MANILA, Philippines--The photographs and wall text that comprise the exhibition ?Hapones: The Early 20th-Century Japanese Community in Baguio,? in The Gallery on the lower basement of SM City Baguio, attest to the wealth of hidden history and cultural diversity of this mountain city.

Approaching its 99th year as a chartered city in September this year, Baguio has long been associated with the American colonialists who, as some outdated books state, ?discovered? and built this place to serve as their rest-and-recreation center-cum-sanitarium from Manila?s torpid heat.

The American presence lingers to this date?note the names of streets, roads and boulevards (Kennon, Harrison, Leonard Wood); the extant architecture and landscape (Teachers? Camp cottages, Brent School, Bell Amphitheater at Camp John Hay, Burnham Park).

But the Japanese? Much has been written about the atrocities Japanese militarists committed during the war and how Baguio was carpet-bombed to rid it of these Asian invaders.

?Hapones,? the Spanish term early Baguio officials used to call the Japanese settlers, speaks of a tranquil time early in the last century when 150 or so men from poor farming and fishing villages in Japan migrated to the Philippines and joined an international workforce that built Benguet (later Kennon) Road.

Most of them stayed after their contracts ended and went on to help the Americans realize their dreams of a colonial hill station.

Poignant

Some photos like the one of the Wright Park promenade connected to the Mansion House gardens prove how good these Japanese laborers were in learning American-building techniques. They were sought after as masons, carpenters, wood workers, and, as time went on, vegetable farmers, bakers, grocers, teachers.

They married women from the Cordillera. A Japanese-Filipino community thrived in the 1920s-30s until the war broke out, and a great cloud of suspicion fell on these people to the point that many were on the run and later repatriated to Japan despite no wrongdoing.

There is a poignant photo that catches a group of these men and women at ease in a picnic on one of Benguet?s meadows. A slight breeze stirs straying strands of hair. Delicate cups are filled with wine. All seems right with the world, but the viewer knows better?everything is about to shatter.

Rita K. Pengosro, a descendant of pioneer Tomoichi Kato who married a Bontoc woman and ran a silk-production business in La Trinidad, translated the older Kato?s ideographs written in ink at the back of a postcard: ?There was a white flower / And I thought of home / When I said goodbye / My tears flowed down / I remember the hill with the white flowers at home.?

At once there is a tug between the adopted home (Benguet) that accepted him and the home he had left (Fukushima), where, ironically, he was being sent on exile.

Victims

Curators Patricia Okubo Afable, editor of ?Japanese Pioneers in the Northern Philippine Highlands: A Centennial Tribute (1903-2003),? and Erlyn Ruth Alcantara culled the photos from different collections, many from family albums.

Foremost was that of Einsoke ?Rudy? Furuya, a Baguio-born-and-raised Japanese photographer whose father put up the Pines Studio on Session Road in 1920. Other sources were the archival and library materials from the US National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and the University of Michigan Museum and Art Institute.

Leopoldo S. Escaño, executive director of the Filipino-Japanese Foundation of Northern Luzon, said at the opening rites: ?Even if many of the Japanese men in the major concentration camps in World War II had returned home and were repatriated to Japan, all the Filipino wives and their half-Japanese children stayed behind, victims of a war not of their own making? (T)hey could not openly speak of their Japanese identities for more than 50 years. Today, many of these descendants are searching for their Japanese roots and identity??

As their search continues, it would do well for those who?ve made Baguio and its environs their home to acknowledge the ancestors of these assimilated Filipino-Japanese in their midst. Were it not for the efforts to restore these pioneers? place in the city?s history, they would have been effaced like paper cranes left out in the rain.

?Hapones? runs until Aug. 28. The Gallery is open 10 a.m.-9 p.m.