BAGUIO CITY -- The country’s mining industry in Northern Luzon stayed vibrant during World War II, and journals of the Mitsui Group of Companies showed it was because of harmonious Japanese ties with local miners during that period.

This was according to a Japanese paper read during the First International Conference on Cordillera Studies at the University of the Philippines Baguio last week.

Serizawa Takamichi, a social science faculty member of the Tokyo-based Hitotsubashi University, said there is evidence to suggest that underground guerrillas allowed the region’s mines to operate under some form of informal cooperation with the Japanese, which he called the “Grey Zone.”

Takamichi said interest in mining was a logical extension of the Japanese occupation.

The Americans had triggered a gold rush in the Cordillera when their government colonized the Philippines, and US speculators ended up building the first mines.

Benguet Corp. is the country’s first mining company.
The gold rush drove up metal prices in under 20 years, drawing more people to Baguio and Benguet to try their luck, Takamichi said.

He said the price of gold in 1928 was valued at P3.8 million, but it shot up to P23 million by 1934; P44.4 million by 1935; and P50 million by 1937, based on the notations of the 1939 Philippine Mining Yearbook.

During this period, Japanese demand for copper, iron and nickel to produce military equipment grew and mines like the copper operations of the Lepanto Consolidated Mining Corp. (which the Americans built in 1936) became a strategic target.

For Japan, the lack of domestic mineral resources was a problem for maintaining and expanding its colonial territories. For the Philippines, transportation of base metal ores was costly, but exporting these ores to Japan was easier than exporting them to other imperialist nations,” Takamichi said.

He said this meant “the growth of Philippine base metal production played a key role in the expansion of Japanese imperialism.”

Americans also depended on Philippine base metal production in the 1940s before the start of the Pacific War.

But Takamichi said there were two episodes in American colonialism, which were the key to explaining the foothold the Japanese had in successfully reactivating the industry during the war.

“[First], after the invasion of American gold hunters and the enforcement of the 1903 mining law, the baknang (Ibaloi rich) could no longer efficiently maintain [their] leadership over] the clan,” he said.

The baknang are synonymous to today’s landed rich, who kept stables of family workers to work for them.

With US replacing Ibalois from the gold mines, the baknang lost their wealth and families who depended on the rich Ibalois ended up working for the Americans as unskilled wage earners.

Takamichi said the second factor involved the entry of “civilized” labor, represented by schooled workers from the lowlands. Their entry into the industry further alienated the Igorots who used to mine the region.

When the Pacific War broke out in December 1941, the United States ordered “the mines in the Philippines destroyed,” leaving thousands of unemployed miners in their wake.

Takamichi said US military forces recruited many of these miners as guerrilla troops when they destroyed the Suyoc Mines and the LCMC in 1942.

He said it was an interesting situation for Mitsui Mining Co., which managed to recruit the same workers back in order to reactivate the mines.

One of Japan’s oldest firms, Mitsui was started by Takatochi Mitsui who built an economic empire from textiles until his death in 1694.

Mitsui Mining had no problem hiring back Igorot laborers to resume work on the Antamok Mines of Benguet Corp. in 1942.

There is reason to their madness, said Takamichi, which can be drawn from the “Mitzui Kinzoku Shushi Ronso Bessatsu (a 1972 collection of essays based on memoirs used in the company bulletin during the war).”

Takamichi said the Mitsui employees respected the schooled Filipinos “who had been accustomed with Western lifestyles,” and their facility for English.

“Japanese miners realized their inability to develop mining operations the way Westerners previously [ran the mines],” he said.

But the Japanese memoirs indicated that the Mitsui employees have discovered they could better associate with the Igorots.

“They compared [the Ibaloi] G-string to Japanese fundoshi (a roll of cotton which Japanese men wrap around as a form of underwear).”

According to Takamichi, local networks of guerrillas and the so-called Japanese collaborators acted as a “safety net” to protect the Igorot miners and Mitsui Mining from “the cruelties of Japanese military operations in the Philippines.”

Bado Dangwa, a well-known Ibaloi businessman who founded in 1920s the bus company named after him, was a guerrilla leader who was related to Mitsui’s private police chief, William Ola.

According to Takamichi, Mitsui Mining felt protected against attacks from Dangwa as long as Ola was in charge. The guerrillas also benefited from Mitsui’s stable food supply.

Giovanni Reyes, a third-generation Igorot, said his grandparents were caught up in the “Grey Zone,” but were later ostracized as collaborators and were never buried home.

He said this is the downside to the story Takamichi tried to put together in his paper.

“My granfather, Deki, worked for Mitsui Mining in Mankayan town [Benguet] as a bridge contractor. During the war, he and my grandmother were perceived as collaborators although they helped protect the guerrillas,” Reyes said.

He said his grandmother was so traumatized that she broke a Benguet rule that required families to bury their dead near their homes.

With a report from Elmer Kristian Dauigoy, Inquirer Northern Luzon