienced a devastating defeat. Understandably, the decade that followed the establishment of
American rule in the country witnessed the weakening of the resistance movements. There are
two major reasons contributed to the regression of the Filipinos into passivity, namely: first, that
after centuries of bitter struggle the Filipino revolutionaries became exhausted and partially
discouraged; and second, because of the “adoption of the ‘wait-and-see’ attitude among the
people as the propaganda about the benefits of American colonialism seeped down to the villages
and farms”.
It must be remembered that the Filipinos were hopeful, though reluctantly suspicious, that
the intervention of the Americans in the 1896 Revolution and President McKinley’s declaration
of “Benevolent Assimilation” would help realize their long-desired independence from colonial
oppression. But no matter how the American colonialists intensified their propaganda campaign,
their economic exploitation of the Philippines eventually became evident as the economic
condition of the country failed to improve and in fact even worsened. Consequently, after the
relative quiescence during the second decade of American occupation, roughly from 1916 until
the early 1920s, the Filipino masses had once again become critically conscious of their plight
which resulted in the reactivation of the old resistance movements and the emergence of new
ones.

Filipino Resiliency during the Japanese Period

The Japanese was essentially military rule. It was more of a popular culture rather than
formal culture during the Japanese occupation. What the Japanese did was they tried to bring in
their own perception of culture. Culture was not too much of importance but Japanese brought in
military occupation. They brought in with them an economic and cultural policy. The first of
which was that the US was no longer a cultural power. The period of rule of the US had gone
and so, replacing this was Japan. And the cultural policy that the Japanese did was first to
remove the traces of the United States; to remove or minimize the European tradition in the
Philippines and replace this with an Asian perspective led by Japan and then secondary to that,
bringing us into the fold by letting us look back and examine our own traditions and bring that
tradition back so that it will fit into the Asian mold. And then the Japanese also tried to bring in
their own concepts things like love of Labor, decency, dignity, and all of this. It sounded very
nice on paper and when they tried to implement this in the field, it also started to be interesting
insofar as the peaceful relations between Japanese individuals and Filipinos was concerned when
they introduced this in school. They did bring in the idea that you had to learn Japanese, but they
also brought in the idea that you had to learn Filipino.
Japan is a Confucian society and the Confucian society has hierarchy. And therefore
when the Japanese brought in this cultural concept, we would be under the Japanese the Japanese
were number one, Filipinos were number two. Japanese language was top one Filipino was
second. So there was that hierarchy built in the second thing that the Japanese also tried to bring
in was a sense of discipline and audience you had to follow the teachers you had to follow the
superiors, you had to accept that without question and so on and so forth. They felt that it was
good because people in the Philippines were seen as undisciplined and therefore if that sense of
discipline and responsibility would be brought in the Philippines could become a better place to
live in again.
Bringing in Japanese culture was not their top priority, what was most important was
crushing the guerrillas and the resistance and getting the economic benefits of Japanese control.
So what people remember from the war is not so much the cultural policy, but they remember the
Japanese soldiers slapping their mother or their father on the streets that undid what the Japanese
were trying to do. Well the teachers were trying to say we belong to the same group of people.
In the Japanese army, it was believed that slapping was the most minor of the
punishments that could be given to the soldier if he broke the rules. So to a Japanese soldier, a
slap was something normal but in our culture a slap meant something much deeper than that;
your whole person was affected by it. Although there were the good policies that the Japanese
trying to implement, they did fail. What was more successful was the inculcation of an Asian
orientation and more successful still the inculcation of a more Filipino identity. Not so much
aligned with Japan but more aligned with Philippines and this also aligned itself with the
resistance movement and others who were outside the Japanese controlled area.
So when we look at the Japanese occupation, we do see there's all this fighting that took
place there was a lot of violence but there was also a cultural aspect to it. And one thing that the
occupation short as it was, showed us and is still relevant to us today is how Filipinos can adjust
to fast changing times; adjust, survive and make a benefit out of it. Examples of these are
learning the Japanese language. Yes, the Japanese language we learn bits and pieces of it but we
twisted it so that it could be a form of resistance. So instead of accepting the Japanese way, the
Filipinos made it a weapon of our own. For example, Konnichiwa is the Japanese for “good
day”. Good morning in Japan is ohayo-gozaimasu and when you bound to the Sentry, you said
ohayo-gozaimasu, but some Filipinos in Manila found out if you added one letter to Ohio it
became a Tagalog word which meant totally different so the other the letter P after Ohio in the
bowed as deeply to the Japanese guard saying “oHAYOP-gozaimasu” and the Japanese soldier
would say “O, very good Filipino, very obedient”. But actually the Filipinos had won over them.
So the Filipinos survived by making jokes out of that. And even though Filipinos had the
shortages they did try to subsist on what they had. We discovered our own local resources and
we made our own substitutes for former goods that we imported and just to mention one item
that still very much on the market is “banana ketchup”. Before the war, banana ketchup did not
exist but during the war, no ketchup was coming from the United States. Filipinos wanted the
taste of ketchup. Somebody invented it and advertised it as something new. The inventor was
Magdalo Francisco and the brand became “Mafran banana ketchup” and that's why we have
banana ketchup today. The Japanese might not have worked exactly the way they wanted it to
work but we took over in a sense in mediate work in our own sense showing that Filipinos were
still the boss of everything else.