This article was downloaded by: [McGill University Library]

On: 01 December 2014, At: 07:07

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Social Semiotics
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csos20

Hybridity, memory and counter-

memory: the short fiction of Sinai C.
Hamada
a
Anna Christie K. Villarba-Torres
a
College of Arts and Communication , University of the
Philippines Baguio , Baguio City , Philippines
Published online: 13 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: Anna Christie K. Villarba-Torres (2012) Hybridity, memory and counter-
memory: the short fiction of Sinai C. Hamada, Social Semiotics, 22:2, 187-200, DOI:
10.1080/10350330.2012.665239

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2012.665239

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever
or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
 Social Semiotics
Vol. 22, No. 2, April 2012, 187
200

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Hybridity, memory and counter-memory: the short fiction of Sinai
C. Hamada
Anna Christie K. Villarba-Torres*

College of Arts and Communication, University of the Philippines Baguio, Baguio City,
Philippines
(Received April 2010; final version received November 2011)
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 07:07 01 December 2014

This paper explores engagements with cultural memory in selected short fiction
by the prominent Filipino-Japanese mestizo writer in English, Sinai C. Hamada
(1912
1991). Hamada’s earliest exposure to literature took the form of oral
narratives, which ranged from folktales to community events told to him by his
Igorot (Ibaloi) mother and maternal grandmother. In as much as his source is the
heard narrative rather than the western notion of fiction as an assemblage of
elements, his fiction emphasizes the social dimension of creative writing and
underscores the link between literature and history. Hamada’s fiction depicts
Igorot
Japanese encounters and negotiations. These are small chapters of history
that are often taken for granted but offer new avenues of intervention by
challenging hegemonic American discourse and highlighting a strategy of
resistance in managing the everyday. Drawing on postcolonial discourse and
semiotic analysis, the essay sets Hamada’s images of Igorot
Japanese relations
against archive photographs and other popular media forms to assert and re-
semanticize the cultural and everyday fas-ang (crossing over) between the Igorots
and Japanese at a particular point in history.
Keywords: hybridity; memory; counter-memory; Igorot; Hamada; fas-ang

Remembering things past

This essay explores engagements with cultural memory in selected short stories by
the prominent Filipino-Japanese mestizo writer in English, Sinai C. Hamada
(1912
1991). Hamada’s earliest exposure to literature took the form of oral
narratives, ranging from folktales to community events told to him by his Igorot
mother and maternal grandmother. (Igorot is the collective term used to refer to
indigenous peoples of the Cordillera Administrative Region, north Luzon, Phi-
lippines.) In as much as his sources were oral narratives and not the western notion
of fiction as assemblage of textual elements, his fiction emphasizes the social
dimensions of creative writing and the link between literature and history. Informed
by postcolonial discourse, particularly Homi Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and
memory as well as the Foucauldian discourse of genealogy and counter-memory,
I analyze stories by Hamada that depict the cultural encounters between the Igorots

*Email: kendi_416@yahoo.com
ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online
# 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2012.665239
http://www.tandfonline.com
 188 A.C.K. Villarba-Torres

of the Philippine Cordillera and the Japanese nationals who came at the beginning of
the twentieth century to help in the construction of Kennon Road and later to assist
in the creation of Baguio City as a colonial hill station.
I begin by analyzing key aspects of dominant representations of the Japanese in
visual culture against which I will read Hamada’s work. Through this juxtaposition
I will interrogate the hegemonic cultural memory established by American discourse
that projects the Japanese in that period as solely ruthless and destructive. Via an
intertextual analysis of visual and verbal representations I will propose an alternative
reading that will allow me to resemanticize the cultural and everyday fas-ang
(crossing over) between the Igorots and the Japanese at a particular point in history.
In doing so I will emphasize the image of the Japanese as part of the Igorot
community by way of a semiotic reading of period photographs and other popular
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 07:07 01 December 2014

media texts.

