Former Philippine President Elpidio Quirino’s grandchildren, Cory, left, and Ruby, center, pose with Kayoko Kano in a commemorative photo session in Manila in November. (Yohei Kobayakawa)
Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko will take time out from their busy visit to the Philippines on Jan. 28 to have a poignant meeting with a granddaughter of the late President Elpidio Quirino.
In 1953, while memories of World War II were still very fresh, Quirino took the extraordinary step of pardoning all of the Japanese Class-B and Class-C war criminals imprisoned in his country.
He hoped this merciful gesture would encourage future peace between his nation and Japan.
Decades later, Akihito and Michiko were to finally meet with the former president's granddaughter, Ruby Quirino Gonzalez, 62.
Four years before Quirino granted the pardon, Japanese painter Kanrai Kano (1904-1977) started bombarding him and others with letters requesting the release of all the Japanese war criminals imprisoned in the Philippines.
His daughter, Kayoko, 71, has high expectations of the current visit by Akihito and Michiko.
“I feel the imperial couple’s sincere thoughts to the fighting waged in the Philippines,” she said. “President Quirino made a decision (for the pardons) toward the peace of the future. We should recall the significance (of the decision) again.”
According to Kayoko, who is serving as honorary director of the Kano Museum of Art in Yasugi, Shimane Prefecture, Kano worked at a school on the Korean Peninsula during the war. The peninsula was a colonial possession of Japan at the time.
After the war ended in August 1945, Kano returned to Japan. In March 1949, he began to send the letters to Quirino and others, including the director of a prison in Muntinlupa near Manila. He sent more than 200 letters in total.
He began to write them because a former major general in the Imperial Japanese Navy, who was sentenced to death over a massacre of local residents, was from his hometown.
However, the then Philippine ambassador to Japan, with whom Kano had become friendly, told him that Quirino had lost his wife and three of his children in the bloodshed in Manila.
The ambassador also said that one of the three, a 2-year-old daughter, was bayoneted to death by a Japanese soldier. The president buried the child himself.
The ambassador also told Kano that the emotional scars felt by Filipinos over the fact that women and children were butchered would remain forever.
In spite of this, Kano continued to send letters, saying that if war criminals were pardoned for what were unforgivable crimes, it would lead the Japanese people to reflect on their past, make confessions and reject militarism.
In July 1953, soon before the normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and the Philippines, Quirino released all of more than 100 war criminals by issuing a statement which said that he would not allow Japanese people to inherit feelings of hatred from him.
In 2011, it was found that documents related to Quirino, which were kept in the Ayala Museum in Manila, contained seven of the letters sent by Kano. This led his daughter to exchange e-mail messages with Quirino's granddaughter, Ruby. Kayoko was then invited to a ceremony held in Quirino’s hometown of Vigan in November 2015 to celebrate the 125th anniversary of his birth in 1890. Quirino died in 1956.
At that time, Ruby told Kayoko that when Quirino issued the pardon, some people were opposed to it, saying that their scars had not yet healed. In spite of that, Quirino thought that Filipinos should have peaceful relations with the Japanese, she said.
Ruby said that she has inherited his feelings.
http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201601280057
