World War Two was a global confrontation between Good and Evil. The Allies (USSR, USA, UK) and the adherents of the Atlantic Charter defended the planet from the Axis (Germany, Italy, Japan) and the Fascist International (Partido Falangista, etc.). The former championed the democratic system, while the latter foisted a totalitarian way of life on peaceable groups and nations.

The Axis scheme of "racial purification" entailed the elimination of "inferior" humans (Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews). Japan, in particular, waged biowarfare against the Chinese.

Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army killed at least 3,000 people in Harbin, China. By injecting their prisoners of war with typhus and cholera. By inducing gangrene on their unwilling "experimental subjects." By performing vivisection on non-Japanese captives.

The Japanese Imperial Navy committed a parallel crime in the Philippines. Hirohito’s military medics severed the arms and legs of captured Filipinos as part of their surgical training. The imperialist navymen used 30 helpless Filipino men, women and children as "live subjects" for abdominal surgery and practice operations.

The nightmare happened in Mindanao from December 1944 to February 1945, and it only came to light a month before Christmas of 2006 when Akira Makino of Hirakata City revealed his participation in the grisly war crime.

Makino had sliced two Filipino captives on the operating table. [Kyodo dispatch, November 27, 2006]

This is for Ma. Rosario Beniga Charles (Project Management Consultant, Baguio), Jose Dadivas (Duty Free Phils.), Bernard Las Heras Fernando (AB Comm Inc.), Raine Grey (DLSU), Ma. Araceli Habaradas (Columbia University, Master of Laws), and Ma. Cristina Isip (Ericsson Telecommunications, Inc.).

World War Two became the fountainhead of an international struggle against long-term memory loss.

When Junichiro Koizumi was Japan’s prime minister, he kept on making pilgrimages to a Shinto shrine in Tokyo that harbors 14 Class-A war criminals. The public gesture is applauded by Japanese rightists, but infuriates the nations harmed by Japan’s criminal war of aggression.

South Korean comfort women are scandalized by the Japanese officials’ visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, while China has a policy of researching and publicizing Japanese war conduct in East Asia.

One of the latest discoveries is a 100-square-kilometer site in the Bayanhan Grasslands, Inner Mongolia, North China where Hirohito’s war scientists tested gas bombs on humans.

This is for Rowena Janeo (Senior Executive, Accenture), Joanne Bernice Kuan (Entrepreneurs School of Asia), Mamerto Montemayor III (College of St. Benilde), Pauline Paige Ortegas (Ateneo de Manila), Ma. Carlotta Pasion (Sugar Industry Foundation), Nina Rosario Rojas (Ph.D. Chemistry, Princeton University), John Benedict Sioson (Senior Associate, Roxas de Los Reyes & Rosario), and Aniza Legaspi (Artist).

World War Two was a historical moment of martyrdom and heroism for Filipinos.

Some 100,000 Manilans were killed in February 1945. Bayoneted and burned by the Japanese. Or bombed by the Americans.

Shrapnel from American ordnance pierced the heart of Maria Y. Orosa, guerrilla captain, Marking’s Guerrillas. Before she became a casualty of the Pacific War, Orosa served her nation by inventing "magic food" (powdered soybean, canned adobo), employing 400 students stranded in the capital city, and smuggling food packages into Japanese concentration camps.

Before Orosa, who has a street named after her, there was Supreme Court Chief Justice Jose Abad Santos.

Refusing to collaborate with the Japanese, Santos was executed by the invaders on May 2, 1942 in Malabang, Lanao del Sur. His last words were an indictment against both the fascist interlopers and their native cohorts: "To obey your command is tantamount to being a traitor…I would prefer to die rather than live in shame."

Santos, along with GSP founder Josefa Llanes Escoda and General Vicente Lim, are featured in the 1,000 peso bill.

This is for the participants of Ayala Museum’s Docent Training Program. World War Two was a traumatic period in Philippine history. Yet it also compelled a generation of Filipinos to fight and win for the Good. The Muntinlupa Raid, the battle for Ipo Dam, the liberation of Los Banos and the guerrilla raids on the armories of Union College and the University of the Philippines, among other victories, exemplified the mettle of the Filipino warrior.