Countering hegemonic discourse

Historical narratives allow us to look back, make sense of our past and present, and
look forward to a future. They are also imbued with ‘‘a particular tyranny [that]
predispos[es] us to determinate ways of framing our subject, of breaking up
experiences into semantic units’’ (Mojares 2002, 270). Hence, historical narratives
are more than simple reflections of past events; they are discourses imbued with
relations of power relation that construct the past in specific ways (Pison 2005, 1).
Genealogy, which traces the development and organization of discourses and their
assumed truths about a particular area of knowledge or discipline, aims to identify
and pin down the forms of power and interest that cut across these discourses to
show how this power builds and legitimizes certain truths and falsehoods. In a sense,
therefore, genealogy allows us to confront ‘‘truth-producing systems in which
propositions, concepts and representations assign value and meaning to objects’’
(Lentricchia and McLaughlin 1995, 57). In the case of the historical narratives that
I am analyzing here, memory and counter-memory allow the critic to identify
differences and disparities in the texts from which hegemonic versions of the
Japanese in the Philippines were constructed. This involves specific relations of
power and resistance. Power in this context is not only negative and inhibiting, but
also in particular ways a ‘‘making possible,’’ an opening up of ‘‘domains of action,
knowledge and social being’’ (Lentricchia and McLaughlin 1995, 58). In this article
I want to show how, by foregrounding literature’s role in the construction and
challenging of cultural memory, other possible forms of historical knowledge can
be acknowledged and heard. Through counter-memory, or what Foucault calls
‘‘a process of reading particular events against the grain of hegemonic histories, the
reader/critic is assigned an active role in the interpretation and deprivileging of
history’’ (Foucault cited in Pison 2005, 1). Hegemonic history in this particular
context of the post-war Philippines produces memory that reinforces the tyranny of
its largely American creators. It is my role as a critic to make the constructed nature
of this memory explicit as well as to open up space for counter-memory that lies
outside the realm of the master narrative. In the next section I look at examples of
visual culture that exemplify what has become the hegemonic collective memory of
the Japanese presence in the Philippines, which has its roots in images of the war in
the Pacific.
 Social Semiotics 189

Of memory and visual representation

Visual images constitute a significant part of the historical narrative of the Pacific
War, and cartoons are a particularly rich source of images that shape collective
memory. Caricatures were used at the time to reinforce America’s self-representation
as well as its representation of the ‘‘enemy.’’1 For example, a cartoon published a day
before the war began showed the coming war as a child’s game. In the image, wooden
blocks serve as stands for armaments, their bold-face letters represent the Allies and
a Japanese ‘‘tin soldier’’ takes center-stage. In the picture the Prime Minister stands
behind a stereotypical kempeitai (Japanese secret policeman) who is fully armed with
a revolver and sword. It is supposedly the eve of the war but he looks confused as five
high-powered guns are pointed directly at him. Even the cajoling of the swastika-
bearing, pitchfork-wielding Nazi devil behind him is useless. The image suggests that
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 07:07 01 December 2014

the Japanese have a dark future. The sheer size of the American canon in the upper-
right-hand corner of the image and Uncle Sam’s stern gaze at the beleaguered subject
clearly call attention to American power and supremacy.
Similar views of the Japanese are found in typical images by a resident Austrian
painter from the period. Five paintings by Trudl Dubsky Zipper, a dancer from
Vienna and resident of the Philippines from 1937 until after the liberation, offer
a western civilian’s view of the enemy just before the return of the Americans.2 In
Figure 1, entitled Damage was of the Slightest, 1945, four Japanese subjects
three
representing the Army, Navy and Air Force
tower over a non-military official in
western garb nervously jotting notes in his writing pad.
The three military men, with their chests all puffed up, are unmindful of the
destruction of the city behind them, and, more importantly, their impending defeat.
Their devil-may-care stance reinforces the American construction of the Japanese
military as ruthless and recklessly stubborn, reinforcing the binary between the

Figure 1. Damage was of the Slightest, 1945. Reproduced by kind permission of the USC
Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles.
 190 A.C.K. Villarba-Torres

implicit representation of the Americans, who are defined by difference from the
Japanese.
Figure 2, captioned For the Nite Club, caricatures a geisha-like comfort woman
entertaining a Japanese soldier who has had a drink too many. Clad only in his exotic
loincloth or fundoshi and displaying his hairy chest to emphasize his exotic physical
built, he holds a drink in one hand and scratches his head with his free hand. He has
one foot up, almost resting on the woman’s obi (traditional sash). His other foot
knocks down the table, breaking and spilling the contents of the liquor bottle. The
male subject is rendered lewd, drunk, disorderly and disdainful, while the female
subject is helpless and powerless. The painting may also be read as an attempt to
strengthen the stereotype of ‘‘a myopic Japanese pilot with buckteeth and coke bottle
glasses staring hopelessly down unaligned bombsights’’ (Cogan 2000, 29). With or
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 07:07 01 December 2014

