WAR IS NOT ALWAYS BLACK AND WHITE

 

BALTAZAR "BJ" BORDALLO AND FAMILY

In the Hågat civilian refugee camp in 1944

A simplistic view of life paints everything black and white. There are the good guys and the bad guys, and a bag guy is all bad and a good guy is all good.

The reality of life is a mixture of more colors than black and white.

Take the Japanese Occupation, for instance.

Many people who went through that Occupation have told me a story of mixed colors. Some Japanese were good people, hating the war and hoping for a quick end. Some Saipan interpreters actually saved some Guam Chamorro lives. Some Guam Chamorros got other Guam Chamorros in trouble with the Japanese. Colors mixed every which way.

Madeleine Bordallo shared with me an anecdote she learned from her late husband, former Governor Ricardo Bordallo, and from her Bordallo family.

When Josephine, wife of Baltazar Bordallo and mother to over a dozen Bordallo children, including Ricky, gave birth to a baby boy in 1942, right during the Japanese Occupation, mother and father showed their American patriotism right in the face of Japanese power by naming the baby Franklin Delano, the given names of the US President at the time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Sadly, the baby died in infancy.

BORDALLO BABY NAMED AFTER PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT

AND YET....

YOUNG JAPANESE SOLDIER

And yet Josephine befriended a Japanese soldier during the Occupation.

The soldier, who had one or two siblings, was amazed when he saw the BJ Bordallo family, with parents trying to manage over a dozen children, as old as twenty and as young as a newborn.

Sparking up a conversation with Josephine, the soldier took out his family photo and showed her his relatively small family of four or five total members.

Josephine was moved by the soldier's humanity and invited him to Bordallo family meals when it was possible for him to be there. In time, of course, with the Americans returning, the Japanese soldier went his way and was never heard from again.

BJ Bordallo told the story how he, being one of the island's leading businessmen and politicians, was sometimes "invited" to join the high-ranking Japanese officers at dinner parties. Such invitations were commands that couldn't be turned down.

Bordallo would be "asked" to rise and give a toast to the attending Japanese. "I used to do a lot of acting," he said, meaning that he would praise the Japanese with much ardor, but not mean a word of it. But, he said, the Japanese were easily fooled.

More stories could be told about BJ Bordallo's experience of the Japanese Occupation to show how real life is not so black and white, but the Bordallo's friendship with a Japanese soldier serves to make the same point. Other Chamorro families, including my own, had similar friendships with some Japanese soldiers who had no love for war.