Japanese troops welcomed back in typhoon-hit Philippines

More than 1,000 Japanese troops were offered a warm welcome in the Philippines on Friday as they prepared to launch relief operations across the typhoon-devastated islands, which Japan brutally occupied seven decades ago.

The troops were aboard 3 vessels that arrived at the central Philippine port of Cebu, an official at the Japanese embassy said, in what is the biggest overseas deployment of Japan’s military since its defeat in World War II.

They will join a huge international relief effort to help survivors of Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), which flattened dozens of towns through the central Philippines on  8 November, leaving at least 5,600 dead or missing according to latest reports.

‘We have already delivered small amounts of aid but the main effort will begin after a meeting with Philippine forces on Friday,’ Takashi Inoue, deputy director of public affairs with the Japanese embassy in Manila, told the a news agency. 

Japan’s contribution to the humanitarian effort comes as a newly-confident Tokyo looks to make its mark again on the world order, after decades in which the idea of its troops on foreign soil was complete anathema.

In many parts of Asia, memories linger of the brutality of invading Japanese soldiers prosecuting an expansionist romp through the region in the name of the emperor.

In a twist of historic irony, the Japanese troops are returning to areas of the Philippines that saw Japan lose one of history’s biggest naval battles to the US-led Allies. Eulalia Macaya, 74, who survived World War II and the typhoon, said she remembered being terrified by Japanese troops as a little girl.

‘We were hiding in holes dug under the floor of our homes,’ she recalled. ‘The Japanese soldiers were patrolling but we couldn’t see much of them. We could only see their boots. We were so afraid.’ But Macaya, who was waiting for treatment at a temporary field clinic set up by the Japanese government in Tacloban, the typhoon-ruined capital of Leyte, said she was very pleased the former occupier was back.