This article reinterprets the emergence and proliferation of violence in the Philippines from the late Japanese occupation to the postwar reconstruction period by shifting attention from state–resistance narratives to the social-historical dynamics of a state power vacuum and failed disarmament. Rather than treating “the masses” as a uniform category, the study examines specific non-elite actors—former guerrilla members, urban lower-class gangs, and vigilante groups—whose social positions differed from ordinary residents and who became central agents of violence. Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of “social banditry” is employed as a heuristic to understand how such actors emerged amid abrupt wartime disruptions. The analysis draws on National Archives military documents in the U.S., People’s Court records in the Philippines, and field interviews in Manila.

Two findings are significant. First, wartime and post-liberation failures to recover weapons facilitated the dispersion of firearms among non-state actors, enabling guerrilla factions to devolve into predatory formations in provincial areas and supporting the rise of gangs in metropolitan Manila, where diversion of U.S. military materiel intensified criminal activity. Second, these developments reveal forms of violence not adequately explained by nationalist or ideological frameworks: they were often opportunistic, redistributive, and locally embedded, sometimes acquiring “Robin Hood” overtones while simultaneously victimizing residents. Nicasio Salonga, also known as Asiong, was one of them.

The article contributes by: 1) reframing postwar violence as a social phenomenon rooted in structural failures; 2) demonstrating, through primary sources, how weapons circulated and violence became routine; 3) recovering forms of coercion marginalized by heroic guerrilla narratives; and 4) integrating urban and provincial trajectories into a unified account of wartime-to-postwar transformation. While source limitations prevent full examination of continuities with contemporary violence, the study offers an essential historical frame for understanding persistent insecurity in current Philippine society.

This paper argues that primbon, divination and magical manuals popular in Javanese society, have functioned not merely as repositories of Javanese tradition but also as dynamic sites for the reconfiguration of knowledge. The study focuses on Wong Kam Fu, a twentieth-century astrologer and primbon publisher, as one of the Javanese modern intellectuals.

Based on data from 132 primbons collected by the author and on Wong Kam Fu’s life history, the paper analyzes the composition and representation of divination knowledge in the primbons he published. Grounded in close reading of these publications, it traces how diverse traditions were translated, juxtaposed, and reassembled across shifting political and publishing conditions. The analysis finds that 1) marginal intellectuals in modern Java used primbon to actively intersect, reorganize, and mediate multiple divinatory traditions, and 2) foreign systems of divination were introduced into Javanese society through primbon publishing.

By foregrounding primbon publishing as a form of intellectual practice, the study highlights an alternative trajectory of knowledge production and circulation in modern Java and argues for the importance of incorporating marginal actors and divination knowledge into broader studies of Javanese intellectual history.