FAST BACKWARD – Summary executions

After Davao fell into enemy hands on Dec. 20, 1941, the Japanese promptly established a military administration to take over the consular office existing in the city. The new office was formed to determine who among the local residents, mainly Filipinos, were supportive of the cause of the invaders. To do this, an interpreter who knew English was hired to interview individuals before a certificate of good standing, the ryominsho, was issued.
The document actually served as an instrument, or a pass, confirming that the holder of the certificate was not anti-Japanese. The women, elderly, and the children were spared from the rigors the men had to undergo. For males who were athletic and physically healthy, they “were immediately sent to the inner part of the compound, far from the prying eyes of others.” In short, they were readied for execution.
Taiji Ikeda of the Propaganda Corps of the Japanese Army, in March 1942, reported that “the number of certificates issued by the military certifying the holders to be law-abiding citizens now (reached) 80 per cent of the pre-war population,” saying the beleaguered local residents were “now willingly cooperating with the Imperial forces on the establishment of a New Philippines.”
The military admin branch held office inside the Guino-o Autobus Compound, at the corner of Andres Bonifacio and Ponciano Reyes (now Cayetano Bangoy) streets. It was manned by a fortyish guy—the interpreter—who was an employee of Ohta Development Corporation, a Japanese-owned abaca firm. His function was to require the men and women to separately queue while he interviewed every one of them, separating those who were perceived to be bad from good, and issuing only the ryomisho to those he subjectively viewed as sympathetic to the Japanese. Hiroyuki Mizuguchi, a Davao resident who later joined his country’s war against the U.S., nonchalantly viewed the fate of those who were arbitrarily placed behind bars:
‘What happened to those [who were detained] in the stockade is best forgotten. We were at war. No one had the right to condemn the man to his death without a fair trial. Those who were waiting in life for their certificates were not losers of the war. They were victims of an unwanted war.’
Hiroyuki reminisced that the detainees were eventually taken out of their cells in groups of ten, their hands tightly bound, and forcibly loaded into buses. To hide them from kibitzers, the Japanese sentries surrounded the inmates, keeping an eye for possible last-minute mutiny or plan to escape. The prisoners were then sent away to an unknown destination. Hours later, the buses would return empty except for the vigilantes on board. To those who knew that thousands of innocent civilians had already died brutally in Japanese hands since the invasion, the disappearance of the able-bodied men was a sure sign of summary execution.
To further enhance the monitoring of public reception towards the new colonial managers, the Japanese organized the Davao Japanese Volunteer Troop, with the chief function to secure deficiently guarded posts. The paramilitary force had sixty members who were equally divided into two squads headquartered at the Guino-o compound. Taught to handle short arms and oriented in the nuances of basic intelligence-gathering, one of its odd jobs was to escort disgraced prisoners and suspected traitors to their deaths.