The land issue affecting the Japanese during American rule came to a head in 1935 after commerce and agriculture secretary Eulogio Rodriguez recommended that those Japanese holding illegal leases had to be removed from the land they were cultivating as farm estates.
To implement the Rodriguez order, a government agent was sent to Davao to issue lease-cancellation orders with help from the local constables as executors. At the time, Japanese investments in Davao had already reached US$30 million, the same size as the country’s budget.
But the Rodriguez order was not implemented. While in Davao, the secretary confronted the PC commander on why the order was not carried out. He simply shrugged his shoulders and told him that against thousands of Japanese his 50 constables would be no match.
The order to execute Rodriguez’s idea was met with a strong protest that year. The Washington-based The Sunday Star reporter Ben McKelway described the incident in the December 15, 1935, edition of his paper: ‘What happened when the eviction was ordered… was that 4,000 or 5,000 Japanese marched to Davao and held a mass meeting, at which they declared that if evicted from the land only their dead bodies could be taken off.’
It was arguably the largest Japanese rally ever held in the town of Davao.
The failure to force out the Japanese leases created quite a stir in Manila. Rodriguez told the President that the only alternative to formalize the eviction would be to call on Congress ‘to pass a law validating existing leases for the unexpired term and permitting new ones.’
The Americans, now in their last leg of their privileged stay in the archipelago, supported the Japanese, saying they were originally allowed by the government to take the leases that resulted in the development of farms using their labor and inventiveness. They also warned that the Japanese government could make an incident out of a single Japanese killing in the hands of a native despite the prevailing sentiment not to escalate the tension related to the land-lease issue.
In contrast, the American government kept off the issue saying the matter is between the Japanese investors and workers and the Philippine government.
For his part, Quezon admitted having only a limited understanding of the land issue brewing in Davao and did not want the Rodriguez order, which elicited different reactions from various sectors, executed if it resulted in trouble. He was particularly interested in the assertions of the Japanese consuls in Davao and Manila that Japanese rights must be protected.
But more significantly, the Americans, already wary of the exclusion of their privileges under the Commonwealth, particularly the non-ownership by foreigners of any Filipino land, predicted that as soon as the eviction happens, Japan, by now spreading its conquest southwest of the islands, would eventually invade the country and subjugate it.
McKelway wrote: ‘Americans who live in Mindanao [especially in Davao] and feel that it is one of the rare garden spots of the whole world, with its fine climate, rich soil and plentiful rainfall, regard it as inevitable that when the American Flag is withdrawn, the Japanese economic conquest of the island will begin in earnest.’
The Japanese, already losing a foothold in its China campaign against the Allied forces, eventually invaded Davao City on December 8, 1941, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, for reasons indirectly related to agriculture, namely: (i) To thwart any US plan to convert the islands into an advance base of operations; (ii) to obtain staging areas and supply bases to improve operations against the Dutch East Indies and Guam; and (iii) to secure the lines of communication between occupied areas in the south and the Japanese home islands.
