In Focus:

of Sympathy
Sinai Hamada and the Power
Posted on February 24, 2015

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January 26, 2004

FRANCIS C. MACANSANTOS

Born in 1911 in Baguio City, Sinai Hamada was the son of Ryukichi Hamada, an
engineer and one of the earliest Japanese immigrants to arrive in Baguio at about the
time it was founded by the American colonial authority (Hamada 1975, 245) His mother,
Josefa Carino, was a native Ibaloi, and belonged to one of the most eminent families of
Benguet, although by marriage to a foreigner she risked certain disinheritance (Zenaida
Hamada-Pawid, interview by author, Baguio, 6 March 2002).

Hamada was a product of the public schools throughout, culminating in the University of
the Philippines, from which he graduated in 1937 in law and journalism (Hamada 1975).

I suspect that for most of us, Hamada, lawyer, journalist, and pioneer fictionist who
produced much of his notable work in 1930s, is a distant figure in the landscape of our
literature. One does not have to look far to see part of the reason for this lack of
familiarity. He chose to remain in the province, close to his roots. The limelight, then as
now, was in the capital. He was a lawyer and journalist there, a committed and effective
citizen until his death in 1991. It is quite likely that these two professions, notoriously
demanding in themselves, took away the leisure time he might otherwise have devoted
to his art. After his graduation, he produced little fiction, none of these quite as
memorable as his earlier work. For the cursory reader of the present generation,
Hamadas stories might, indeed, seem dated.

He himself might have felt ancient when he wrote, in an afterword to his 1975 collection,
that, No permission was sought for republication. The compiler would have loved
asking. Alas, none of the magazines in which the stories first appeared is extant. (Ibid.)
But he was only in his mid-sixties then, a time when some artists produce their most
mature work. Then it seems likely that his circumstances did not favor creative work.

And yet, sadder than the thought of such lost possibilities is the fact that Hamada has,
as yet, no true successor. In the PEN conference held in Baguio in 1998, this point was
driven home by National Artist F. Sionil Jose who, facing a panel of Baguio-based
writers asked what seemed to be a sarcastic, rhetorical question: Is there Baguio
writing after Sinai Hamada?

Most of us in the panel took the question in a negative light. I believe that had we not
reined ourselves in and chewed the bit, we would have committed the ignoble act of
rattling off the names of contemporary Baguio writers, awards, achievements and all. In
retrospect, I think it was fortunate that we checked such an impulse. For as Sionil Jose
explained to me in another, subsequent PEN conference, his question centered around
the mode of social chronicling that fictionists do, the kind that Hamada had pioneered in
the Cordilleras. He meant to ask whether anyone in the Cordilleras was writing that kind
of fiction now.

The most upbeat answer to such a question would be, Well, not just yet. The sad truth
is that Hamada still stands quite alone in the landscape of Cordillera fiction. Why this is
so is not an easy question, and not for us to even attempt to answer here. But certainly,
we must rejoice and be thankful that such a body of work as Hamadas fiction was at all
created. It comprises a world of its own, full of delightful surprises, passion, and insight.
And though sadly much of the actual world on which these stories are based is largely
changed, transformed or completely gone, the fictional world is still accessible and
vitally human.

In his introduction to Hamadas Collected Short Stories published in 1975, story-master

Francisco Arcellana makes a remarkably interesting error. He erroneously observes
although the sentence on the page seems to ring with absolute convictionthat all of
Hamadas stories are love stories (Arcellana 1975). A careful re-survey of the collection
will not bear this out.

The last story in the collection, for instance, Five Men and the Carcass of a Dog, is a
humorous story with a sardonic social comment. Compensation, the penultimate story,
is about social injustice. The Fall of Irisan Bridge deals with the betrayal of the
Philippine revolution by the ruling classes. The story Willy-nilly, whatever else it is, is
surely not a love story.

But the curious thing about this attempt to pick out contrary evidence is that we soon
realize we are nearing a dead end. On closer reading one or two other stories that dont
seem to be love stories turn out to be, in some special way, arguably so. In the end, by
what Atty. Hamada himself might have termed a preponderance of evidence, we may
have to agree, essentially, with Arcellana. His instincts were proven right.

