Grandma and the Japanese soldiers

One Christmas evening after dinner with all the kids, nieces and nephews at the table, Grandma leaned forward in her chair and told the grandchildren a story she wanted them to remember.

“Most of us are lucky," she said, "that we have never experienced war on our own soil."  And then she began to tell the kids that she was not so lucky.

She looked across the dinner table at her grandchildren.

“Right after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor we heard news that they were coming toward the Philippines,” she told them.  Grandma lived in Legaspi, Philippines when she grew up.  A lush, mountainous area south of the capital of Manila.

“My father began to prepare for us to leave the town.  He started to gather and pack food and clothing.  I was 22 years old then,” she said. 

Adela Yanzon, center top and 
her mother Pilar, right in Legaspi.

“But the Japanese came sooner than we expected,” she said.  “We stayed in our homes with our doors locked.  After a while we heard stories that Japanese soldiers had been taking local girls with them, raping them and keeping them for the soldiers.  The Japanese called them ‘Comfort women’” she said.

A few days later we saw a group of soldiers coming into the neighborhood and going into the houses.  My mother called for me and quickly pulled me into the laundry room.  She emptied the clothes out of a large clothes hamper and had me get inside and roll up into a ball.”   It probably wasn’t that hard for a young woman who stood only 149 cm, or 4’ 11”.

“She told me not to move, not to make a sound.  Then she piled the clothes on top of me.  A short while later there was a loud pounding on the door.  I heard men coming into our house.  I could hear their boots on the wooden floor.  They were going from room to room.  They were speaking Japanese to each other.  I heard the boots coming closer and closer to me, and then I heard the door open.  I could feel the boots next to me.  I was frozen," she said. "I didn’t even breathe.”

The grand kids stared at grandma while she spoke.

“Then the boots started walking away, into the next room.  After a few moments the boots walked more quickly and finally out of the house.  I heard the sound of the door close and latch.  My mother said nothing. It seemed like a long time.  Then I could hear her speaking to me.  She came into the room and pulled the clothes off of me.”

“When my father came home that afternoon,” she said, “my mother told him what happened.  Infuriated, my father left the house and went to the Japanese Army post and protested to the Captain about what had happened.  The Captain, who my father said seemed like a nice man, apologized and said he would make sure they never did that again.  But my father didn’t believe him.

"Later my father and my brother were imprisoned by the Japanese for giving rice to the resistance fighters," she told the kids.  "But a month later our family was able to get them released.

“When my father returned we packed up what we could carry and we walked for hours up into the mountains to a cabin we sometimes used .  It was a long walk, and I remember being tired from carrying so much and walking for so long.

Americans entering Legaspi

“We stayed in the cabin for over two years,” she said.  Grandma said she grew to like it in the mountains. “We had no electricity or running water.  But we had a waterfall, fruit growing everywhere, and we planted our own vegetables.  We used a kerosene lamp, but kept it under a table so it wouldn’t shine out the window.  We felt safe.

"Guerrilla fighters passed through the mountains and often visited our cabin.  We offered them food.  We had guns in the cabin to protect us, but we never saw the Japanese soldiers where we were.  There were eventually about 30 of us,” Grandma said.  “Uncles, aunts, cousins, all hiding from the Japanese.   On some days we could hear the airplanes fighting overhead.

“One day we heard news that the Americans had come ashore at Legaspi.  We finally went down the mountain back into town.  American soldiers were driving through our streets.  We were fortunate, but others who stayed were not so fortunate.  While we were gone some of the townspeople had been cruelly killed.”



Adela Yanzon, left, and her mother Pilar right,
in Manila at the end of WWII

I don’t know if the kids really appreciated the point Grandma was trying to make that holiday evening.  It’s one thing to hear her stories and quite another to live in a place visited by the horror of war.

Perhaps that’s why it seems some of the people who are most critical of war have been those who lived through it themselves.

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Adela Yanzon Concepción is 91 and lives in California