LAST weekend, April 9, was a holiday commemorating the Fall of Bataan, when the United States Army in the Far East (USAFFE) surrendered to the Japanese Imperial Army in one of the renowned battlefields of World War 2.

I decided to read a book that was much related to World War 2 in the Philippines, The Indomitable Florence Finch by Robert Mrazek. As I read it, it brought me to another book of World War 2 in the Philippines from another perspective, Kiyoshi Ozawa’s A Japanese in the Philippines. In fact, both books speak to each other, with the same characters, few as they may be. The first, just out last year, was written by a former US congressman who is now a military historian and the author of a number of books in the field, and the other is an autobiography by a Japanese who came to the Philippines as an emigrant to Mindanao in the 1920s and lived through the war in the Philippines.