without his uniform, the pilot is just a bungling, comic figure. This was how the
American community in Baguio, which included not only entrepreneurs in sugar and
cattle, mining and textiles, but also missionaries and medical practitioners,
represented the Japanese. They did not consider them a threat to America. Similarly
Figure 3, which depicts a Japanese soldier on a looting mission, ironically referred to
in the caption as a ‘‘treasure hunt,’’ reaffirms this view of the Japanese.
The negative connotations of this image are reinforced by the portrayal of the
soldier as barefoot, wearing tattered knee-length pants and an unbuttoned undershirt
again exposing his hairy chest. This depiction emphasizes the absence of discipline
and formality, supposedly the hallmarks of a respectable military force. It likewise
points out that the Japanese military is inferior and ‘‘low tech’’ and definitely not
techno savvy, with its personnel having to pedal around on a mere bicycle in the heart
of the city. The representation of the Japanese as a more primitive fighting force is
also linked to the character traits of the Japanese soldiers represented in Figure 4,
For Sidewalk Entertainment, 1944.

Figure 2. For the Nite Club. Reproduced by kind permission of the USC Fisher Museum of
Art, Los Angeles.
 Social Semiotics 191
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 07:07 01 December 2014

Figure 3. For the Treasure Hunt, 1944. Reproduced by kind permission of the USC Fisher
Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

This image, in which three Japanese soldiers bathe in a fire hydrant in full view of
Filipino residents peering out their windows, signifies both lack of civilized modes of
behavior and a tendency towards childish play, drawing on deep-rooted racist
stereotypes of the less developed other that are widespread in colonial discourse. An
othering ‘‘gaze’’ is operational here, as the onlookers or voyeurs laugh at the subjects
involved in the ‘‘sidewalk entertainment.’’ The soldiers appear oblivious to public
scrutiny and are portrayed as no better than dogs frolicking and marking their
territory. The Japanese male is radicalized through the gaze. He is typified as having a

Figure 4. For Sidewalk Entertainment, 1944. Reproduced by kind permission of the USC
Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles.
 192 A.C.K. Villarba-Torres

hairy chest, which runs counter to his biological physique. This type of uncouth and
bestial portrayal can also be seen in Figure 5, For Greater East Asian Sanitation, 1945.
Here, the soldier is urinating from a wide window ledge. Two large open windows
frame his ‘‘act,’’ underscoring his primitiveness and ignorance of western or
‘‘civilized’’ toilet practices. The caption, ‘‘[f]or greater Eastasian [sic] sanitation,’’ is
edged with sarcasm, since it is a statement that undermines the capability of the
Japanese colonial government to carry out its political platform in the Philippines.
Anti-Japanese leaflets from the period depict what would become the dominant
collective memory of Filipinos during and after the Japanese Occupation. It is also
the memory that the Japanese, on the other hand, have tried to forget and even erase.
In one example the looming figure of a Japanese kempeitai pierces the core of the
motherland’s independence, even as one foot crushes victims of rapes and abuse and
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 07:07 01 December 2014

another foot kicks torture victims. Apart from the violence, what is striking about the
image is the use of English. Although the Japanese ‘‘sought to rid the Philippines of
Western influences by encouraging, among others things, the use of the Tagalog
vernacular and the learning of Japanese, English continued to be the language in
which the Japanese Military Administration and Filipinos communicated’’ (Rafael
2000, 111).
Thus the rhetoric of East Asian ‘‘co-prosperity’’ ideology was both ‘‘formulaic’’
and hollow (Rafael 2000, 111). Even posters extolling the courage and determination
of the Japanese Navy were in English. This heightens the irony of a situation in which
‘‘occupier and occupied were linked by a language that was alien to both’’ (2000,
112). Even the certificate of identification that was imposed by the Japanese forces as
a tactic of surveillance, discipline and punishment and which reduced the Filipino to
a mere number was in English, with an accompanying Japanese translation. The
authority imposed by the Japanese translation is reinforced by the hanko (insignia) of
the Japanese Ministry of Defense. This combination of language ironically rendered

Figure 5. For Greater East Asian Sanitation, 1945. Reproduced by kind permission of the
USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles.
 Social Semiotics 193

the Filipinos ‘‘aliens’’ in their own country. On the other hand, speaking in English
allowed the Filipino elite to express American ideas and Japanese ideology as not
their own. They were able to keep their hybrid Spanish-vernacular selves apart from
the New Regime, and in so doing, regard their collaborative stance as ‘‘a ruse as well
as a form of resistance’’ (2000, 112). In the rest of this article I turn to the ways in
which writings by Hamada open up the possibility of contesting the version of the
Japanese in the Philippines that developed from the type of wartime propaganda
analyzed above to become the hegemonic collective memory of the post-war period.

