Anticipating Nationhood: Collaboration and Rumor in the Japanese Occupation of Manila

Anticipating Nationhood: Collaboration and Rumor in the Japanese Occupation of Manila Vicente L. Rafael University of California, San Diego 1. Introduction To come under colonial occupation is to live in a state of constant displacement . Under siege from the economic, military, and cultural forces of the métropole, a colonized people finds itself constrained to exist on the expanding borders of imperial designs. Differentially positioned within the structures of the colonial regime, it must perforce negotiate with and around the regime's agents and institutions, now rejecting, now acceding to the Other's claims on land, labor, and loyalties. As such, this people continually recasts, even as it appropriates, identities and languages: those of its real or imagined ancestors, as well as those imposed on it by the colonial state or imputed to it by other ethnic groups. With these efforts, it seeks a place in the social hierarchy, even as it struggles to project alternative conditions for future empowerment. Since the late eighteenth century, the nation-state has been one of the most pervasive models for articulating the wish for postcolonial empowerment . In tending towards what Benedict Anderson has called "imagined communities"—a politically sovereign and secular, geographically bounded and potentially egalitarian union of peoples emerging from the common yoke of dynastic or colonial subjugation1—a colonized populace shares certain features with some diaspora communities, in particular those which have been blocked from assimilating into the host country. Both live out a history of alienation and interior or extraterritorial exile by constructing cultural practices predicated on shifting protocols of resistance and accommodation to the dominant culture or state. Whether in the form of collaboration , confrontation, or calculated evasion, the colonized, like the members of a diaspora society, never stop trying to represent their position of subordination in ways that might also hold out, at some point, the possibility and means of overcoming that position. In so doing, both colonized and diaspora communities fashion alternative bases for recounting, and accounting for, their sense of deprivation; often they seize upon the condition of displacement itself as the site from which they move toward a different sense of community or to which they must return. Among a colonized people, the discourses of and on displacement can take many different forms, shaped as they are by the historical contingencies of class, gender, and race. What they seem to have in common, though, is their tendency to produce contradictory effects, alternately provoking and relieving anxieties attendant upon encountering the workings ofthe coloni67 Diaspora Spring 1991 al regime, on the one hand, and imaging a postcolonial existence, on the other. In this essay, I want to examine these contradictions as they appear in some aspects of Filipino responses to the Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945, which come at the end of United States colonial rule in the archipelago . In particular, I want to focus on two modes ofdealing with the force and violence of wartime displacement to which Filipinos resorted in the capital city of Manila: namely, the rhetoric of collaboration and the retailing of rumors.2 As contrastive strategies for responding to Japanese rule, collaboration and rumor both called into question the totalizing claims of colonial discourse (whether Japanese or American or, in an earlier period, Spanish3) even as they problematized the relationship between class and national interests among the Filipino elite and the rest of their countrymen. Insofar as Filipinos under occupation shared a common desire for nationhood, the terms in which that desire was fashioned differed between those in close contact with the colonial state and those on the periphery of its reach. 2. Colonialism and the Filipino Elite The Japanese occupation was a crucial moment in the invention of the Philippine nation-state. Although it lasted for only three years, the occupation disrupted American hegemony in the Philippines. More significantly, it exacerbated social tensions whose origins date to the last century of Spanish rule. Conflicts between a landed, politically influential, and Europeanized Filipino elite and a diversity of landless, disenfranchised groups often led by messianic figures in the countryside or charismatic leaders in the cities had become particularly acute during the revolution of 1896 and the short-lived republic of...