Having reached such a conclusion, we next must guard ourselves against the possibility
of classifying Hamada with the sentimentalists. A good helping from magic helper
Arcellana will steer us from such a trap:

All the stories are love stories, not just of love sacred and profane but of love as charity.
Tanabatas Wife, the most popular of these short stories, is, in the opinion of the writer
of this brief homage, the finest Filipino love story ever written. Lin-eys Strange
Request, is to the same person the most cynical statement on love ever made by a
Filipino writer in a work of fiction (Arcellana 1975).

Arcellana instructs us on what Sinai Hamada is aboutno less than his heights and
depths, dimensions where no mere sentimentalist would dare tread. No, his characters
are not all gentle souls; they love and hate, suffer and inflict painor love so selflessly
their love becomes like the purest, most intense flame. At times the intensity culminates
in acts of violence (though never in the manner of self-indulgent social realism). These
are ordinary folks, mostly, and portrayed simplybut they are never flat, never run-of-
the-mill. In truth they are mostly non-conformists, law-breakers, romantic rebels against
tradition.

Don Gregorio, the wealthy social reformer of the story Sometimes I Am Crying is
reduced to penury by his repeated failure to win any election. One sees the passion and
constancy of a rejected lover in this quixotic figure, tragic in his failure to raise the
political consciousness of his community. One is happy to agree with Arcellana that this,
too, is a love story. And there are lovers galore in Hamadas stories. One such is a free
spirit named Baroy, otherwise known as the Pagan. Orphaned at an early age and
living by himself on the highest hill near a valley community, Baroy is enticed into
marriage by a beautiful damsel of the valley. He successfully courts her with precious
gifts, gold he has dug from the hill of his lonely abode. The community welcomes him
joyfully as its new member. Yet immediately after the wedding, he and his bride leave
the valley for a virgin land he had once seen from his mountain home. He remains an
outsider to the very end. In The Road to Alno, a boy is filled with obsessive fascination
by the romantic affair he discovers between a high-born maiden and a commoner. In
Kintana and Her Man, a young widow and a mulatto soldier of the invading American
Army discover spontaneous love, and are immediately married without word or ritual.
Beautiful Chaguysa, wife of a dying invalid in the story Death in Love, elopes with her
lover. For her perceived crime, the village closes its doors on her. In Lin-eys Strange
Request, a low-born but alluringly beautiful wife of a laborer instigates an infatuated
admirer into murdering her husband so that she can be free to marryher husbands
and her admirers foreman. In A Woman Hurt, two young lovers decide to live away
from each other to prevent the mans father from using their union as a means to
possess her.

Love and passion predominate the stories. But is that all? Is this themeor obsession,
if you preferan end in itself? For, if so, there is a danger as there must be in all
amoristic self-indulgence, the danger of a lack of insight, and its inevitable result:
sentimentality. Where is the depth that Arcellana promised us in his foreword? The
answer is quite simplewe are already there, at those depthseven the mere
discovery of such depths is already insight.

But there is surely more than that. I believe that Hamadas aim, or obsession if you
wish, conscious or unconscious, was to prove that the Cordillera native, far from being
tradition-bound, was entirely human, human as any other, his humanity shining through
exactly at the point where tradition has been broken. But why choose the path of the
amorist? Well, what else but the elemental emotions, to break man-made rules?

Beyond ethnicity is nationality: it is no coincidence that most of the stories where the
theme of love and passion is not central deal with love for our country, with the national
struggle for liberation. But beyond nationality is the struggle, the demand of the human
being for equality, respect, acceptance and yes, love. This latter theme is especially
dominant in the stories such as The Last Slave, The Call of the Huntland, and
particularly O Returning Day, where an erstwhile peasant, having made a fortune
through his skills as entrepreneur, tries and hopes to the very end to make himself
worthy of the woman he loves, a woman above his station.

