Japanese occupation of the Philippines

Japan launched an attack on the Philippines on 8 December 1941, just ten hours after their attack on Pearl Harbor.[3] Initial aerial bombardment was followed by landings of ground troops both north and south of Manila.[4] The defending Philippine and United States troops were under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, who had been recalled to active duty in the United States Army earlier in the year and was designated commander of the United States Armed Forces in the Asia-Pacific region.[5] The aircraft of his command were destroyed; the naval forces were ordered to leave; and because of the circumstances in the Pacific region, reinforcement and resupply of his ground forces were impossible.[6] Under the pressure of superior numbers, the defending forces withdrew to the Bataan Peninsula and to the island of Corregidor at the entrance to Manila Bay.[7] Manila, declared an open city to prevent its destruction,[8] was occupied by the Japanese on 2 January 1942.[9]

The Philippine defense continued until the final surrender of U.S.-Philippine forces on the Bataan Peninsula on April 10, 1942, and on Corregidor on May 6, 1942.[10] Quezon and Osmeña had accompanied the troops to Corregidor and later left for the United States, where they set up a government-in-exile.[11] MacArthur was ordered to Australia, where he started to plan for a return to the Philippines.[12] Quezon's political rival, former president Aguinaldo, sided with the Japanese invaders as a collaborator. In exchange, Japan initially was going to appoint Aguinaldo as President of a Japanese puppet-state in the Philippines, but later gave him the position of National Distribution Corporation head, placing him in charge of rationing prime commodities for the Japanese war effort.[13][14][15]

Most of the 80,000 prisoners of war captured by the Japanese at Bataan were forced to undertake the "Bataan Death March" to Camp O'Donnell prison camp in Capas, Tarlac 105 kilometers to the north of Mariveles Bataan.[10] Thousands of men, weakened by disease and malnutrition and treated harshly by their captors, died before reaching their destination. More men died from Japanese mistreatment in the first four months in the camps than had died in the four months of battle previously.[16]

Warning for local residents to keep their premises sanitary or face punishment.

A 100-peso note made by the Japanese during the occupation.

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Proclamation of the Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Forces in the Philippines on Military Administration Over Occupied Districts

The Japanese military authorities immediately began organizing a new government structure in the Philippines. Although the Japanese had promised independence for the islands after occupation, they initially organized a Council of State through which they directed civil affairs until October 1943, when they declared the Philippines an independent republic.[17] Most of the Philippine elite, with a few notable exceptions, served under the Japanese.[18] The puppet republic was headed by President José P. Laurel.[19] Philippine collaboration in the puppet government began under Jorge B. Vargas, who was originally appointed by Quezon as the mayor of the City of Greater Manila before Quezon departed Manila.[20] The only political party allowed during the occupation was the Japanese-organized KALIBAPI.[21] During the occupation, most Filipinos remained loyal to the United States,[22] and war crimes committed by forces of the Empire of Japan against surrendered Allied forces[23] and civilians were documented.[24]

Throughout the Philippines more than a thousand Filipinos, composed of mothers, girls, and gay men, some as young as 10, were imprisoned, forcibly taken as "comfort women", and kept in sexual slavery for Japanese military personnel during the occupation.[25] [26] [27][28] Each of the Japanese military installations in the Philippines during the occupation had a location where the women were held, which they called a "comfort station".[29] One such place where these women were imprisoned was Bahay na Pula.[30] The Filipinos that were forced to sexual slavery by the Japanese were kidnapped from the population and were routinely gang-raped, tortured, and humiliated. Many of them had their breasts cut off or received damaging wounds whenever they fought back against the soldier's sexual advancements. Many were also murdered and disposed like animals.[31][32][33] Decades after the war, victims of Japan's colonial sex slave system initiated for their documented slavery to be inscribed to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register; however, Japan's government blocked the inscription to defend itself from its own war crimes by using its monetary contributions to threaten UNESCO.[34] During the occupation, the Japanese were also known to have killed Filipino infants as an act of entertainment and stress-reliever.[35][36][37][38]

