Fragments of multi-layered settler colonialism: mixed-race children in Japanese schooling, the American Philippines, 1924–1945

ABSTRACTThis article examines Japanese schools in Davao Province, the American Philippines, by highlighting the mixed-race children born to Japanese fathers and Filipino mothers. How did mixed-race children experience Japanese schooling in the Philippines, in which Japan’s settler colonial project operated in a colonial territory of the U.S. empire? I call entangled conditions, such as Davao on the island of Mindanao, ‘multi-layered settler colonialism.’ In Davao, the settler colonial projects of the U.S. and Japanese empires developed co-constitutively by underlining the subjugation of tribal Filipinos to Christian Filipinos and displacing the former. By following Black and postcolonial feminist method and patching together archival fragments of different genres and locations, I uncover the perspectives of mixed-race students in the history of multi-layered settler colonialism. I argue that the goals of Japanese education in the Philippines, a product of the public and private collusion, both conflicted with and reinforced American colonial education which was also developed by state and nonstate actors. I also show that the diverse experiences of mixed-race children and their mothers contested the stated goals of American colonial and Japanese education by illuminating the multi-layered nature of settler colonialism.KEYWORDS: Mixed-racechildreneducationdiasporasettler colonialismthe PhilippinesJapanese empireU.S. empireDavaoMindanao AcknowledgementsI gratefully acknowledge the many insightful comments I received from various scholars at conferences and workshops, including the 18th Annual International Conference in Japanese Studies (in Davao!), the Japanese Empire and Mobility Working Group, the 12th International Convention of Asia Scholars, the 2021 American Studies Association Annual Meeting, the 75th Global Japan Studies Seminar at the University of Tokyo, and the workshop for this special issue organized by Rebecca Swartz and Felicity Jensz. I also wish to thank the anonymous referees of the Settler Colonial Studies for their generous and helpful suggestions. Last but not least, this article has benefitted immensely from my education and training with Chie Ikeya and Jennifer Mittelstadt. All errors and omissions are my own.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 No date, ‘Re-Mariwanay Case’, Mariwanay in ‘Series 6: Davao Land Case’, Jose P. Laurel Foundation in Manila, the Philippines; ‘Statement (Estrella Macasaet Tan)’, March 16, 2013, 1, in the possession of Philippine Nikkei-jin Legal Support Center, Tokyo, Japan.2 Some scholars have been skeptical of terms ‘race’ and ‘mixed race’ because of their legacy of scientific racism, their essentialist connotation, and different nuances in non-English languages, including Japanese and Filipinos. I use the terms, ‘race’ and ‘mixed race’, as analytic categories. On debates over the term mixed-race, see for instance, Erica Chito Childs, ‘Critical Mixed Race in Global Perspective: An Introduction’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 39, no. 4 (2018): 379–81; Also see, Takezawa Yasuko, ‘Joshо̄: Konketsu shinwa no kaitai to jibun rashiku ikiru kenri’ (Dismantling the Mixed-Blood Myth and the Right to Live as We Are) in Jinshu shinwa o kaitai suru, 3, “Chi” no seijigaku o koete (Dismantling the Race Myth, Volume 3, Hybridity: Beyond the Politics of ‘Blood’), edited by Kawashima Kohei and Takezawa Yasuko (2016), 8–10.3 The collapse of the Japanese empire through World War II did not mean the end of Japan’s settler colonial project. See, Sidney Xu Lu, The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868–1961 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), Chapter 8.4 Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008); Dean Itsuji Saranillio, ‘Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A Thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and Indigenous Difference’, Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–04 (2013): 280–94; Juliana Hu Pegues, Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska’s Indigenous