Page 58 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

Part One

The Japanese had picked up Don Albino in 1942, along with other leaders of the
Chinese-Filipino community, for “anti-Japanese activities” they had supposedly
undertaken under the Commonwealth government. This very likely referred to
the boycott that the local Chinese had declared against Japanese goods when the
Japanese invaded China in the 1930s. The Japanese had kept close watch on the
boycott leaders, and Wash later discovered how. “When the Japanese invaded China,
Chinese-Filipino boycotted Japanese goods. And the Japanese at the time had a large
presence in the Philippines. I was told that my uncle Alfonso had a Japanese driver
before the war. At that time they were gardeners and drivers. It turned out that my
uncle’s driver was a captain in the Imperial Army. My father had a friend who was
the head of the Yokohama Specie Bank. He turned out to be a colonel. In Davao they
built a Japanese cemetery, and it turned out that there were no bodies buried there at
all. The coffins were full of guns.”

Albino could have spared himself imprisonment; the Japanese asked him to co-
operate in the establishment of their “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” but
he refused, and ended up in Muntinlupa, the national penitentiary. There he suffered
with fellow inmates like the young Jovito Salonga, who taught Albino how to plant
mongo beans in the prison grounds. Only the intercession of a subordinate named
T. S. Wang, who had learned Japanese while studying in Japan, later secured Albino’s
release. (Knowing what his father went through, Wash would much later provide a
donation of computers to Muntinlupa prisoners who were serving their last year and
who had requested him to talk about the Philippine economy.)

Wash’s brother Alex helped support the family while Don Albino was in prison.
Just before the war, he had been set to captain the UP debating team on a tour of
the US, but the war aborted that, and it turned out to be a good thing, because no
one else would have been around to provide for the family. He couldn’t practice law
during the Japanese occupation, so Alex went into the buy-and-sell business, earning
whatever he could.

The Japanese kicked the SyCips out of their home, and so they stayed briefly with
their neighbors, the Simplicio del Rosarios. A retired judge and fiercely patriotic,
del Rosario had been Leyte’s delegate to the Malolos Congress. Before the Japanese
came, however, the SyCips hid the family silver in the ceiling—where they found it
untouched, after the Japanese fled. It was practically all that Albino’s family retained
of their worldly possessions.

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