The Japanese Empire occupied the Commonwealth of the Philippines between 1942 and 1945 during World War II.(Filipino: Pananakop ng mga Hapones sa Pilipinas; )
Japan invaded the Philippines on December 8, 1941, ten hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. As at Pearl Harbor, American aircraft were severely damaged in the initial Japanese attack. Lacking air cover, the American Asiatic Fleet in the Philippines withdrew to Java on December 12, 1941. General Douglas MacArthur was ordered out, leaving his men at Corregidor on the night of 11 March 1942 for Australia, 4,000 km away. The 76,000 starving and sick American and Filipino defenders in Bataan surrendered on April 9, 1942, and were forced to endure the infamous Bataan Death March on which 7,000–10,000 died or were murdered. The 13,000 survivors on Corregidor surrendered on 6 May.
Japan occupied the Philippines for over three years, until the surrender of Japan. A highly effective guerrilla campaign by Philippine resistance forces controlled sixty percent of the islands, mostly forested and mountainous areas. MacArthur supplied them by submarine and sent reinforcements and officers. The Filipino population remained generally loyal to the United States, partly because of the American guarantee of independence, partly because of the Japanese mistreatment of Filipinos after the surrender, and partly because the Japanese had pressed large numbers of Filipinos into work details and put young Filipino women into brothels.
General MacArthur kept his promise to return to the Philippines on October 20, 1944. The landings on the island of Leyte were accompanied by a force of 700 vessels and 174,000 men. The initial Leyte landing was followed by landings on Mindoro, Luzon, and Mindanao. During the campaign, the Imperial Japanese Army conducted a suicidal defense of the islands. Cities such as Manila were reduced to rubble. Around 500,000 Filipinos died during the occupation.
Background
Japan launched an attack on the Philippines on December 8, 1941, just ten hours after their attack on Pearl Harbor. Initial aerial bombardment was followed by landings of ground troops both north and south of Manila. 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. 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. 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. Manila, declared an open city to prevent its destruction, was occupied by the Japanese on 2 January 1942.
The Philippine defense continued until the final surrender of US-Philippine forces on the Bataan Peninsula on April 10, 1942, and on Corregidor on May 6, 1942. Quezon and Osmeña had accompanied the troops to Corregidor and later left for the United States, where they set up a government-in-exile. MacArthur was ordered to Australia, where he started to plan for a return to the Philippines. 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."Aguinaldo, 1902–1964". Philippine-American War, 1899-1902Most 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. 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.
The occupation
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. Most of the Philippine elite, with a few notable exceptions, served under the Japanese. The puppet republic was headed by President José P. Laurel. 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. The only political party allowed during the occupation was the Japanese-organized KALIBAPI. During the occupation, most Filipinos remained loyal to the United States, and war crimes committed by forces of the Japanese Empire against surrendered Allied forces and civilians were documented.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. 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". One such place where these women were imprisoned was Bahay na Pula. 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 soldiers' sexual advancements. Many were also murdered and disposed like animals. 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. Aside from the "comfort women" system imposed by Japan against Filipinos, many Japanese also routinely raped Filipinos outside of the "comfort women" system. For example, during the Manila massacre, upon feeling that they were losing the war, the Japanese conducted a mass rape of Manila's population. The Japanese were also known to have killed Filipino infants as an act of entertainment and stress-reliever.
Cannibalism was also conducted by the Japanese on the remains of murdered civilian Filipinos during and after the occupation. Notable examples occurred in Bukidnon, where after the war, the Philippine Military Police documented seven Japanese soldiers ghoulishly feasting on the flesh of a murdered Filipino woman at Malaybalay. Malaybalay at the time was forested and had numerous wildlife that can be hunted, fruit-bearing trees, and fish-filled rivers. The report was the third cannibalism incident conducted by the Japanese in the Bukidnon plateau alone. Numerous cannibalism incidents occurred across the country.
The Japanese also sent "doctors" and "surgeons" to the Philippines, who performed human experimentation on native Filipinos. Some of these experiments included amputations, dissections, and suturing blood vessels of live humans. Surgeons gruesomely performed vivisections 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 sewn back up, then the living victims were shot dead. In other cases, the vivisected victims were left with huge open stomachs and then dumped in their graves along with their intestines and left to die. Many of the doctors and surgeons who performed their human experiments 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 talk about the crimes they committed during the war. After the war, then General Douglas MacArthur decided to withhold information about Japan's human experimentation from the war crimes tribunal in the interest of improving of American-Japanese relations amid the growing threat of communism. This prevented persecution of the Japanese doctors involved. The United States afterwards received human experimentation data from Japan in exchange for MacArthur's actions.
Resistance
Japanese occupation of the Philippines was opposed by active and successful underground and guerrilla activity that increased over the years and eventually covered a large portion of the country. Opposing these guerrillas were a Japanese-formed Bureau of Constabulary (later taking the name of the old Constabulary during the Second Republic), Kempeitai, and the Makapili. Postwar investigations showed that about 260,000 people were in guerrilla organizations and that members of the anti-Japanese underground were even more numerous. Such was their effectiveness that by the end of the war, Japan controlled only twelve of the forty-eight provinces.
The Philippine guerrilla movement continued to grow, in spite of Japanese campaigns against them. Throughout Luzon and the southern islands, Filipinos joined various groups and vowed to fight the Japanese. The commanders of these groups made contact with one another, argued about who was in charge of what territory, and began to formulate plans to assist the return of American forces to the islands. They gathered important intelligence information and smuggled it out to the US Army, a process that sometimes took months. General MacArthur formed a clandestine operation to support the guerrillas. He had Lieutenant Commander Charles "Chick" Parsons smuggle guns, radios, and supplies to them by submarine. The guerrilla forces, in turn, built up their stashes of arms and explosives and made plans to assist MacArthur's invasion by sabotaging Japanese communications lines and attacking Japanese forces from the rear.
Various guerrilla forces formed throughout the archipelago, ranging from groups of US Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) forces who refused to surrender to local militia initially organized to combat banditry brought about by disorder caused by the invasion. Several islands in the Visayas region had guerrilla forces led by Filipino officers, such as Colonel Macario Peralta in Panay, Major Ismael Ingeniero in Bohol, and Captain Salvador Abcede in Negros.