Tensions and conflicts of a hybrid

Sinai C. Hamada was born in February 1912 in Baguio City to Japanese Ryukichi
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 07:07 01 December 2014

Hamada, a foreman of an American lumber company, and Josefa, an Ibaloi who

belonged to the baknang (elite) Cariňo clan of Benguet, north Luzon. After the
untimely death of Hamada, Josefa married another Japanese, Teroji Okubo.
Sinai was educated in Baguio City public schools and the University of the
Philippines, institutions patterned after the American educational system. His
American teachers nurtured his engagement with literature. While in his senior
year in high school he published his first short story, ‘‘Whose Home,’’ in Graphic
magazine and was later included in prominent Filipino literary figure Jose Garcia
Villa’s anthology of best short stories in English in 1930 (see Villarba-Torres 1989).
At the University of the Philippines he finished his studies in journalism and law and
went on to become the first lawyer of Baguio. He also founded two local weekly
tabloids (Villarba-Torres 1989). Sinai felt that he belonged more to the Ibaloi than to
the Japanese community. For one thing, he could not speak Japanese. He was also
closer to his Ibaloi relations. He noted that his Japanese father and step-father were
the ones who adjusted to the Ibaloi and Iluko languages and cultures of his mother
(see Villarba-Torres 1989).

Local memory and counter-memory

Hamada’s Tanabata’s Wife, 1932, is the most widely anthologized Filipino story in
English. The story brings to life the historic construction of Kennon Road, an
American project that began in 1903 and sought to link Baguio to the lowlands. The
American colonial administrators needed a respite from the travails of administering
the tropical empire and Baguio’s cool climate and rich gold resources attracted them.
The Kennon Road project literally extended the myth of the American tropical
empire in the East but also marked the arrival of the Japanese and other foreigners in
Baguio, at first to help in the road construction and later to settle permanently in the
city (Figure 6).
The inset stamps in Figure 6 are commemorative of the centennial of Kennon
Road and more importantly, because the stamp is an emblem of ‘‘official
nationalism,’’ they recognize the participation of the Japanese workers in establishing
the American social order. Project leader Major Lyman W.V. Kennon himself noted
that the Japanese workmen were ‘‘fearless and active on cliff work . . . and could be
called upon to lay walls and do stone work of almost any kind’’ (Afable 2004, 15).
Major Kennon arranged with the Japanese Consul in Manila for the recruitment of
Japanese laborers, with the largest number of migrants to the Philippines noted in
 194 A.C.K. Villarba-Torres
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 07:07 01 December 2014

Figure 6. Construction of Kennon road with inset postage stamps. Reproduced by kind
permission of the Filipino-Japanese Foundation of Northern Luzon, Inc.

1903 and 1904 (Yu-Jose and Hayase in Afable 2004, 16). Kennon Road is significant
to the Japanese because it was here that they displayed their roadwork skills that
earned them an employment niche in Baguio’s history (2004, 195).
Hamada’s story is based on a rural event involving his uncle Kenzo Hamada who
married Layan, a Bontoc farm worker. In the fictive version, Tanabata hires Fas-ang
to work in his vegetable garden. He later woos and marries her ‘‘without ceremony
and without the law’’ (Hamada 1975, 44). When Fas-ang bears his son, Tanabata is
elated. But Fas-ang becomes addicted to the cinema, which was fast gaining
popularity at that time (Figure 7).
Most of the featured films were western, reinforcing the Orientalist discourse of
the native as Other. At the cinema she meets a young man from her ili (village) who
convinces her to leave Tanabata. The dejected husband leaves his garden to rot.
Upon hearing this (by now her Bontoc lover had left her), Fas-ang returns and
mother and child are reunited with Tanabata. It should be noted that in real life
Layan did not return but sent her child (a daughter, not a son) to live with her father
who was already married to a Japanese picture bride (see Villarba-Torres 1989).
By recasting the memory of the heard narrative, Hamada challenges the
representation of a fixed or unchanging Other. In fact, he ‘‘incorporate[s] the flow
of history, change, movement or development [into the narrative] and thus offers a

