The Japanese began to bomb American bases in the Philippines hours after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor that launched the United States into World War II.
By the spring of 1942, Japanese forces occupied Manila. American and Filipino troops protecting the 7,000-island chain were overwhelmed and thousands were killed on the infamous Bataan Death March. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had ordered Gen. Douglas MacArthur, his remaining troops and government officials to flee their holdout on Corregidor — and the semi-independent U.S. commonwealth, the most important American military outpost in the Pacific, had fallen.
For the family of Central Islip resident and Filipino immigrant Jan Jandayran, the siege had just begun.
The 28-year-old history teacher, military reenactor and newsletter editor of the Long Island Living History Association said his paternal grandfather witnessed Japanese atrocities on Panay Island and Japanese forces confiscated his maternal grandmother’s home in Laguna Province, south of Manila, to use as headquarters for anti-guerrilla operations in Luzon.
“When we think of the end of World War II, we think of the famous kiss in Times Square, ticker tape parades for American troops,” Jandayran said. “We don’t think of the occupation of the Philippines … Families like mine saw all sides.”
Census data estimates more than 140,000 of the 4.4 million Filipino Americans in the United States live in New York, most in the Little Manila section along Roosevelt Avenue in Woodside, Elmhurst and Jackson Heights, Queens, with another 15,000 in Nassau and Suffolk.
A graduate of Central Islip High School and Stony Brook University, Jandayran immigrated to Long Island with parents Janice and Loreto Jr., in the late 1990s. He said his paternal grandfather, Loreto Sr., witnessed horrors of the occupation where he lived near Iloilo City in the Visayas region.
Jan Jandayran, of Central Islip, is a history teacher and reenactor with the Long Island Living History Association. His grandparents lived through the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during the war. Credit: Museum of American Armor
His maternal grandmother, Jacinta (Kimhoko) Tabuzo, known as Cynthia, was barely 10 at the start of the war. Because her father, Jaime, was a Japanese-Filipino businessman with Japanese citizenship, her family, which included eight children, was treated well by troops who occupied their estate, Jandayran said.
“They treated my grandmother’s family more as house servants,” Jandayran said. “There’s this commander my grandmother called ‘Captain K,’ and if she did an extra load of laundry maybe he got her an extra ration of rice. One of her sisters, who was 5, got malaria — and he got antimalarial quinine to treat her. There was even an instance where Japanese guards harassed her and her sisters and she told this Captain K — and he had them whipped in the courtyard.”
But, Jandayran said while the Japanese were using the home to seek out Filipino guerrilla units bent on attacking their occupiers, Jaime Kimhoko was gathering intelligence — feeding it to those guerrilla commanders.
“He’s taking intelligence from the center of anti-guerrilla operations and feeding it to the resistance,” Jandayran said. “If he’d gotten caught, I wouldn’t be here. The Japanese would’ve executed him and his family.”
It would take two years of bloody island-hopping before American forces could liberate the Philippines, MacArthur fulfilling his “I shall return” pledge — landing with U.S. troops at Palo, Leyte, on Oct. 20, 1944. Postwar investigations found more than a quarter-million Filipinos were part of the anti-Japanese underground that participated in sabotage and intelligence-gathering to help make that liberation possible.
The U.S. granted the Philippines independence on July 4, 1946.
On Tuesday, the Museum of American Armor in Old Bethpage, where Jandayran participates as a military reenactor, will mark the 80th anniversary of the Japanese surrender and the formal end of World War II.
Museum spokesman Gary Lewi said: “In the case of Imperial Japan’s surrender, this historic anniversary has opened the door for us to recognize the role of the Filipino resistance … and their courage as under-armed, ill-equipped guerrillas facing a ferocious enemy. And then we discover we are Long Island neighbors to some of their descendants. That truly speaks to America.”
Jandayran said: “As Filipino communities grow here on Long Island, it’s important to remember the close bond the Philippines has with America … and that the war is not just Americans fighting to preserve the values of America. It’s also people outside the United States fighting for America — and, for the chance to one day be Americans.”
John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee’pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”
