This is not about romantic love either, the kind that is portrayed badly by studio-fabricated movie pairs and post-adolescent, fame-famished entertainers channeled on television.

This phenomenon, puppy love in the Philippines, is a source of mirth for observers and mortification for the participants. So timeless, so obvious that it did not escape the attention of Mary Helen Fee, writing when the 19th century had turned into the 20th.

"Apparently the Filipino boy has no period in his development in which he hates girls. At 12 or 14, he waxes sentimental, and his love notes are the most reeking examples of puppy love and high tragedy ever confiscated by an outraged teacher. When written in the vernacular they are not infrequently obscene, for one of the saddest phases of early sentiment here is that it is never innocent; but in English, they run to pathos. One ludicrous phase of love-making is the amount of third-person intervention – an outsider thrusting himself into the matter to plead for his lovelorn chum." ["A Woman’s Impression of the Philippines"]

In maturation, Filipinos and other humans learn, or should learn, the purposeful, self-abnegating, and altruistic form of love. The type that is reserved for the significant other, and in the context of family. Notice the following testimony:

"Notwithstanding frequent absence, my father was the central figure of the family life – the light and warmth of the home. How well I remember how we girls raced to the front door when we heard the wheels on the carriage drive: the eager questions, the cheery replies, however tired he might be. He worshipped his wife, he admired and loved his daughters; he was the only man I ever knew who genuinely believed that women were superior to men, and acted as if he did; the paradoxical result being that all his nine daughters started life as anti-feminists!" [Beatrice Webb, "My Apprenticeship," Volume 1, 1938]

Ideal and true. Yet we know that humans can devote as much fervor to things. The Chinese people, for instance, "love nothing more than playing with money." [James McGregor. "One Billion Customers: Lessons from the Front Lines of Doing Business in China." NY: Wall Street Journal Books, 2005, p. 2]

The ardor for material things can mean kitsch or high-mindedness. The passion for ideas can be expressed as a penchant for the printed word. Writers in particular love books. To wit:

"There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazetteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies’ magazines of the sixties. For casual reading – in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch – there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl’s Own Paper...Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can’t borrow, and I never buy junk." [George Orwell, "Bookshop Memories," 1936]

Love in its adaptations, from schoolboy crushes to filial piety to obsessive collection, is painfully funny, admirable and fulfilling. Alas, there is one more variant. The love of war.

The brand that was preferred in Hitler’s Germany and Hirohito’s Japan. The genus that led Japanese military scientists to build a gas bomb experiment site in the Nei Mon Autonomous Region in China. The genre that victimized Manila and Elsa O’Farrell, harpist, who lost her bearings in consequence. The hue that blackened the world and gave the pretext to Japanese Imperial Navy medics to practice surgery on hapless Filipinos.

Nipponese emperor-worship was the excuse to rape Nanjing, the rationalization to rape Manila. Bushido and the cult of the katana was the upbringing of the militarists who perpetrated the Bataan Death March and the Thai-Burmese Death Railway.

The Japanese zeal for conquest was the source of their so-called comfort women system that included, according to Western parliamentarians, "gang rape, forced abortions, humiliation, and sexual violence resulting in mutilation, death or eventual suicide, in one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the 20th century."

"The government of Japan, during its colonial and wartime occupation of Asia and the Pacific Islands from the 1930s until the end of World War II, officially ordered the acquisition of young women, who became known to the world as ‘ianfu’ or ‘comfort women,’ for the sole purpose of sexual servitude to its Imperial Armed Forces." [European Parliament resolution of 13 December 2007 on Justice for the Comfort Women]

Green MEP Jean Lambert, who developed the European Parliament motion, said: "Over 60 years on, the ‘comfort women’ are still battling to restore their dignity. A resolution like this one is important not only for the individual but for the message it conveys." Dutch ALDE MEP Sophia Veld added: "This issue shows that it’s necessary to underline that women’s rights are human rights." [www.eupolitix.com/EN/News/200712/303a08a6-197b-42df-9425-bc36e5c8de3b.htm]

Menen Castillo, the national representative of the Filipino survivors who testified in Brussels in November 2007, was 13 when she was taken by Japanese soldiers raiding a village of Pampanga Province in 1942. Gil Won Ok of Korea was also 13 when found herself in a comfort station in northeast China. She caught syphilis, developed tumors, and eventually, a Japanese military doctor removed her uterus leaving her unable to bear children. [www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/good-news/breakthrough-battle-justice-comfort-women-20071221]

Nipponese chauvinism and militarism reminds us that "the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness FOR THEIR OWN SAKES." [George Orwell, "Raffles And Miss Blandish, 1944]