Figure 7. Alhamar cinema advert. Reproduced by kind permission of the Filipino-Japanese

Foundation of Northern Luzon, Inc.
 Social Semiotics 195

form of resistance to the reifying power of Orientalist discourse and ideology’’

(Williams 2004, 276). Fas-ang is not the stupid and timid native woman who cannot
decide for herself. Neither is she someone who would renege on an agreement nor
someone without heart. Hamada’s story relies on counter-memory to free the native
Igorota from constricting Orientalist ideology and the successful Fas-ang from Ibaloi
and Japanese cultures, depicting the resulting hybridity that history has failed to
include in its discourse.
This hybridity can also be seen in studio portraits from the period. By the 1920s
the Japanese community in Baguio had expanded its employment sphere. Japanese
businessmen led by Hideo Hayakawa opened bazaars, pharmacies and photography
studios, among other businesses. The following examples are of portraits of Ibaloi-
Japanese subjects and suggest hybridity via form of cultural cross-dressing.
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 07:07 01 December 2014

In Figure 8 two sisters, Katsuyo and Katsue Iwakawa, pose before the camera in
full Igorot attire, courtesy of Pine Studio’s costume wardrobe. The pakkung (bamboo
flute) and the kayabang (traditional horn of plenty) complete the costume (Afable
2004, 28).
Figure 9 is a parallel photograph in which Yukie and Kimie Tomita, daughters
of farmers, are in Ibaloi garb, with pakkungs and baskets (see Afable 2004, 828).
Figure 10 is a portrait of Antonina Teraoka and her son Carlos, taken in the late
1930s (2004, 235). Here, the mother is wearing a yukata (Japanese cotton robe) and
an obi. She is also holding a parasol. Her son is dressed in what appears to be a
western-style school uniform.
Filipino historian Vicente Rafael notes that portraits introduce ‘‘an element of
playfulness and indeterminacy into the formation of the Filipino identity’’ (Rafael
2000, 99). This is all the more so in the formation of a hybrid identity. The subjects’
costumes call attention to identities other than Igorot or Japanese; they are both.
Likewise, the painted backdrop is equally important. The Iwakawa sisters in Figure 8
are posing before an image of Kennon Road, a fitting symbol of the sufferings and
endurance of their pioneering ancestors (Afable 2004, 28). Kennon Road marked

Figure 8. Katsuyo and Katsue Iwakawa. Reproduced by kind permission of the Filipino-
Japanese Foundation of Northern Luzon, Inc.
 196 A.C.K. Villarba-Torres
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 07:07 01 December 2014

Figure 9. Yukie and Kimie Tomita. Reproduced by kind permission of the Filipino-Japanese
Foundation of Northern Luzon, Inc.

their ascent to a more productive life in the Baguio community in which they were
not viewed as aliens but as partners in its development. Yet not all studio
photographs suggested hybridity.
Figure 10, for example, has the Japanese sakura (cherry blossoms) as its
backdrop. This reiterates the ‘‘sense of contingency that underlies appearances and
the reproducible fantasies of identification that evade ascribed categories’’ (Rafael
2000, 99). The sakura reinforce Japanese self-representation and memory.

Figure 10. Antonina Teraoka and her son Carlos. Reproduced by kind permission of the
Filipino-Japanese Foundation of Northern Luzon, Inc.
 Social Semiotics 197

It is a deliberate attempt to construct an identity in a place that in many ways

resembled home.
Hybridity is an important theme in Hamada’s work. His story Goodwill, 1938, is
concerned with hybrid identities and features young Katsuo Tsukami, a fourth-
grader at the Baguio Central School. His father Tsukami-san is a foreman carpenter
in Baguio, and is ‘‘responsible for the erection of public buildings’’ (Hamada 1975,
205), while his mother is an Igorot woman who makes her living as a vegetable
farmer. The story is a typical rite of passage narrative of a young boy, Katsuo, who is
enamored of his Filipina teacher Miss Policarpio. One day she asks him whether he is
Japanese and he gives ‘‘a half-hearted reply, not knowing whether to be ashamed or
proud of it’’ (Hamada 1975, 203). But when she sings him a ‘‘song by American
children of their little friends in the ‘land of the rising sun,’’’ he is moved yet unable
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 07:07 01 December 2014

