Chronology
| 1945 | The Battle of Manila (February–March) leaves at least 100,000 civilians dead (the “Manila Massacre”) |
| 1945 | The Pacific War ends; 518,000 Japanese, more than 1.11 million Filipinos, and roughly 15,000 American troops are killed in the Philippines |
| 1945 | President Laurel, Speaker Aquino, and others are taken via Yokohama (September) to Sugamo Prison (November 16) |
| 1946 | General Tomoyuki Yamashita is executed at Los Baños after being held responsible for the Battle of Manila (February 23) |
| 1946 | Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma is executed by firing squad after being held responsible for commanding the Bataan Death March (April 3) |
| 1946 | Laurel, Aquino, and others are transferred from Sugamo to Manila, where the People’s Court prosecutes them for collaboration with Japan (July) |
| 1947 | Nobuhiko Jimbo is acquitted and released following a plea for clemency by President Roxas (March) |
| 1948 | Laurel is granted amnesty by President Manuel Roxas before being brought to trial |
The Tragedy of the Battle of Manila
In the final stages of the war, between February and March 1945, a brutal urban battle raged in the capital, Manila, between Japanese forces under General Tomoyuki Yamashita and the combined American-Filipino forces. The Japanese garrison, centered on units under Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi of the Navy, ignored orders to withdraw and dug in within Manila, and as they were cornered, they turned to killing large numbers of civilians. According to an investigation by the U.S. Army’s XIV Corps, the record includes acts of bayoneting and shooting unarmed civilians, herding civilians into buildings and setting them on fire, and throwing hand grenades into shelters; it is also reported that many women and children were subjected to mass assault.
President Elpidio Quirino himself is said to have lost nine relatives in this urban battle, including his wife and three children. The death toll from this “Manila Massacre” is estimated at a minimum of 100,000 civilians, with some sources placing it as high as 500,000 — meaning that roughly one in every seven to ten residents of Manila at the time became a victim. After the war, General Yamashita, held responsible, was executed on February 23, 1946, and Chief of Staff Akira Muto was executed on December 23, 1948.
Postwar investigations revealed that a considerable portion of this tragedy was carried out systematically by the Navy’s landing forces (the Manila Naval Defense Force) amid a chain of command that had effectively collapsed. Orders documents from subordinate battalions discovered after the war spelled out specific procedures even for the disposal of bodies, suggesting that large-scale killings were concentrated between February 7 and 9. Also, after a fire broke out in the Ermita district on February 9, Japanese forces gathered residents in a plaza, separated men from women, and marched the women and children off to the Bayview Hotel.
Of the roughly 200 to 300 people held there, more than twenty young European women — British, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, and others — were taken to a nearby restaurant called the “Coffee Pot,” where they were sexually assaulted by multiple soldiers over several days. The victims included girls, and the fact that victims came not only from the Philippines but also from Western countries is one basis for characterizing this as an organized mass rape. Roughly 90% of the naval unit believed to have been involved was killed in subsequent fighting, and with almost no records left from the perpetrators’ side, the full picture of the incident has had to be reconstructed from victims’ testimony. The historic buildings of the Intramuros district were also nearly reduced entirely to rubble by this urban battle and by American bombardment.
Behind the scale to which this tragedy grew lay confusion on the Japanese side over whether to abandon Manila as an “open city.” General Yamashita, commander of the 14th Area Army, had settled on a policy of abandoning Manila to spare civilians, and had withdrawn most of his army units outside the city — but Imperial General Headquarters’ Army Section did not agree, and the naval units under Rear Admiral Iwabuchi also disobeyed the withdrawal order and stayed behind to fight to the last, so the open-city declaration was never realized. The American side, for its part, had initially prohibited the use of heavy artillery in the urban area, but lifted that restriction in the face of fierce Japanese resistance and proceeded to bombard and shell the city. Recent research suggests that roughly 40% of the approximately 100,000 civilian deaths were directly caused by this American bombardment and shelling — meaning this unprecedented civilian toll resulted from a compounding of decisions on both sides: the Japanese military’s systematic killings, and the American bombardment.
The Battle of Manila severely damaged Filipino sentiment toward Japan. Even for General Yamashita himself, who had not even been the commander on the ground in Manila, this outcome seems to have been difficult to comprehend; when he was held responsible for the mistreatment of prisoners at his postwar military tribunal, he is reported to have said, “I did not know. But I will not say I bear no responsibility.” The verdict was handed down on December 7, 1945 — by a striking coincidence, exactly four years to the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. On February 23, 1946, Yamashita was hanged at Los Baños, south of Manila. He is said to have bowed calmly in the direction of Tokyo and walked to the gallows on his own feet, without losing his composure — an episode still recounted today as an example of a soldier’s dignity in shouldering, to the very end, a responsibility that had fallen upon him through his subordinates’ actions running out of control.
