Sins

by F. Sionil Jose

  I was to hear soon after the war the reason for MacArthur’s cozy relationship with the mestizo elite. Quezon gave him half a million dollars in 1942, when the dollar was still so highly valued. How much would that be worth today? This rumor, which percolated widely, would soon be confirmed by historians. Indeed, we Filipinos are not only grateful and hospitable to our friends—we are also very liberal with our spending of the people’s money. Collaboration then, and its stigma, was not perceived as a moral issue, only political. But that was soon settled when many of the collaborators ran for public office and got deluged with so many votes, when men like my father—bless him for his wisdom and his prescience—and my grandfather, too, not only maintained their social status but also strengthened it vastly. I was absolutely sure, therefore, that when the dictatorship would end, those of us who pandered to the Leader would remain anointed with power and social position.

  Soon enough, those bleeding hearts who believed in American justice would ask why MacArthur decreed land reform in Japan and not in the Philippines. Simple! He had no friends among the zaibatsus, the Japanese financial conglomerates. In the Philippines, we surrounded him, pampered him, then smothered him.

  Ah, the Tokyo of my youth! There were no jets then except in the military, and the four-engine, double-deck Boeing Stratocruiser took almost the whole night to reach Haneda. On my first trip, I left Manila close to midnight and reached Haneda in the early morning. There was no airport building in Manila then—just a simple shed at the end of the runway. Outside the airport in Haneda were mudflats, wide open spaces. Tokyo was still very much a city of the low wooden buildings that had survived the fire bombing by the Americans. The Korean War was winding down to a stalemate and the P’anmunjŏm peace talks had started. Tramcars clattered in the main avenues and soba boys, one hand supporting a tray of noodles, raced through the crowded streets with miraculous agility. Most of the nightclubs were provided with music by Filipino bands. In fact, Filipino musicians were in many Asian cities before World War II. I have told this story often, how I entered the nightclubs in Tokyo in the fifties with eyes closed, ears keenly tuned to the music and, after a minute or so, I would know for certain if it was a Filipino band playing. The Japanese played Western music perfectly, cleanly, each note in place. But their music, though precise, was cold, without feeling. Not the Filipino bands. They played with that deft human touch that showed that not just the intellect and the hands were making music, but the heart was, too.

  These sorties into the nightlife were the major attraction of Tokyo to me then; I was young, virile, with all the lust for living. Yoshiwara, that old and famous red-light district of Tokyo, was still open, the brothels lining the streets, wooden houses with their young women, some of them newly arrived from the rural areas, seated in their fronts and flaunting their youth and innocence. There were more tourists than guests.

  Yoshiko was not from Yoshiwara. She worked at the information booth of Takashimaya, one of the department stores at the Ginza—a huge stone building that seemed to have survived the war. She spoke passable English at a time when there were very few who could speak the language. I had asked her to escort me when she was off duty and she had agreed, primarily, I think, because I had offered her quite a sum for a day’s work. She was tall, but not as tall as me, and slim. In her store uniform, with her hat and all, she looked trim, and prim.

  It was much, much later that I developed temple and museum fatigue. But in my youth, I visited them all avidly, noted every curio and all minutiae; the manicured gardens, the architecture, the use of wood and beams—the major characteristics of Japanese architecture.

  I should see Nikko then, Yoshiko suggested.

  Japanese department stores even then were well stocked and a delight—I learned it was at Takashimaya that the Emperor’s family shopped, so I concluded it must be loaded with quality goods. Indeed, even at this time, when Japan was poor, imported consumer goods were already available in specially designated places; one could easily recognize these places because their floors were carpeted. I had bought a brand-new Nikon from the tax-free shop across the street and had left it at the stationery counter where I had purchased some handmade paper. I did not even realize I had left the camera there until I heard the announcement over the speaker system that it was waiting for me at the information booth on the ground floor. Talk about honesty and service; even to this day, I am sure, both are not in short supply.

  That was where I met Yoshiko. When I presented myself, she looked me over, then, after a while, she smiled. “Yes, you are the owner.”

  She told me later that the salesgirl at the stationery section had described me as tall, fair-skinned, about twenty-five or so and very handsome.

  She was off at seven when the store closed. I did not tell her I wanted a date, but five minutes before seven, I was at her counter, asking where the best steak house was. She said she knew of one in the next street that served Kobe beef, very expensive and frequented only by businessmen. Would she like to have dinner with me? She demurred at first. Just dinner, I asked in my best pleading manner, and she finally agreed.

  It was fall, the lights of the Ginza were on, the drooping leaves of the willow trees that lined the street shimmering and silver. It was cool, and not used to the cool weather, I had a topcoat on. She had a thick black sweater over her uniform, her cap now in her bag. She was, of course, made up as all the salesgirls in the department stores were made up, but it was easy to see that Yoshiko was beautiful even without all the powder, rouge and lipstick.

  You must remember, this was in the early fifties, when a pack of Camels was enough to obtain a lay. Oh, those were the days when Japan was a playground for many Filipinos, and glib as we are and used to flattering our women, the Japanese woman who had always been regarded as inferior was so easy to seduce. Besides, then as now, they suffered no moral inhibitions about fucking—they would gladly do it for the sheer pleasure.

