Curator’s note: In June 1991, I wrote the following research paper while an Anthropology major at UCLA under Prof. Michael Moerman, three years before my father, Pfc Eve, died. It gave me a chance to research the more human aspects of his collection.
What follows is the photographic odyssey of an enlisted man stationed in a Philippine village during the latter part of World War II.
These pictures do not reflect the scrutiny of an ethnographer, but the digressions of a man barely out of his teens who desired remember his humanity in wartime. They portray the everyday life of Leyte Island villagers during the period immediately following their liberation from Japanese occupation. Small details in the photos, however, illustrate how the war affected their normal routines.
This is also a very personal journey since the young man on the other side of the lens is my father. He snapped these photos during a three-month period from November 1944 to January 1945, while he took leave from his regular duties with a special army mobile photo unit stationed in Tacloban, Leyte.
The Japanese attacked both Pearl Harbor and Luzon in 1941, but Japanese occupation of Leyte did not commence until May 1942. In late October 1944, the American liberation forces landed with my father among them. His unit set up the mobile photography lab in the Tacloban Ice and Electric Plant, which later doubled as a “theater” and exhibited American movies to many of the surrounding villages (Nurge 19).
Almost seventy years old now, my father, unfortunately, suffers from severe dementia. I interviewed him on three different occasions regarding the pictures. Though he remembered many details of his stay on Leyte, they revealed little about the villagers and their life, and much about man’s inhumanity to man.
He possessed no real purpose for taking the photographs, other than the curiosity of any young man for a culture vastly different from his own. He relaxed by rambling through Tacloban and photographing people at their everyday tasks during his sporadic leave time. The junket to Leyte had been fraught with danger, and the unit would be ordered to depart for enemy-occupied Manila within a few months.
Since my father photographed village life from the eye of a portrait artist, not an ethnographer, Ellen Nurge’s study, Life in a Leyte Village, explained many of the ethnographic details depicted in these photos.
Nurge administered a mother-child survey in a village which she called Guinhangdan, seventeen kilometers south of Tacloban, approximately ten years after these pictures were taken. She identifies Tacloban as a provincial capital governing Guinhangdan and the surrounding district.
Her 1955 account of Guinhangdan surprisingly mirrored 1945 Tacloban of these pictures, which impressed me as a thriving village, yet not quite the large provincial capital Nurge portrays. Perhaps the fact that Tacloban served as headquarters for the American forces on Leyte accounts for its growth in the ten years before Nurge’s report. She alludes to the prosperity the Americans brought to Tacloban her second chapter (15).
Another ethnographic analysis I employed to describe these photographs was Case Studies of Farm Families in Laguna Province, Philippines. Although it covers southern Luzon in the late 1950s, this study is more agriculturally oriented than Nurge’s and illustrates many of the implements and processes portrayed in the snapshots.
The twenty-one photographs reviewed loosely fell into four thematic groups:
- How the Villagers Lived and Dressed;
- Rice Processing;
- Washing at the River—A Glimpse of Religion; and
- A Close Encounter With Carabao
My father’s personal comments, written on the back of each picture, are included under the hyperlinked entry. Together with the Nurge and Diaz studies, these photographs somewhat consolidate three outsiders’ views of a Philippine village. Unfortunately, none of the projects truly narrate the villagers’ version, but hopefully, in a few instances, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”
How the Villagers Lived and Dressed
Houses
The villagers supported and elevated their houses against periodic flooding by posts, as seen in Figures 1, 3, and 4. The section under the house is known as the sirong. In 1956 Guinhangdan, wood houses were taxable, but those constructed of bamboo and nipa palm were exempt (Nurge 20-21).
These palm thatch houses were considered a holdover of the older indigenous style and lacked prestige. Figure 4 (and above) shows a woman hauling thatched palm siding for a house, such as the one represented in the background and Figure 9. Wood houses in Tacloban do not appear to boast the prestige Nurge claims for their counterparts in Guinhangdan.
In fact, some of the wooden huts seem to belong to poorer families (see Figure 1), so the prominence of such residences might have increased in the decade following the war. My father could not illuminate the differences between the houses shown in Figures 1 through 4, and 9 and 10. Other details confirmed by Nurge include the well in Figure 2, which in Guinhangdan serviced several households, and wooden, cane-bottom chairs more common to wealthier families, such as the one shown in Figure 9 (21).
The building in Figure 5 closely resembles a sari sari store, described by Nurge as a four-sided roofed structure or shop usually facing the road (20). The frontage usually includes a counter with removable half-walls or windows. This particular photo also provides a glimpse of Tacloban during the Japanese occupation, as it was in fact taken from a roll of Japanese negatives. My father would not say how he came by the picture, but it was probably left behind by the occupation.
Clothing
Clothing in 1956 Guinhangdan was “strongly affected by American and European styles,” with infants and toddler wearing only under shirts (Nurge 19). Although missionaries, teachers, and government all influenced dress, the greatest inspiration came from American pictures, which ran in any town large enough to have an ice and electric plant (19).
Guinhangdan had no “theater,” but Tacloban had four in 1955. My father reports that in 1945, Tacloban had only one ice and electric plant which the photo company turned into a laboratory. The villagers’ clothing in all these pictures confirms Nurge’s report, but Figures 7 and 15 especially show the influence of the American forces, portraying many of the villagers wearing cast-off military clothing.
“Some more wash women. Notice the cigarette. Philippines 1945.”
Footwear
The most common type of footgear to both men and women, if worn, was the bakia, a kind of clog with a wooden sole held on the feet by a wide celluloid strip (Nurge 20). This description fits the shoes pictured in Figures 10, 11 and 12, which my father remembers the women predominantly wearing.
The bakia is completely practical “one may slosh in and out of puddles, shuffles across streams…and all the shoe needs is some drying” (20). They also marked the lower classes, as did the traditional woven hats shown in Figures 13, 14, and 15 (and above).