The issue of Filipino political collaboration under Japanese occupation (1941-45) has evoked several controversies within Filipino and American scholarship. The former has dwelt on the issue of patriotism while the latter has focused on the wartime resilience of the oligarchic elite. This paper rethinks those issues with a particular focus on “Americanization” in the Cordillera Mountain Societies of Northern Luzon. The indigenous residents in that area were generally called (and officially termed) “Igorot” during the American colonial period. Under the name of “benevolent assimilation,” Igorot intellectuals collaborated with Americans and their lowlander counterparts in order to modernize their societies, which ultimately led to further discrimination as well as exploitation by their “developed” patrons.
During the Japanese Occupation, a group of the Mitsui Mining Company was able to mobilize Filipino workers and conduct copper mining at Mankayan located in the southwestern part of the Mountains. As revealed in Mitsuiʼs memoirs edited in 1974, the group’s operations could not be handled without depending on the former colonial relationships at the mining sites. The Japanese friendship narrative with the Filipinos was also the product of ethnic tension between lowlander and Igorot created by American colonial policy. On the other hand, local accounts showed that the reason behind Igorot intellectuals’ collaboration with Japan as well as resistance to it was the desire to modernize, a pattern first found during the American colonial period. In conclusion, I show the contradictions of “Americanization” in Igorot societies, which led to both emancipation and repression during the Japanese Occupation.