The Massacre at Barrio Lumbang, Lipa
It was not only in Manila; south of the capital, in Batangas Province, withdrawing Japanese forces also carried out a series of brutal massacres of local residents. The worst-hit area was Lipa (now Lipa City), where a series of massacres between February and March 1945 is estimated to have claimed 18,000 lives in that area alone, and more than 25,000 noncombatants across the whole of Batangas Province.
Barrio Lumbang was one such site. After the war, victim rolls compiled at the order of the Philippine government for each barrio in Batangas Province were submitted as evidence in the war crimes trial “United States vs. Yamashita,” and in Lumbang alone, at least 450 victims — men and women, young and old — are recorded by name. The rolls list the names of entire families, in some cases spanning three generations of parents and children who all lost their lives, testifying starkly to a situation in which “an entire village was wiped out.” It is believed that not a few victims went missing amid the chaos of the time and were never recorded on the rolls, and some point out that the actual death toll may exceed these figures.
According to survivors’ testimony, residents were gathered in a ravine under the pretense that travel permits would be issued, separated by sex, and the men were tied together in a line with rope; group by group, they were called out, stabbed with bayonets, and thrown into the ravine or the river. There was in fact no guerrilla presence in Lumbang — if anything, it was a village friendly to the Japanese military — and yet it was targeted for total annihilation nonetheless; researchers have suggested this may have been aimed at silencing residents who had been mobilized for labor, or at depopulating the area to designate it a military operations zone.
The commander of the unit responsible for this area, encompassing the whole of Batangas Province, testified at his postwar trial that because armed women and children had repeatedly launched surprise attacks — including an incident in which a child threw a hand grenade at troops on the march — he had ordered his unit to subdue anyone bearing arms, regardless of age or sex. This climate of fear is believed to have been one factor that fueled suspicion of the entire population and the spread of the massacres.
In Lumbang, this “land of lamentation,” postwar efforts at atonement and reconciliation by private Japanese citizens have also accumulated over the years. Mutsuhiko Miki, chairman of the Japan-Philippines Cultural Association, learned of this massacre and used grassroots fundraising in Japan to build a schoolhouse at Lumbang’s elementary school, as well as a Peace Memorial Tower on land donated nearby. That an educational facility and a place of remembrance have been built by Japanese hands on ground marked by the memory of such a brutal massacre stands, alongside the reconstruction of Manila Cathedral and the erection of the Takayama Ukon statue at Plaza Dilao, as another facet of postwar civilian exchange between Japan and the Philippines.
Another figure who, in the same spirit, supported Japan-Philippines friendship at the civilian level for many years and should not be forgotten is the late Father Itaru Nishimoto. Father Nishimoto ran a scholarship program for Filipino students, said to have amounted to as much as 40 million yen a year. Many Filipino students who would otherwise have had to give up on further education for financial reasons were able to continue their studies thanks to this scholarship.
Manuel Roxas’s Narrow Escape from Death
Manuel Roxas, who would become the first postwar president, was one man who narrowly escaped death during the war. In 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Nobuhiko Jimbo, who had taken part in the occupation of Mindanao following the fall of Corregidor, came face to face with Roxas — then Finance Secretary — who was being held as a prisoner at the Davao mayor’s residence. Moved by Roxas’s earnest words about his country’s independence — “Japan is a nation of benevolence and righteousness under Emperor Showa, and I believe it will not mistreat prisoners as Germany does” — Jimbo sensed intuitively that this man would surely be of use to Japan-Philippines relations after the war ended, and that he must not be killed. He appealed to the headquarters of the 14th Area Army, and succeeded in obtaining an order from Chief of Staff Takaji Wachi that “Roxas is to be used for pacification work for the time being,” halting a move by some staff officers to have Roxas executed. As the price for this action, Jimbo himself was transferred to the China front.
After the war, Jimbo was captured by the National Revolutionary Army in Jinan, China, and detained as a suspected war criminal. But Roxas, who had by then become the first president of an independent Philippines, personally sent a letter pleading for clemency to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek on behalf of Jimbo, the man who had saved his life, and in March 1947 Jimbo was acquitted and released. Returning to Japan that June, Jimbo told the press: “Earthly power will someday perish, but true affection lasts forever.”
Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, the Philippines area’s supreme commander at the time, would himself also be executed after the war. Homma, who had commanded the initial invasion of the Philippines at the outbreak of the war, was placed in the reserves in August 1942 after being blamed for mishandling the capture of Bataan, and thereafter left military service. Thus, at the time of the Battle of Manila in 1945, Homma was already no longer an active commander — but after the war, GHQ held him responsible for command of the “Bataan Death March” (1942), in which American and Filipino prisoners of war captured on the Bataan Peninsula were forced on a brutal march that claimed many lives, and summoned him before a military tribunal in Manila.
Homma, known as an Anglophile humanitarian who had served as a military attaché at the British Embassy, and who was also something of a literary man who enjoyed composing haiku, argued at his tribunal that the inhumane treatment of prisoners had not been of his own will — but he could not escape responsibility as commander, and on April 3, 1946, unlike Yamashita, he was executed by firing squad. He was 58. Homma — a cultured man of international sensibility, an Anglophile humanitarian who also enjoyed haiku — died bearing sole responsibility for the war surrounding the Philippines, and it is truly a matter of regret to think that he was exactly the kind of talented figure who should instead have been able to contribute to Japan’s postwar reconstruction.
Behind this “death march” lay a serious miscalculation born of the military situation at the time. On April 9, 1942, the American-Filipino forces on the Bataan Peninsula, under Major General Edward King, surrendered to Japanese forces — numbering roughly 76,000, far exceeding the 25,000 prisoners the Japanese side had anticipated in advance.
The Japanese forces conducting the campaign were themselves believed to have been operating with fewer troops than the number of American-Filipino soldiers they took prisoner, and the lack of preparedness in food and transportation to sustain such a massive number of prisoners was one factor behind the chaos and mounting casualties during the march.
General MacArthur had escaped from Corregidor to Australia on March 11, 1942, on President Roosevelt’s orders, and some point out that the fact that the troops left in his stead surrendered on a scale three times what the Japanese had anticipated only compounded this miscalculation.
As for the march itself, it was said to have been not uncommon at the time for Japanese soldiers themselves to walk a dozen-odd kilometers a day without adequate food or rest; while it remains beyond dispute that the Japanese side bore a humanitarian responsibility for forcing this march upon prisoners, the collapse of logistics and lack of transportation behind it are also factors that cannot be ignored in understanding this tragedy.
It is worth noting that a persistent view holds that Homma’s trial and execution were driven by MacArthur’s personal grudge. The judges and prosecutors who tried Homma were all MacArthur’s subordinates, and the date of the verdict (February 11, 1946 — Empire Day) and the time of execution (12:53 a.m. on April 3 of the same year) were set to fall exactly four years after the date and time Homma had ordered the all-out assault on Bataan.
This is the view that MacArthur, by putting his old rival Homma on trial, sought to wash away the dishonor of his own “flight in the face of the enemy” — having escaped Corregidor by torpedo boat and, in effect, left his men behind. While the truth is difficult to establish with certainty, this context has led Homma’s execution to be remembered as an event carrying complicated emotional weight beyond a simple pursuit of war responsibility.
Filipino Leaders Held at Sugamo Prison
In March 1945, as Japan’s defeat became increasingly certain, President Laurel evacuated to Japan with his family and key cabinet ministers, traveling from Baguio via Taiwan. Among those who accompanied him was National Assembly Speaker Benigno Aquino Sr. (a former House Speaker, father of the later senator Benigno Aquino Jr., and grandfather of the 15th president, Benigno Aquino III). After Japan’s defeat, on September 15, 1945, Laurel was detained by Allied forces in Yokohama along with his son Jose Laurel III and Aquino, and on November 16 of that year they were transferred to and held at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo.
Sugamo Prison is well known as the facility that held Hideki Tojo and other Japanese Class-A war crimes suspects, but it is little known in Japan that Filipino leaders suspected of collaboration with Japan were also held there for a time. In July 1946 they were transferred from Japan to Manila and handed over to the Philippine government, where they were charged with treason before the People’s Court on grounds of collaboration with Japan (including cooperation on maintaining public order). Benigno Aquino Sr. was transferred to Manila and indicted that August, but was released on bail a few weeks later. That one of the men brought to trial happened to be the head of the Aquino family — which would later become a central force in modern Philippine political history — speaks to how intricately the history of the Japan-Philippines war and the history of Philippine domestic politics became intertwined. Laurel himself, before being brought to trial, was granted amnesty in 1948 by President Manuel Roxas, and returned to political life without ever being convicted.
(Asahiko Yara, Chairman, Japanese Business Club, Philippines, Inc.)
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