2021 Volume 62 Issue 3 Pages 32-62
This article examines the wartime violence resulting from Filipino collaboration with Japanese occupying forces and the subsequent arbitrary application of the law concerning collaboration issues, which have long been ignored in Philippine historiography. This study focuses on the province of Negros Occidental, where the sugar industry has been dominant since the American colonial years, and on the wartime violence that occurred as a result of disciplinary actions initiated mainly by the Japanese occupying forces in collaboration with both local elites and the poor. This study also seeks to clarify how local elites, mostly affluent “sugar barons” who managed the region’s sugar plantations, collaborated with the Japanese by using poor local men against the anti-Japanese guerrilla forces, and how these same elites avoided the “disgrace” of being charged with the crime of treason in the People’s Court after the war, while most of the poor collaborators were convicted to the fullest extent of the law. Filipino historians such as Augusto de Viana have previously pointed out such disparities in treason convictions. Considering the process of how wartime violence emerged in the local community during the Japanese occupation, this study also shows what factors might have led to such disparity in the application of the law between the local elites and the poor masses after the war. In so doing, this study highlights one aspect of the profound social division that resulted from the wartime violence in Negros Occidental.