Let us take a most extreme example, that of the lethal ingenue, Lin-ey, of Lin-eys
Strange Request. In essence, Lin-eys request, posed as a question to the construction
foreman of Will you marry me? is not really so strange as it may seem. It is really a
request to be allowed to move up to a higher, more humane level of society. In purely
human terms, it is a demand to be treated as an equal. And such a desire, such a
dream, is so alluring for Lin-ey that she uses a most heinous means to achieve it.

Hamada moves beyond ethnicity and nationality until, at last, he puts us face to face
with the human being. And this is true not only of the evil Lin-ey, but even more so of
Tanabata-san, whose love is so pure Franz Arcellana calls it charity (Arcellana 1975).
And so Hamada portrays Tanabata, the foreigner, the extremely other, as the paragon
of human virtue, the possessor of the truly civilized heart.

And yet even Tanabata breaks rules. The characters of Tanabatas Wife are none too
law-abiding. Fas-ang, the young woman who travels to faraway Baguio to find work
breaks tradition by agreeing to be the common-law-wife of Tanabata, a Japanese
national. Tanabata, for his part, crosses lines of ethnicity and nationality by this tacit
marriage that is blessed with neither ethnic rite nor state sanction. Later, Fas-ang, under
the pernicious influence of American movies to which she has become addicted, elopes,
Hollywood-style, with a town-mate she has met in the movie-house and returns with her
lover to Bontoc. This town-mate lover is a busol, a head-hunter, a man with a violent
temper who has been recently dismissed from his job in the American base for a rule
violation. This lover eventually deserts Fas-ang, and she returns to Baguio where
Tanabata takes her back, with great affection and without question. Among other things,
this a story of lawless people, right? True, but they are all the more human.

Essentially, though, Tanabata is most upright. He may have broken with some
traditions, but not with the human moral law. He is the only character in this story who
remains steadfast to his human commitments. Definitely he is not our stereotypical Jap,
whether brutal invader, slick businessman, or noble, virile samurai. Rather, he is a
farmer, unobtrusive, avid, attuned to the cycles of Nature, of planting and of harvesting.
His sensitive fingers coax the soil to bring forth life. More than just a vegetable grower
with an eye to profit, Tanabata is symbolic of mans urge to nurture. Only those who are
steadfast in their love possess the gift and power to husband the earth in all its phases.
The steadfast man as nurturera life symbol (1)such is Tanabata-san.

Ironically, it is he who is the other, the foreigner and stranger, who becomes the
paragon for a God-like virtue which Arcellana rightly calls love which is charity. It is
eros transformed into divine attribute. Some may stop to ask how a mere human could
behave so well. If we fail to fathom Tanabata, we will start to doubt his credibility. Likely
as not, we will view the storys resolution as forced, without adequate basis. How could
a mere man, a mere male, be so constant in his love, and so God-like as to possess the
power to pull all the loose ends of the plot together? Doesnt he remind us of that
deceitful deity of ill-wrought fiction, the deus ex machina?

The best place to look for evidence in his defense is in the earthor in his hands. Or,
more precisely, in what natural miracles occur when his hands and the earth meet. For
Tanabata is not just a trader of vegetables. Above all, he is a nurturer. In Tanabatas
garden, Fas-ang, when she was not cooking, stayed among the cabbage rows picking
worms. All that Tanabata did was to care for the seedlings in the shed house. Also, he
did most of the transplanting, since he alone had the sensitive fingers that could feel the
animate soil (Hamada 1975, 42).

These are the hands of a truly dominant male, a great lover who husbands the soil to
fruition. The secret to successful husbandry, as to all of civilized community, is in
patience, and unfailing intensity.

In the end, neither tribal law nor Fas-angs busol lovers feckless, anarchic machismo
can help him triumph over Tanabata, the man of substance. The restless and mobile
hunter loses out to the farmer because the hunter just cant stay put, literally or
emotionally. He cannot provide the moral basis for a truly humane existence, a civilized
society. As a matter of fact, neither can the wayward ways of the modern industrialized
west, fickle as Hollywood, illusory as the movies which had led Tanabatas wife astray.

