Once again, Mr. Costes, your journals and pictures breathe life into some things that I have only read about in books or seen in documentaries. Keep them coming please!
--Bartlett
Hi Mike..I will be too happy to write more re: memories of the war in my hometown as related to me by my parents and kinfolks..Samples here are some paper money I found scattered in our living room around 1948..Quite a bundle of them were stacked in an old wooden chest in my grandma's room..It looked like a treasure chest from an adventure movie..The only difference is that, all these bills were useless after the war, after armistice was signed. They could not even be used in the toilet; the sizes are too small!
So what we kids did was to use the bills ( known already at that time as Mickey Mouse money ) for playing store. During Saturdays or Sundays we pretended to be merchants selling assorted stuff ( rocks, flowers, leaves, some scrap iron, etc ) in our yard and we used the Mickey Mouse money as currency. Neighbouring kids would come over and join the game which kept us out of trouble practically the whole day.
These Japanese currency were printed the same way as real money was. Fine artwork, serial numbers, the whole shebang. They used familiar vignettes like Rizal's monument or an abaca plantation just to give it the "Philippine" look.
Life was cheap and volatile during those days of occupation. I heard from my Mom that one morning, my dad was picked up by some men ( called Makapilis ). Maka-Pili is a derivative of Maka Pilipino which means Pro-Pilipino. In reality, these were opportunists, carpetbaggers, the scum that thrive on the absence of law and order in a country. My grandmother was rich before the war having pioneered so many kinds of businesses in Asingan. When the Japanese arrived, anarchy set in. Makapilis aimed to fleece money from the rich. The men picked up my dad ( and my grandma was not able to do anything but cry her eyes out ). My aunt's husband, according to the family lore, promised to help my dad since he ( my uncle) knew the captors personally. Maybe they were his drinking buddies.
Anyways, some hours later, my uncle came back and told my grandma to give him some ransom money so he can "save" my dad. So my grandma handed him a big bag of money ( I hope it was some Japanese currency ) and that same night, my dad arrived, very pale and haggard. I never learned what they did to him, but I knew it was not something very nice.
Well, some say my uncle was a makapili himself. Hard to tell really. During war time, things and people are not what they appear to be.---#
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