Book Review

There is a nation; a complex web of forces have fed into its creation—that much is clear. Historians try to decide when to declare a nation born and untangle the intricacy of the social process that preceded it. In this familiar task, we ask many familiar constituent questions. How did state formation intersect with social change? How did extraneous forces such as policies adopted by the colonial power shape the making of a nation? How did various segments of the local population exercise their agency? The two books under review—the Japanese historian Satoshi Nakano's scholarly monograph and a collection of short newspaper essays by the Philippine historian Ambeth R. Ocampo—engage these questions in the context of Philippine history. In some ways, these works could not be more dissimilar—written in different languages, focusing on different time periods, targeting different levels of readership. But they will inspire a reader in a strangely similar way.	1
Nakano's chronicle of the Philippines' emerging nationhood, covering a period between 1929 and 1946, offers a richly textured account of the Asian colony's tortured path toward independence. Rigorous in every respect, this Japanese-language work recenters the Filipinos in America's conflicted relationship with its imperial outpost. Those other than the colony's socioeconomic elite, often cast in peripheral roles in traditional diplomatic history, receive well-deserved limelight in Nakano's tale. Despite its dispassionate narrative style, the book delivers a poignant portrayal of the disfiguring weight of America's colonial presence in the modern history of the Philippines. It visits multiple social arenas, at both subnational and international levels, where disparate discourses and strategies for Philippine independence were created, contested, and pursued. This wide-angle view allows the author to demonstrate, quite persuasively, the real moral force the concept of independence came to possess as the fragmented colonial society's "national" agenda.	2
The process of decolonization was also laden with failed visions. The idea of social justice articulated in the Philippines' Commonwealth Constitution harbored the potential of a progressive developmental philosophy, but in reality it produced little beyond the most venal of pork-barreling that came to characterize Philippine politics and increased dependency on the United States. Their self-image as a benevolent and willing decolonizer notwithstanding, Americans lacked a coherent and workable scenario for the Philippines' autonomous future. Neither were they unwavering in their commitment to the colony's independence. Such confusion and ambivalence made them susceptible to manipulation of various sorts by the Philippines elite, allowed domestic interest groups to dictate policy, and generated ill-conceived expediencies justified in the name of military exigency in the Far East. Through it all, one recurrent question that dogged the Americans and Filipinos alike comes through: who should bear the cost of the Philippines' state making, and how. Nakano's brief discussion of the legacy of Japanese military rule shows another scar inscribed into the Philippines' modern history. His ability to organize massive technical details combines with his literary skills to create a highly readable and stirring historical narrative.	. . .