The Japanese Occupation

The Japanese occupied the southern Cordillera with relative ease. On December 24, 1941, the Americans evacuated their military facility at Camp John Hay, and retreated east to the sawmill at Bobok, Bokod municipality. When they found their planned escape route a dead end, the soldiers scuttled much of their war matériel, lest it fall into Japanese hands (see Harkins 1955:22–24). When the Japanese threatened to bomb Baguio City, American officials entered negotiations; within weeks Japanese troops marched in unopposed. A few American civilians sought refuge in nearby villages, but most were eventually captured.

A few American military officials who eluded capture found the Cordillera a perfect stage for covert operations and the Igorots a promising group of guerilla fighters. One of this group's leaders, Captain Don Blackburn, had, along with Lieutenant Colonel R. W. Volckmann, escaped from Bataan and trekked back to the Cordillera (Harkins 1955:38). Once in the highlands, Volckmann and Blackburn organized a guerilla network, concentrating at first on building an organization and gathering intelligence.

The Japanese, meanwhile, had quickly reorganized the southern Cordilleran economy. They terminated all commercial gold mines while expanding the copper excavations at Mankayan (Fry 1983: 191). They also quickly established a new civilian government, staffed largely with locals; the first Igorot governor of the Mountain Province, Hilary Clapp, was appointed by the Japanese authorities (Fry 1983:194).

Buguias was little affected through the war's early months (1942 through early 1943). The indigenous leadership retained power, and life continued as before. Japanese occupation actually created

lucrative opportunities for some. Many Buguias families catered to the expanded works at Mankayan, selling fruit and vegetables to the miners and managers, and a few Buguias men joined a short-lived gold rush in the Baguio mineral zone. Here they extracted high-grade ore from the abandoned American mines until poison gases began to take a heavy toll.

By late 1943, intensified guerilla actions provoked the Japanese to interfere more directly in local affairs. Earlier they had organized villages into "neighborhood associations" on the Japanese model, but these proved ineffective in curtailing partisan operations (Fry 1983:198). Military authorities now billeted soldiers in Buguias, beloved of the Japanese for its hot-spring baths. These men at first established fairly good rapport with local residents, especially with the young boys they hired to help locate edible mushrooms and other wild foods.