and Asian Entanglements (The University of North Carolina Press, 2021).5 Eiichiro Azuma, In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019); Lu, The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism; Also see, Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Jordan Sand et al., ‘Reconfiguring Pacific History: Reflections from the Pacific Empires Working Group’, Amerasia Journal 42, no. 3 (2016): 7; Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).6 The term ‘Moro’ derived from the vocabulary of the Spanish empire tasked with conquering Muslims across the globe and came to signify ethno-linguistic communities in the Philippines, including Tausūg, Maranao, and individuals who converted to Christianity. Meanwhile the term ‘Lumad’ means non-Muslim natives in Mindanao, such as Manobo, Bagobo, and Tagakaulo, and originates in inter-group political activism in the 1970s by these peoples.7 On the history of Davao, Patricia Irene Dacudao, Abaca Frontier: The Socioeconomic and Cultural Transformation of Davao, 1898–1941 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2023); Macario D. Tiu, Davao: Reconstructing History from Text and Memory (Davao City: Ateneo de Davao University, 2005); Patricio N. Abinales, Making Mindanao: Cotabato and Davao in the Formation of the Philippine Nation-State (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000).8 For instance, Dacudao, Abaca Frontier; Tessa Winkelmann, Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023), Chapter 2; Christopher John Chanco, ‘Frontier Polities and Imaginaries: The Reproduction of Settler Colonial Space in the Southern Philippines’, Settler Colonial Studies 7, no. 1 (2017): 1–23; Oliver Charbonneau, Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020); Jorge Bayona, ‘Inherited Destinies: Discourses of Territorial Loss in Postcolonial States across the Pacific (Peru and the Philippines, 1903–1927)’, Verge: Studies in Global Asias 3, no. 2 (2017): 169–94.9 Winkelmann, Dangerous Intercourse; Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019); Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).10 For instance, Sarah Steinbock-Pratt, Educating the Empire: American Teachers and Contested Colonization in the Philippines (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Chie Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2011), Chapter 2; Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998); Jun Uchida, ‘A Sentimental Journey: Mapping the Interior Frontier of Japanese Settlers in Colonial Korea’, The Journal of Asian Studies 70, no. 3 (2011): 706–29.11 Sabine Frühstück, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 7.12 Masaru Kojima, Nihonjingakkou no kenkyu: Ibunkakyouikushitekikousatsu [A Study of Oversea Japanese Schools: An Analysis from the Perspective of the History of Intercultural Education] (Tokyo: Tamagawadaigakusyuppanbu, 1999), 25; Dong Hoon Lee, Zaichonihonjinshakai no keisei: Shokuminchikuukan no henyou to ishikikouzou [Formation of Japanese Settler Communities in Korea: Transformation of Colonial Space and the Mentality] (Tokyo: Akashishoten, 2019), Chapter 3.13 Kojima, Nihonjingakkou, 29; Yukuji Okita, Hawai nikkeiimin no kyouikushi [The History of Education by Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii: U.S.-Japan Cultures and Their Encounters and Conflicts] (Kyoto: Mineruba Shobou, 1997), 105, 111.14 Kojima, Nihonjingakkou, 24.15 Sousuke Watabe ed., Zaigaishiteigakkouichiran [The List of Government-Designated Overseas Schools] (Tokyo: Kokuritsukenkyuujo, 1982), preface, 48. On the GDOSs in Southeast and South Asia, Masaru Kojima, Dainijisekaitaisenmae no zaigaishiteikyoikuron no keifu [A Genealogy of Educational Theory for Overseas Japanese Children] (Kyoto: Ryukoku Gakkai, 1993), Timetable at the end.16 Watabe ed., Zaigaishiteigakkouichiran, preface.17 Kojima, Nihonjingakkou, 36–37.18 Watabe, ed., Zaigaishiteigakkouichiran, preface.19 Kojima, Nihonjingakkou, 39.20 Reiko Furiya, ‘The Japanese Community Abroad: The Case of Prewar Davao in the Philippines’, in The Japanese in Colonial Southeast Asia, ed. Saya Shiraishi and Takashi Shiraishi (Ithaca, N.Y.: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1993), 158.21 Eri Kitada, ‘Intimately Intertwined: Settler and Indigenous Communities, Filipino Women, and U.S.