  Yoshiko turned out to be different, indifferent to the best seduction techniques I knew. After dinner, we went to one of the nightclubs along the Ginza where a Filipino band was playing and where Bimbo Danao, a mestizo, was singing. I had known Bimbo when he was in Manila crooning during the war in one of the Escolta theaters. Shortly after Liberation, he had migrated to Japan, where he was getting much more money and attention from the women. I sought him out to impress Yoshiko, and for her he sang a Japanese love song.

  I took Yoshiko to the Nikkatsu, where we had hot soba. I tried to get her upstairs to my room, but she said she had to hurry and catch the last Yamanote train to her home in Ikebukuro.

  It was my first experience of being rejected by a Japanese girl at a time when they were easy conquests, and I was baffled and, for the first time, too, doubted my capabilities. I looked at myself in the mirror—a tall man with patrician features, a noble brow, a sensual mouth. I wondered if she did not like my hotel. It was not as classy as the Imperial nearby, which I did not like. Although designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, a famous American architect, its lobby was tiny and dim and certainly did not conform to the Japanese architectural dictum. I decided to move there to let her know that I had means. I also decided to stay a few more days—I was not worried about my business; at the time, I had already learned certain basics, like selecting good people, paying them well, delegating authority and axing them if they fumbled.

  On the day that Takashimaya was closed, I don’t recall now which weekday it was, Yoshiko consented to take me to Nikko, this fabled shrine up in the mountains near Tokyo. We took a train at Asakusa station and, in a couple of hours, we reached the town, then up a zigzag road to the temple itself. She was no longer in her store uniform. She was wearing a blue wool suit and, over it, an old black leather coat. Patches of snow lay on the ground and I made a couple of snowballs and threw them at her; she did the same. We were enjoying ourselves and laughing. She had explained to me on the train that she had studied American literature in a Jesuit school, which explained her knowl
edge of English. I missed it all, the ancient cedars that lined one of the narrow roads that led to the shrine, the gorgeous temple bedecked with a surfeit of gold filigree, much more elaborate than any church altar I have seen. Everything simply flitted by my vision although I was not in a daze. On that perfect autumn day, alive with sunshine and the dazzling colors of leaves, I could only look at this splendid girl. How I longed to possess her.

  I was prepared to spend that day and night in Nikko—there was no shortage of hotels; in fact, some of them were precisely for couples on a binge—but it would not be. She said we had to return to Tokyo. At the Asakusa station, she refused to go to the Imperial, chiding me for having transferred from a very good hotel to this snobby place frequented only by Americans. No amount of pleading could convince her to have dinner with me, but she did kiss me, almost as an afterthought, when she left me there, dumbfounded, mystified and horribly frustrated. I stood bewildered on the platform long after her train had left.

  The riddle of Yoshiko was settled a year later, but this is going ahead of the story. I was back in the Ginza soon enough, and hoping to see her, I went to the department store at closing time. She did not see me, and it was just as well. She was walking out of the store with a big black American woman in uniform—probably a WAC—and they were holding hands.

  I am now leaving the straight chronology of time because this digression that I am relating happened almost two years afterward, during which time I came to terms with what is afflicting me. I would have never known of it had I not been frustrated by Yoshiko that day. That discovery has, since then, made me conclude that even in adversity, there is yet some good to be found.

  I had returned to Tokyo to finalize negotiations with Marubishi—the powerful Japanese trading company that was interested in going into partnership with me. It had survived MacArthur’s edicts against the zaibatsus and was now enlarging its operations, eager to make connections in Southeast Asia.

  Let it be known that Yoshiko’s rejection did not totally faze me. Nothing ever seems to defeat me—like that doll with a lead bottom, you can knock it any way you like but it always bounces back, upright, because it was made to be that way. It is with this attitude that one enters into business with the Japanese. How does one really do it? A Filipino would have no difficulty, unlike the Americans, who have such poor empathy with the behavior of Asians; in a sense, that is what the Japanese are, although they are loath to admit it, looking down as they do at all Asians, but not at the Americans nor the Europeans, to whom they feel inferior.

  As I said, it is like dealing with Filipinos. A lot of sake has to be consumed and even when they say they will try, that is certainly not definite, not till the relationship is bonded, and then the Japanese word is as trustworthy as the yen. But again, cuedao—because they are pragmatic and unyielding when it comes to what they perceive as ensuring the survival of their group.

  By this time, too, I saw the absolute necessity of learning Japanese. I bought several Japanese-language records, and whenever I had the time, I had Commander Martinez come up to talk with me in the language. He was a former naval intelligence officer who had mastered the language, could read and write it, and was one of my top executives. I always brought him to Japan when there were important negotiations. I had asked him not to speak Japanese at all in the presence of the Japanese we did business with, but, being very thorough, they must have known of his background. I am sure, though, that they were unaware of my adequate proficiency in their language, which I never used with them. I have been tempted so many times but I have always desisted. No, as we Filipinos say, they cannot sell me down the river. Knowing that I did not speak Japanese, they often made comments concerning me, nothing derogatory at all, just remarks that I may be hungry, or tired. I did not even use it when talking with Yoshiko; in the first place, there was no need, as her English was adequate.