The true lover husbands the earth, prods it to yield its bounty. This bonding with the
earth early on in the narrative prepares us for his elemental bonding with Fas-ang, and
is the true foreshadowing of the storys resolution. Thus, when Fas-ang finally returns
home with their child, it is as if the living essence of the long-abandoned earth, too, had
returned. Tanabata and Fas-ang become symbols of lifes mystery, its mysterious
fecundity, transcending ethnicity and nationality.

In his foreword to Hamadas collected works, Arcellana calls Tanabatas Wife the
finest love story ever written by a Filipino. Now this is the highest praise from the story-
master. But Arcellana does not stop there. He goes on to make an observation so
uncannily sharp that we suggest it become a heuristic device for the study of Hamadas
fiction, particularly for Tanabatas Wife. Arcellana writes, These stories are told with
the compulsion and great urgency that characterize the making of myths.

For quite a number of Hamadas stories that deal with love and passion, the eternal
triangle provides the infrastructure: Whos Home?(2), The Road to Alno, Death in
Love, Lin-eys Strange Request, A Woman Hurt, and of course Tanabatas Wife.
But it is in the latter that the love triangle appears clearly as archetypal.

Earlier we have had occasion to refer to both Tanabata and Fas-ang as life-symbols.
But there is more to the figure than that. Tanabatas garden, for instance, harks back to
a garden so ancient it might well be the most ancient of all.
Ordinarily, she [Fas-ang] was patient, bending over the plants as she rid them of their
worms, or gathered them for the sale in the market. Even her hands had been taught to
handle with care the tender seedlings, which almost had to be prodded to grow
luxuriantly.

When the sunbeams filled the valley, and the dewy leaves were glistening, it was a joy
to watch the fluttering white butterflies that flitted all over the garden. They were pests,
for their chrysalides mercilessly devoured the green vegetables. Still, their advent in the
bright morning would stir the laborers to be up and doing before they, themselves, were
outdone by the insects (Hamada 1975, 44).

The figure is old, indeed, but only because it is an allusion, though still recognizable
even if worms and butterflies have taken the place of the snake. Another snakeor
worm, if you likeis the busol lover, disguised as a butterfly. But perhaps the most
pernicious snake of all is Hollywood, purveyor of American moral anarchy.

In the end, Tanabata hurdles the moral challenge. And let us not forget Fas-ang either,
who with quiet courage traverses the barrier of ethnic norms. They are the couple to
watch.

Of course one must wonder why it is the foreigner, the stranger, the remote other who
becomes the paragon. In terms of artistic genesis, the answer must lie in the fact that
Sinai Hamadas father was Japanese. And even though Sinai was a month-old infant
when his father died, the Japanese community in Benguet kept in touch (Hamada-
Pawid, interview). In fact, the real-life models for Tanabata and Fas-ang were uncle and
aunt, respectively, to Sinai Hamada (Ibid.). No doubt, Sinai must have felt like a
foreigner, even in the land of his Ibaloi ancestors. But true to his creative gifts, he turned
this familiarity with the foreigner into a bridge of understanding, leading to the realization
that there really is no foreigner, there really is no other. There is only the human being
which is what we all are.

For the task of understanding this problematic creature, Hamada brought to his material
a broad and deep curiosity and a ready, unstinting flow of sympathy, a sympathy of
such a kind that, having gone through the gauntlet of otherness twice overfirst, as a
member of what used to be called a cultural minority and second, as a foreigner
emerged from the injustice with his literary sensibility intact, cleansed of any animosity
or resentment, truly Filipino and truly humane.

Afterword

In the wake of the Marcos flight to Hawaii in 1986, Baguio was the recipient of a visit
from poet-critic in exile, Epifanio R. San Juan, Jr. One of the most distinct memories I
possess from that period of ferment is the lecture he delivered on the story Tanabatas
Wife at Luna Hall at the U.P. College in Baguio. Employing the structuralist approach,
then a novelty in the country, San Juan laid out what he saw as the storys Marxist
framework, containing the latent theme of class struggle. The analysis was a tour de
force.

But what turned out to be just as interesting for me, in retrospect, is a seemingly minor
point he made at the beginning of his lecture. This was his reference to the reputation of
Tanabata Wife as the most anthologized Filipino short story on record. No one in the
audience then rose to dispute the lecturers point. In those times, the belief was widely
held. I, myself, held my peace. But I had my doubts.