-Japanese Imperial Formations in the Philippines, 1903–1956’ (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2023), Chapter 5.22 I-1-5-0-2_7_1_001, 35, MoFA (Japanese Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan).23 Furiya, ‘The Japanese Community Abroad’, 161–62; Yoshizō Furukawa, Dabao Kaitakuki [Chronicle of Pioneering Davao] (Tokyo: Furukawa Takushoku, 1956), 405–6.24 Hiroji Kamohara, Dabao hōjin kaitakushi [The History of Japanese Development of Davao] (Dabao: Nippi Shimbunsha, 1938), 621–22.25 Kamohara, Dabao hōjin kaitakushi, 623.26 I-1-5-0-2_7_1_001, 42, MoFA.27 Ibid., 36; Dabao kai, Dabao natsukashi no shashinshu [Davao, a Nostalgic Photo Album] (Tokyo: Dabao kai henshubu, 1988), 192.28 Steinbock-Pratt, Educating the Empire, 19; Taihei Okada, ‘Onkei no ronri’ to shokuminchi: Amerika shokuminchiki firipin no kyouiku to sonoisei [‘Logic of Benevolence’ and the Colony: Education in the U.S. Colonial Philippines and Its Legacy] (Tokyo: Hoseidaigakushuppankyoku, 2014), Chapter 1.29 Patricia Dacudao, ‘Abaca: The Socio-Economic and Cultural Transformation of Frontier Davao, 1898–1941’ (PhD diss., Murdoch University, 2017), 306–7; Ernesto I Corcino, Davao History (Davao, Philippines: Philippine Centennial Movement, Davao City Chapter, 1998), 143.30 1.6.2.3–13, 194, MoFA.31 Tiu, Davao, 122.32 Antonio S Gabila, ‘Mindanao Pioneer Teachers Make Good: Many of Them are Now Wealthy Landowners’, Graphic, July 26, 1934, 8–9.33 I-1-5-0-1_16_037D1, 38-39, MoFA; I-1-5-0-1_16_037D2, 138–139, 156, 170–171, MoFA.34 Furiya, ‘The Japanese Community Abroad’, 164–65.35 Shinzo Hayase, ‘Tribes, Settlers and Administrators on a Frontier: Economic Development and Social Change in Davao, Southeastern Mindanao, the Philippines, 1899–1941’ (PhD diss., Western Australia, Murdoch University, 1984), 309.36 Erika Lee, ‘The ‘Yellow Peril’ and Asian Exclusion in the Americas’, Pacific Historical Review 76, no. 4 (2007): 544, 558–62; Azuma, In Search of Our Frontier.37 Furiya, ‘The Japanese Community Abroad’, 164.38 Kamohara, Dabao hōjin kaitakushi, 620.39 Patricia Irene Dacudao, ‘Filipinos in Davao and the ‘Land Problem’ of the 1930s’, Journal of History 54, no. 1–4 (2008): 122, 127–28; Grant Kohn Goodman, Davao: A Case Study in Japanese-Philippine Relations (Lawrence: Center for East Asian Studies, University of Kansas, 1967), 53, 73.40 Masatake Komeda, ‘Zaihitouhoujinshitei no gakkoukyouiku ni kansuru chousa’ [A Study on School Education of Japanese Children in the Philippine Islands], The Quarterly Journal of the Colonial Institute of Nippon 1, no. 4 (1940): 176–79.41 Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 360–61.42 ‘Mintarujogakuin bokokukengakudan’ [Mintal Women’s School in Study Tour], The Philippine Information Bulletin 48 (June 1941): 104; Shun Ohno, Hapon: Firipin nikkeijin no nagai sengo [Hapon: The Long Postwar Period of Filipino Japanese] (Tokyo: Daisanshokan, 1991), 30; Yuji Ichioka, edited by Gordon H. Chang and Eiichiro Azuma, Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), Chapter 3; Rong Yuan, ‘Shokokumichi Nihongoshinbun no jigyokatsudo’ [Activities Organized by Newspaper Companies in the Concession City of Dalian: Focusing on Field Trips by Manchuria-born Japanese Students Visiting Mainland Japan Organized by the Japanese Newspaper Company in Manchuria], Sokendai Review of Cultural and Social Studies 12 (2016): 55–81.43 Kenji Suzuki, Firipin zanryunikkeijin [War-Displaced Japanese in the Philippines] (Tokyo: Kusanoneshuppankai, 1997), 84–88; Yōichi Amano, Dabaokuo no matsueitachi: Firipin nikkei kimin [Descendants of Davao-Kuo: Abandoned Japanese in the Philippines] (Nagoya: Fūbaisha, 1990), 71.44 Ohno, Hapon, 30–32.45 For example, in November 1939, Over the Sea Journal (Umi wo koete, 1938–1944), a government-sponsored magazine that promoted Japanese overseas settlements and economic activities, had a special issue on Davao and printed several articles about Japanese settlers’ education there.46 Yoshitaka Honshige, ‘Niseikyouiku no genjou to toujisha no niseikyouikukan’ [A Thought on Problems of Educating the Second-Generation