Dinner

I just came home from a farewell dinner with Professor Yutaka Katayama, the professor who is responsible for bringing us here to Japan. The dinner was heartwarming, not just because it was a farewell dinner - and everything seems to be rosier and more sentimental when you have to say goodbye to someone, but also because it was really touching to hear a foreigner talk about the Philippines with such knowledge, and love for the Philippines as he does.

When he interviewed me for the scholarship, he asked where National Power Corporation was and I said it is in Quezon City. He pursued and asked "Where is it in Quezon City? Saan siya?" I was taken aback because, okay, he can speak Tagalog. And later when we were talking about lawmaking in the Philippines, he explained how he was involved in the enactment of the Clean Air Act, and he explained what provisions should have been included but were discarded in the Bicameral Conference Committee Meetings. And I thought, okay so I cannot BS this guy. He seems to know more than I do about Philippine policy.

But I eventually got the scholarship, and later we got the last subject he was teaching in Kobe University - Local Development. We have Japanese, Italian and Indonesian classmates but he would talk about the Philippines most of the time. He even tells us inside stories - do you know that the owner of this grocery chain is a smuggler and that his girlfriend works in the office of that official? He talks about things like that, which are not common knowledge to most Filipinos. He could not have gotten that from reading the news, but from being friends with so many Filipinos in the academe, in government, in the media.

Earlier, he was talking about the 1986 EDSA Revolution and how this event has been very significant in his life that he uses 1986 in all his email addresses. Anyway, he was a visiting professor at the Political Science Department of the University of the Philippines at that time. During the Snap Elections, he monitored the elections from a polling precint in Barangay Guadalupe Nuevo in Makati City. He was expecting something big to happen but from nine in the morning until half an hour before the end of the voting time, nothing much happened. And then in the last hour, goons with high-powered guns trooped to the precint and seized all the voting paraphernalia. He started taking pictures of what was happening. A goon who saw what he was doing aimed to hit him with a rifle but he said, "No, no, I'm friends with Barangay Captain Villanueva", who he said was the head of Barangay Nagkaisahan at that time, and won the Silver Medal in Boxing in the Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 1964." The goon spared him, and he escaped.

He went on to say that days prior to the EDSA Revolution, an official from the Japanese Embassy called him and said that some things are happening. He followed the news closely, as he listened to Radio Veritas. He learned that some people are going to EDSA so he went too. He was really moved by what he saw, and he took lots of pictures. When Marcos fleed from Malacanang, Katayama sensei was in Camp Crame and he witnessed the euphoria of some of the members of the PC.

He asked us about our plans after graduating from Kobe University. When he was about to leave, we gave him a pen and a planner and he was a bit teary-eyed. It is too bad that he is retiring by the end of the month to transfer to another university in Kyoto. He said that he is tasked in that university to create a department for international studies. I feel very honored to have met him.###