My research
It wasn’t easy to get hold of local history in Los Baños, though. You need access to books, obviously, and with the pandemic, going to the UPLB library is not without friction. I went the first time only to find out that I needed to book a chair online. I did that first, got approved, and returned the following day. While at the Filipiniana section, I was prohibited from searching for any book by myself. Instead, the librarian asked me for a specific title, something I didn’t have because the library’s online website was broken, and I couldn’t search for books there beforehand. So, I just asked the librarian to give me any books they have on Los Baños’ local history. He gave me three books, all of which covered a single story: the rescue of prisoners in the Los Baños Internment Camp.
I picked up the first one, The Los Baños Raid by E. M. Flanagan, and read the first two chapters, which described the camp, how it started, and where it was located. I was surprised to learn that the half of Freedom Park from outside Baker’s Hall until the Fertility Tree and that area along Animal Husbandry, Copeland Gym, and some parts of Viado Street were once part of an internment camp for Western or Caucasian foreigners imprisoned during the Japanese occupation. More than a thousand prisoners were in that camp; many starved to death from 1942 until the remaining were rescued by American forces in 1945. According to Jeff, my friend who is a history professor at UPLB, the liberation of the internees was successful. However, it led to the massacre of Filipino residents living near the campus by the Japanese. My reading hasn’t gotten that far yet, although I would say that this was an expected reaction from the Japanese. It is typical for wartime Japanese soldiers to violently channel their anger toward prisoners and their colonies whenever they faced a defeat.
I took a picture of the map of the internment camp and, after leaving the library, walked these parts of the campus to trace the map and figure out what current markers could correspond to those indicated in it. I have repeatedly walked on these parts for more than a year, but they never meant that much to me until I read the stories inside that camp.
Draft of a literary piece
In the early hours of morning, this part of the park is a communal space for joggers and athletes. Around 8 or 9 am, students join the mix of marching feet as they walk toward their first classes. The streets quiet down around lunch time only to come alive again by 5 pm when students and workers begin their attempt to slither out of the campus amid locals who enter the space with their dogs, children, and toys. The park becomes itself for about two hours.
Around 7 pm, that is when the park becomes what I want it to be. I walk from nearby Mt. Data to follow a consistent route that brings me into the park while avoiding the crowd.
While walking, I breathe slowly, accompanying the rhythms of my measured steps. I try my best to embody the great saunterers of history: Thoreau, Kant, Diogenes. But also, I let imagination take hold of me. I let memory of what I read about this park and nearby spaces graple me.
Because, before it was a park, it was once an internment camp.
I walk and try to imagine what this place looked like in the past, and the walk facilitates this thinking, facilitates this meaning-making
Tracing the boundaries of the internment camp
- share the story of transferring to LB and the motivations for doing so
- Share your desire to befriend the physical space you belong to. Past experiences of doing fieldwork and learning about the history of the road from Manaoag to San Jacinto, changes how I have viewed space.
- My method for befriending space is: read its history and walk.
- Introduce walking and how you see it.
- Introduce UPLB and its most accessible walking routes. Show maps per routes.
- Tell the story of Blanca.
- tell the story of serendipitously discovering the internment camp and spending an entire afternoon tracing the camp.
- Share the poem I wrote about Baker Hall.
Notes
February 23, 1945 2,122 civilian internees Breakfast of unhusked rice (palay) and ersatz (coffee)
Los Baños interment camp started in December 1942 when the Japanese when the Japanese sent 800 single males from Santo Tomas University, which they converted into a hospital, to the Agricultural College of UPLB. These males were from Cebu, which the Japanese captured in early 1942.
Prisoners were 3 days old to 70 years old. Ten nationalities:
- Americans - 1575
- British - 320
- Netherlanders - 89
- Canadians - 56
- Australians - 33
- Poles - 22
- Norwegians - 10
- Italians - 15
- Nicaraguan - 1
- French - 1
Talinum was part of the stew that was fed to prisoners at the internment camp during the last months of the camp. At 7 am, they were fed rice and coffee. At 5 pm, they were fed rice and a ladle of stew, with the meat, rarely availble, and concealed in talinum leaves, which the internees called New England spinach, tasted slimy and metallic). Their food worsened, eventually just rice.