Thank you. Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast.

Episode 209 Across the Sea Part 5.

This week, we're going to wrap this series with a look at a few post-war topics covering

Niki communities and Japan itself. First, I want to take a few minutes to talk about a few

of the overseas communities we haven't discussed before. To start with, I want to spend some

time on the Japanese community in the Philippines.

Japan, of course, is far closer to the Philippines than it is to North or South America,

so it makes sense that the Japanese presence on the islands goes back much further than in either of those places.

Japanese traders and adventurers reached the Philippines back in the 12th century, but the first long-term communities of Japanese didn't settle there until the 16th and 17th centuries.

At that time, the islands were coming under Spanish rule and became a bastion of Catholicism

in Asia.

It's unsurprising then that the first Japanese to settle

in the Philippines did so because of their religion. Japanese Catholics came to the Philippines

in droves to escape the Christian persecutions that were the hallmark of Toyotomi Hideoshi's

rule and of the Tokugawa Shogun's after him.

The ban on the religion within Japan forced some Japanese Catholics underground,

but others decided that their faith was more important than their homes and fled to the Philippines.

About 3,000 Japanese, for example, came to the Paco district of Manila, led by the Christian

ex-daimyo Takayamo Ukon. This community has more or less been assimilated into the

Filipino ones surrounding them. Most estimates suggest that somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000

Filipinos

have some ancestry that can be traced back

...