to understand why (Hamada 1975, 204). He asks his father to buy a yuletide gift for
his teacher and receives a book of bible stories from his teacher. As his eyes brim with
happy tears, his mother lovingly bends over him. The enunciating subject in this
story is a young boy, who though erudite in knowledge is ‘‘not knowledgeable
about [himself]’’ (Simons in Pison 2005, 96). Hamada’s foregrounding of a local
memory provides for a historically located depiction of conflict within a little boy of
Igorot and Japanese parentage in which insipient love affirms hybridity. Hamada’s
simple narrative calls attention to subsequent history’s role in the propagation of the
racial prejudice and inequity that marks simplistic, hegemonic post-war collective
memory of the Japanese in the Philippines. Thus, after the Allied liberation in April
1945, all Japanese men and women, Filipino wives and their children were labeled
‘‘enemy aliens’’ and were sent to detention camps. Some families joined the Japanese
troops retreating to the Cordillera hinterlands; most died of illness and starvation
along the way. All Japanese nationals who survived the war were repatriated to
Japan. Many Filipino-born wives of Japanese and their adult children were tried for
collaboration with Japan. When their cases were dismissed, most changed their
surnames and refused for many years to acknowledge their Japanese identities
(Afable 2004, 294).
It is significant that before the war the Baguio Japanese School, first located at
the northwest end of Burnham Park and later transferred to Lucban, thrived and
became the center of the civic and cultural life of the Japanese community. The
teaching of Japanese language and culture strengthened the position of the Japanese
in Baguio. English was introduced after a few years. Figure 11 depicts the school on
its inauguration day, 31 October 1924 (see Afable 2004, 212).
In this photograph there appears to be a three-way construction of identity for the
Japanese as the flags of America and the Philippines fly alongside theirs. Here we see
the workings of a way of living where exposure to the challenging and exhilarating
West seems not to displace Japanese self-identity. Instead, ‘‘the occident is tamed’’
(Carrier 1995, 19). However, the same photograph may also be read as depicting the
way in which America constructed the image of the Philippines, which was alongside
rather than subject to Japan, particularly because Japanese expertise was crucial in the
construction of Baguio as a colonial hill station, and generally because, like the
Filipinos, they posed no threat at that time to America’s colonial designs.
Another little known Christmas story by Hamada (Gifts, 1932) recalls the settled
physical presence of the Japanese as traders in Baguio before the Second World War.
In the story, two Filipino children sneak out during midnight mass to buy presents
 198 A.C.K. Villarba-Torres
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 07:07 01 December 2014

Figure 11. The Baguio Japanese School. Reproduced by kind permission of the Filipino-
Japanese Foundation of Northern Luzon, Inc.

for their parents, running down the ‘‘long flight of steps descending the hillside to the
brightly illuminated stores below’’ (Hamada 1975, 15). They peer through the glass
cases of the Japanese bazaar (Figure 12) and pick out a watch for their father and
a pair of glasses for their mother.
Among the various stores along Session Road, the Japanese bazaar was the most
well established. The proprietor was Hideo Hayakawa, whose business acumen
earned him the respect and admiration of the community. The story graphically
describes the heart of the city of Baguio, from the cathedral to Session Road, the
main business thoroughfare down to the marketplace. This physical presence is also
echoed in Figure 13, a topographic landscape sketch by Hideya Takanami, an
alumnus of the Baguio Japanese School whose parents were farmers.
The left side of the map shows central Baguio with the cathedral and the market
area at opposite ends. Other city markers include Burnham Park and its lake on the
left, the city auditorium is left of the lake and the City Hall is at the northern end
(Afable 2004, 202
203). Both the story and the map are attempts at tracing Hamada

Figure 12. The Japanese bazaar. Reproduced by kind permission of the Filipino-Japanese
Foundation of Northern Luzon, Inc.
 Social Semiotics 199
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 07:07 01 December 2014

Figure 13. Topographic landscape sketch by Hideya Takanami. Reproduced by kind

permission of the Filipino-Japanese Foundation of Northern Luzon, Inc.

and Takanami’s memories of the city. This appropriation may likewise be read
as a form of resistance. The reclaiming of an existing landscape allows for the
presentation of a new identity through cultural expression. Appropriation ‘‘claims
and redefines a built environment ultimately instilling in it a new sense of place and
memory’’ (Grant 2001, 202
203). Homi Bhabha posits that the recurrent metaphor
of ‘‘landscape as the inscape of national identity’’ focuses on ‘‘the question of social
visibility, the power of the eye to naturalize the rhetoric of national affiliation and its
forms of collective expression’’ (Bhabha 1990, 295). Both story and map expound on
this metaphor and succeed in presenting their counter-memories.