  I have mentioned that one of my top executives is Commander Martinez—not a mestizo, really, but with skin fair enough to pass for one. He came from the Ilokos where, for sure, those itinerant Agustinians must have fertilized the region with their genes. He would have rotted in Camp Murphy then, pushing papers, because he had angered a politician close to the Palace.

  But first, my rationale for him. With a huge organization—more than twenty-five thousand personnel—I do need a kind of security force that can check on my people as well as protect me and my enterprises. What would be the best source of such trained people if not the army itself? And more specifically, the graduates of the Philippine Military Academy. How did I come to this conclusion? Simple—I had my planning staff study the structure of our armed forces, how decisions are made, who makes the decisions. It soon became obvious that, as in all large organizations, cliques exist, competing with one another for scarce resources. The most powerful cliques were dominated by graduates of the Military Academy, strategically located in the different branches and in different ranks—all of them bonded by personal ties arising from when they were cadets living together and sharing the adventures of young manhood.

  This is going ahead of the story, but years afterward when I was assigned to South America, I realized the great difference between our armed forces and the Latin American armed forces; there, the elite corps is drawn from the continent’s elite families. There are no oligarchic names in our officer corps, no Cobellos, Danteses or Rojos. Almost to a man, they are all Indio.

  From the very beginning, therefore, I made it a very important objective to recruit retired officers, and even those on active duty who could be enticed. That is not difficult because most of them are paid so low, and with Cobello y Cia, almost immediately after they leave the service, they get more than double their measly government pay, not to mention the fringe benefits and the prestige of working with an established institution like mine. After an officer gets to be a captain, the rise in the ranks is painfully slow and this is the time when it is easiest to lure them away from military life. No, I never aimed for the brightest in the corps; the most popular cadet in his time is the best. First, he knows how to work with people, else he would never have been the most popular in his class. That is not all—keep in mind that if you have one man from each graduating class of the military academy, you have a key to the entire army network, for the army is no different from other Filipino institutions. Those relationships developed in college will come to good use in the future, and, in a sense, this is how I endeared myself to the military; this is how they have also protected me and my interests.

  In the freezer for six years, Commander Martinez used the time to learn Japanese, German and Spanish, all of which were put to use when he joined Cobello y Cia.

  I had some difficulty reeling him in—a big fish like Martinez is an instinctive fighter, his skills as such honed during the war years when he was a guerrilla. A senior at the Philippine Military Academy in 1941, he was inducted as officer immediately at the outbreak of hostilities. He escaped from the Bataan death march and immediately joined the guerrillas.

  How do you hook an Indio who had amply illustrated his patriotism with deeds and not with inane gestures as I have often done? How else but show him that these gestures are not meaningless, that they bespeak the best intentions which, if they are not actualized, would yet be when hindrances to their realization were removed.

  As part of that indoctrination process, I took him to the Sta. Mesa house to show him the library, the preening collection of Philippine antiques. Where possible, I also brought him to my charity missions for the ethnic groups, showed to him my interest in Philippine culture by being supportive of all its creative aspects. No explanations, no rationalizations.

  If later he had doubts, I allayed those with excellent pay and fringe benefits and, most of all, with trips abroad wherein he was often a glorified valet but nonetheless anointed by his seeming closeness to me. I knew I had won his complete loyalty when he asked me to stand as godfather to his youngest son, whose employ in Cobello y Cia I had assured
him.

  So here I was in Tokyo again to pursue not just the yen but a luscious information clerk at Takashimaya. Midsummer, but it never really gets very warm in Tokyo. I did not want to meet the black woman who, I was sure, would be waiting for Yoshiko when the department store closed, so I went there in the morning, at ten, when it opened. She was as beautiful as when I first saw her, and it seemed as if she had not aged a day. She was extremely pleased to see me—that much I could elicit from the warmth with which she greeted me, the lingering handclasp. I asked her when her day off was—it had not changed.

  “Let us go to Kyoto,” I said.

  She shook her head immediately. “That is so far, Charlie”—she remembered my nickname. “We cannot make it in a day; the trip alone would take half the day.”

  The other salesgirl was listening and I could tell that Yoshiko did not want her to hear our conversation. “I will pick you up when the store closes,” I said. “And we can have dinner together.”

  I was a little surprised when she said quickly, “Yes, that would be fine.” So her lover wouldn’t be coming for her after all. Maybe Yoshiko had already ended the relationship. Many things could have happened in the past year, maybe the other woman had been reassigned or sent back to the States. I was eager to find out.

  I had some difficulty getting away from a business meeting, and also avoiding the usual evening ritual of going out with my associates for a round of drinks. I thought she had already left, for I was twenty minutes late and, in Tokyo, because of the excellent public transport, there is no excuse. The big stores at the Ginza had closed, but not the boutiques. The taxi stopped right at the main entrance and she was there, maintaining solitary vigil. She accepted my explanation graciously, she had some knowledge already of my business interests but did not seem awed by them.