Over the years I have found myself occasionally scouring my memory for sightings of
this particular story in anthologies I had come across. It is recorded that in the early
30s, the story found its way into Story, a highly-regarded American anthology. The
story is included in T. D. Agcaoilis landmark volume of Philippine short stories. I
remember reading the story for the first time in one of the anthologies published by the
Philippine PEN. I was a college sophomore then, at about Hamadas age when he
wrote Tanabatas Wife. Yet in the textbook used for our class in Philippine Literature,
then considered the most up-to-date, there was no Tanabatas Wife.

Beyond such sightings, memory fails. Or is it the facts that fail? Is the truismrepeated
by E.R. San Juan, Jr.really true? Isnt the truth rather that Sinai Hamada has been
gradually forgotten by critics and anthologists? Lately, I scanned through one of the
most recent volumes of short stories in English written by Filipinos. I report no sighting
of Sinai Hamada there. Hopefully, such critical lapses of memory will not occur too
often. Let us hope, too, that lectures on Hamada serve as mnemonic devices for a
people whose memory is notoriously short.

NOTES

1. For the term life-symbol which I prefer to use in lieu of fertility symbol or phallic
symbol I am indebted to Susanne K. Langers Philosophy in a New Key,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967) pp. 150-152.
2. Whos Home is Hamadas first published story.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agcaoili, T.D. Philippine Writing. Introduction by Edilberto K. Tiempo and Edith

L.Tiempo. Manila: Archipelago Publishing House, 1953.

Arcellana, Francisco. Foreword to Collected Short Stores, by Sinai Hamada. Baguio

City: Baguio Printing and Publishing, Co., 1975.

Bagamaspad, Anavic, and Hamada-Pawid, Zenaida. A Peoples History of Benguet

Province. Baguio City: Baguio Printing and Publishing Co., 1985.

Hamada, Sinai. Collected Short Stories. Baguio City: Baguio Printing and Publishing
Co.,1975.
Langer, Susanne K. Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1967.

http://ncca.gov.ph/about-culture-and-arts/in-focus/sinai-hamada-and-the-power-of-sympathy/

Reflections on the Tickler

Si Miss Phathupats

We have to be true and honest about ourselves and to other people.

Language is really a powerful tool for learning, so we must use it for the good and the right way.
We shouldn't boast about the many languages we had learned and we should not forget the
language that we grew up hearing and speaking.

____________________________________________________________________________

Ang Utos ng Hari

In reality, Teachers are not really the type of good person that society tells us when we were young.
They have different attitudes and characters just like the students. Every teacher is uniquely different
from each other. As long as the student-and-teacher relationship is good and that the student is able
to learn the good things and be able to apply it in the future.

___________________________________________________________________________

Sapay Koma

Life is a garden full of roses and thorns. Thats what I learned in the story. Not one life here on earth
is a perfect love story. The story portrayed reality. It certainly showed the complications that we have
or we can have in our lives. There are always ups and downs in life and theres nothing we can do
about it. What we can only do is make the best out of the situation. Life is certainly full of
Challenges
__________________________________________________________________________

How My Brother Leon Brought Home A Wife

True love, it doesnt happen every day. When it comes, be sure to grab it and never let it go. No
matter how many challenges come in your way, in order to protect your love with each other, youll
do anything to keep it. Love is something that should be treasured for eternity. In the story, the
characters showed that capability. Because true love always ALWAYS win against all the odds.

__________________________________________________________________________

Tanabatas Wife

Respect and loyalty, main things I learned in the story. First is respect, I learned that every culture
should be accepted by everybody else. Also, respect for your loved ones. For you to truly love
someone, respect and accept him or her for who he or she truly is. Second is loyalty. Loyalty is
something given to those people who we trust. I learned in the story that loyalty to your loved ones is
very important. We cannot love fully if we dont have our complete loyalty to them.

http://literaturalouisian.blogspot.com/2013/10/reflections-on-tickler.html