The Japanese also sent "doctors" and "surgeons" to the Philippines, who performed human experimentation of native Filipinos. Some of these experiments included amputations, dissections, and suturing blood vessels of live humans. Surgeons gruesomely performed vivisections (dissection of the stomach) on Filipinos. Before such experiments, the victims were forced by the Japanese to dig their own graves first. In some cases, the bodies of vivisected Filipinos were sewed back up, then the living victims were shot dead. In other cases, the vivisected victims were left with huge open stomachs then dumped in their graves along with their intestines and left to die. Many of the doctors and surgeons who performed their human experimentations kept quiet about their deeds until some information came out decades after the war. In those cases, the "wartime friends" of the doctors who exposed their own acts tried to prevent the historical stories from coming out to the public in a bid to defend Japanese war crimes. The majority of the doctors, however, never spoke about their crimes and remained at-large in Japan until their comfortable retirement. Some Japanese ultra-nationalists have harassed doctors who wanted to tell about the crimes they committed during the war.[39][40][41] After the war, then General Douglas MacArthur hid facts about Japan's human experimentation from the war crimes tribunal. His actions pardoned those who committed the human experimentations. The United States afterwards received human experimentation data from Japan, as exchange for MacArthur's actions which protected Japanese war criminals from legal persecution.[42][43][44][45]

General Tomoyuki Yamashita surrenders to the Filipino soldiers and guerrillas in the presence of Generals Jonathan Wainwright and Arthur Percival.

When General MacArthur returned to the Philippines with his army in late 1944, he was well-supplied with information; it is said that by the time MacArthur returned, he knew what every Japanese lieutenant ate for breakfast and where he had his haircut. But the return was not easy. The Japanese Imperial General Staff decided to make the Philippines their final line of defense, and to stop the American advance towards Japan. They sent every available soldier, airplane and naval vessel to the defense of the Philippines. The kamikaze corps was created specifically to defend the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. The Battle of Leyte Gulf ended in disaster for the Japanese and was the biggest naval battle of World War II. The campaign to liberate the Philippines was the bloodiest campaign of the Pacific War. Intelligence information gathered by the guerrillas averted a disaster—they revealed the plans of Japanese General Yamashita to trap MacArthur's army, and they led the liberating soldiers to the Japanese fortifications.[50]

MacArthur's Allied forces landed on the island of Leyte on 20 October 1944, accompanied by Osmeña, who had succeeded to the commonwealth presidency upon the death of Quezon on 1 August 1944. Landings then followed on the island of Mindoro and around Lingayen Gulf on the west side of Luzon, and the push toward Manila was initiated. The Commonwealth of the Philippines was restored. Fighting was fierce, particularly in the mountains of northern Luzon, where Japanese troops had retreated, and in Manila, where they put up a last-ditch resistance. The Philippine Commonwealth troops and the recognized guerrilla fighter units rose up everywhere for the final offensive.[71] Filipino guerrillas also played a large role during the liberation. One guerrilla unit came to substitute for a regularly constituted American division, and other guerrilla forces of battalion and regimental size supplemented the efforts of the U.S. Army units. Moreover, the cooperative Filipino population eased the problems of supply, construction and civil administration and furthermore eased the task of Allied forces in recapturing the country.[72][73]

Fighting continued until Japan's formal surrender on 2 September 1945. The Philippines had suffered great loss of life and tremendous physical destruction by the time the war was over. An estimated 527,000 Filipinos, both military and civilians, had been killed from all causes; of these between 131,000 and 164,000 were killed in seventy-two war crime events.[74][2] According to a United States analysis released years after the war, U.S. casualties were 10,380 dead and 36,550 wounded; Japanese dead were 255,795. Filipino deaths during the occupations, on the other hand, are estimated to be more be around 527,000 (27,000 military dead, 141,000 massacred, 22,500 forced labor deaths and 336,500 deaths due war related famine).[2] The Philippine population decreased continuously for the next five years due to the spread of diseases and the lack of basic needs, far from the Filipino lifestyle prior to the war when the country had been the second richest in Asia after Japan.[74]

• Emergency circulating notes
• Escape to the Hills
• Heritage Towns and Cities of the Philippines
• Hunters ROTC
• Japanese government-issued Philippine fiat peso
• Military history of the Philippines during World War II
• Santo Tomas Internment Camp
• Second Philippine Republic

• This article incorporates public domain text from the Library of Congress July 1994, Retrieved on 11 November 2008

• Agoncillo Teodoro A. The Fateful Years: Japan's Adventure in the Philippines, 1941–1945. Quezon City, PI: R.P. Garcia Publishing Co., 1965. 2 vols
• Hartendorp A. V. H. The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines. Manila: Bookmark, 1967. 2 vols.
• Lear, Elmer. The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines: Leyte, 1941–1945. Southeast Asia Program, Department of Far Eastern Studies, Cornell University, 1961. 246p. emphasis on social history
• Steinberg, David J. Philippine Collaboration in World War II. University of Michigan Press, 1967. 235p.
• Hernando J. Abaya (1946). Betrayal in the Philippines. A.A. Wyn, Incorporated.