The ruptures of subjugated knowledges

My brief engagement with Hamada’s simple and straightforward narratives and
various visual texts shows how literature and visual culture may confront
and challenge received history and collective memory. More significantly, literature
and popular visual forms can be seen as repositories of subjugated knowledges.
According to Foucault, subjugated knowledges enable us to comprehend something
that is altogether different, a whole set of knowledges dismissed as inadequate and
naı̈ve that are located at the bottom rung of the hierarchy of cognition and
scientificity (Foucault 1972, 82). Specifically, my study has shown how visual
and linguistic documentation produced to serve the interests of hegemonic groups
like American colonialists and Japanese imperialists serves as proof of bias and
power. If the same documentation is read against the grain of its ideological context,
the beliefs and actions of subaltern groups may be unraveled. Alternative historical
sources
such as photographs, advertisements, and maps, among others
become
useful in this endeavor. Local memory and counter-memory then become strategies
to foreground and disseminate the struggles of marginalized and/or hybrid cultures
that have long been silenced.

Acknowledgements
This research was made possible through a grant awarded by The Sumitomo Foundation of
Japan, 2006
2007. Figures 1
5 reproduced by kind permission of the USC Fisher Museum of
 200 A.C.K. Villarba-Torres

Art, Los Angeles. Figures 6
13 reproduced by kind permission of the Filipino-Japanese
Foundation of Northern Luzon, Inc.

Notes
1. Examples of such cartoons and other propaganda can be viewed via Google images online:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q philippines  anti  japanese  cartoons  images.
2. These five watercolor, pencil and ink on paper works are part of 60 paintings of the war that
represent ‘‘genuine ‘close-up’ views and subjective feelings of a contemporary at the scene
which neither a story nor a camera can communicate.’’ See http://www.usc.edu/org/
fishergallery/exhibitions_past_trudl.shtml (accessed May 12, 2009). The collection was
donated to the University of Southern California Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles,
California by Dr Herbert Zipper.
Downloaded by [McGill University Library] at 07:07 01 December 2014

Notes on contributor
Anna Christie K. Villarba-Torres is Associate Professor of English in the Department of
Language, Literature and the Arts, University of the Philippines Baguio, Baguio City,
Philippines. She teaches writing, literature, popular culture and media courses at the graduate
and undergraduate levels. Her research interests include ethnicity, translation and popular
culture. She teaches and does research in English and Filipino, the national language.

References
Afable, P.O., ed. 2004. Japanese pioneers in the northern Philippine highlands. Baguio City:
Filipino-Japanese Foundation of Northern Luzon.
Bhabha, H., ed. 1990. Nation and narration. London: Routledge.
Carrier, J., ed. 1995. Occidentalism: Images of the West. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cogan, F. 2000. Captured. Georgia: Georgia University Press.
Foucault, M. 1972. The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Grant, B. 2001. Accomodation, resistance and appropriation in African-American buildings.
In Sites of memory: Perspectives on architecture and race, ed. C.E. Barton, 109
18.
New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Hamada, S.C. 1975. Collected short stories. Baguio City: Baguio Printing and Publishing.
Lentricchia, F., and T. McLaughlin, eds. 1995. Critical terms for literary study. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Mojares, R.B. 2002. Waiting for Mariang Makiling: Essays in Philippine cultural history.
Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.
Pison, R.J.L. 2005. Alternative histories: Martial law novels as counter-memory. Quezon City:
UP Press.
Rafael, V.L. 2000. White love and other events in Filipino history. Quezon City: Ateneo de
Manila University Press.
Villarba-Torres, A.C.K. 1989. Fas-ang: Cross-cultural elements in the fiction of Sinai C.
Hamada. Unpublished MA thesis, Ateneo de Manila University.
Williams, P. 2004. Edward Said (1935
2003). In Contemporary critical theorists, ed. J. Simons,
269
85. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.