Japanese in Davao], in Dabao hōjin kaitakushi [The History of Japanese Development of Davao], by Hiroji Kamohara (Dabao: Nippi Shimbunsha, 1938), 659.47 About the history of ishokumin, see Azuma, In Search of Our Frontier, 4–9. The principal Honshige referred to Colonization and Colonial Policy, the 1926 work by Tadao Yanaihara, a prominent, contemporaneous economist and scholar of Japan’s colonial policy.48 Ichioka, Before Internment, Introduction and Chapter 2.49 Honshige, ‘Niseikyouiku’, 662.50 Kiyoshi Ibuse, ‘Dabao no nihon jin [Japanese in Davao]’ in Gaikou seisaku wo nampou ni miru [On-Site Observation of Southward Policy], ed. Satoru Hasegawa (Tokyo: Nihongaijikyokai, 1936), 301.51 Lee, Zaichonihonjinshakai no keisei, 187–88.52 Honshige, ‘Niseikyouiku’, 669.53 Ryuzo Hattori, ‘Dabao ni okeru dainiseikyouiku’ [Education for the Second Generation in Davao], Umi wo koete [Over the Sea] 2, no. 11 (1939): 28.54 Nakamura Takeo, ‘Dabao zanryū hо̄jin no genjо̄’ [Current Situation of Japanese Residents in Davao], Umi wo koete (Over the Sea Journal) 2, no. 11 (1939): 7.55 Lee Jeong-Seon, ‘Naisenkekkon no kodomotachi: Naichijin to chousenjin no hazama de’ [Children of Japanese-Korean Marriages: Between Japanese and Koreans], Historical Journal 815 (2018): 42–55; Barbara J. Brooks, ‘Japanese Colonialism, Gender, and Household Registration: Legal Reconstruction of Boundaries’, in Gender and Law in the Japanese Imperium, ed. Barbara J. Brooks and Susan L. Burns (University of Hawai’i Press, 2014), 219–39.56 Paul D. Barclay, ‘Cultural Brokerage and Interethnic Marriage in Colonial Taiwan: Japanese Subalterns and Their Aborigine Wives, 1895–1930’, The Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 2 (2005): 323–60.57 For instance, Iyo Kuminimoto, ‘Nihonjin no boribia syokiimin ni kansuru ichikousatsu’ [A Study of Early Japanese Immigrants in Bolivia], The Annual Review of Migration Studies 6 (1999): 3–20; Istuko Kamoto, Kokusaikekkon no tanjo [The Birth of International Marriages] (Tokyo: Shinyosha, 2001), 175.58 Honshige, ‘Niseikyouiku’, 672.59 Ibid., 672–73.60 Komeda, ‘Zaihitouhoujinshitei’, 175.61 Hattori, ‘Dabao ni okeru’, 26.62 Honshige, ‘Niseikyouiku’, 673.63 Komeda, ‘Zaihitouhoujinshitei’, 175.64 Honshige, ‘Niseikyouiku’, 673.65 Kitada, ‘Intimately Intertwined’; Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 6.66 Antonio Sitchon Gabila, ‘Lo, the Vanishing Non-Christian’, Philippine Free Press, September 14, 1935, p2, 36.67 ‘Statement (Estrella Macasaet Tan)’, 2.68 Joan Mae Suco-Bantayan, ‘Revisiting Mintal: The Little Tokyo in a Dream’, Mindanao Times, April 14, 2012; ‘Dabao no nikkei 2sei no shougen ‘sensou heno omoi’’ [A Testimony of the Second-Generation Japanese in Davao and Her ‘Thoughts on War’], Davao Watch, September 22 and 23, 2017; Shun Ohno, Transforming Nikkeijin Identity and Citizenship: Untold Life Histories of Japanese Migrants and Their Descendants in the Philippines, 1903–2013 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2015), 214n14.69 Hiroyuki Kawai and Norihiro Inomata, Hapon wo torimodosu: Firipin zanryunihonjin no senso to kokusekikaifuku [Get Back Hapon (Japanese): World War II of the Abandoned Japanese in the Philippines and the Recovery of Citizenship] (Tokyo: Korokara, 2020), 64–67; Norihiro Inomata, ‘Dabao no kurafutokohi to jidori no adobo wo motenashitekuretano ha shiburan no yamani zanryushiteita nisei no obachan’ [It Was a Second-Generation Grandma, Who Stayed Behind in Mt. Sibulan, That Welcomed Me with Davao’s Craft Coffee and Chicken Adobo], Davao Watch, July 3, 2020.70 Kawai and Inomata, Hapon, 65.71 Amano, Dabaokuo, 70.72 Ibid., 20, 48, 62–63. Ohno, Transforming, 122–23.73 Suzuki, Firipin, 84–88; Amano, Dabaokuo, 71.74 ‘Dabao no nikkei 2sei no shougen’.75 Ohno, Transforming, 211n68.76 Young, Japan’s Total Empire, 167–71.77 Amano, Dabaokuo, 135.78 For example, the children of Japanese father Eiji Hirao and Christian Filipino mother Monica Tan attended Bayabas Japanese School, which was created in March 1934 in the district of Bayabas. Kamohara, Dabao hōjin kaitakushi, 1517.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Social Science Research Council (International Dissertation Research Fellowship).