Once the haven that welcomed the saints

Do you know Takayama Ukon?” our guide asked my parents and me, back in 2017, as we waited for our train. “He will be a saint one day! He was blessed here in Osaka!”

Our guide was a former salaryman who lived with his family in a rural seaside town. Life there, he said, was simple: you could eat fresh fish, walk through the streets safely, and read. He had come from a place that had learned its lessons and valued knowledge, kindness, and every minute of life.

He was always eager to talk about history. He gave us maps so that we could see where the ancient castles and forts in Osaka once stood. He pointed out the houses of artisans and craftsmen as he led us through the streets of nearby Kyoto. He was excited, therefore, to share any past connections between Osaka and Manila.

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He told us about Takayama Ukon then: how the feudal lord protected Christians at a time of widespread persecution; how he disobeyed the shogun, refused to renounce his faith, and was expelled from Japan; how he fled to Manila with hundreds of other Christians but died from sickness following the long sea voyage, in exile, in 1615.

His tone, however, dropped as he asked: “Is it true that your president shows off about killing people?”

“We didn’t vote for him!” my parents and I chorused, too ashamed to answer the question directly.

“I also heard that he has a killing squad,” our guide continued, grave. “Why would anyone vote for someone like that?”

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We couldn’t answer him definitively. All we could say was that former President Rodrigo Duterte was elected by popular vote, but we still couldn’t understand his appeal when he had cursed so many people, including God and the Pope.

I recalled the conversation last week, when Vice President Sara Duterte spoke to protesters at a rally in front of the International Criminal Court.

She boasted about knowing the going price for an assassin that she could hire to kill her husband’s hypothetical mistress. She claimed that the ease of procuring a gunman was a sign of widespread gun violence in the country. When the mainstream media latched onto her statement, she accused it of sensationalism, claiming that Philippine media could not stand up against the quality of their foreign counterparts.

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Then, when asked about Pax Silica (the international economic security initiative aiming to create a technology supply chain to reduce reliance on China), she said she couldn’t comment on it.

Pax Silica had been in the headlines for weeks. Its environmental and economic impacts had already been debated by the time VP Sara had been asked the question. Her bluster about assassination prices, coupled with her not even having a word for an initiative that could have dire repercussions for the country’s resources and well-being if undertaken recklessly, made human life sound even more trivial in the words of someone who had vowed to serve the nation.

How cheap human life had become to her, if she knew so much about the machinery of a seedy criminal underworld, but had not even bothered to study an initiative with direct consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods.

How cheap the truth has become, as her online supporters echo her offline bluster, and as they reframe current news and recent history, discredit good public officials, mock evidence and testimony, and threaten violence on those who criticize their views.

How cheap human dignity has become, in this haven that once welcomed those who would later be saints.

Anyone with less discernment would have shrugged off our guide’s questions back then, on that Osaka train platform. Anyone with less tact might even have quipped, “Well, back in World War II, when Japan invaded us…” but those words would have been both a logical fallacy and a useless statement.

The question our guide had posed was not out to seek confirmation of a rumor, nor was it the prelude to a competition on which country had a more sordid past, a more brutal leader, or a greater propensity for violence.

His question probed the contrast: how could a country, once high in its ideals and close to goodness, have stooped so low and gone so far?

Our country had once been a refuge for the faithful fleeing persecution. We were once a colony, and we fought our colonizers with the violence of both sharp pen and bloody rebellion; but we welcomed the fellow suffering with kindness precisely because we knew what it was like to be abused, undervalued, and unwanted.

In speaking so casually about assassination, and then castigating the media for echoing her words, VP Sara simply showed how strongman rule can damage a country that is, in its very heart, good. The normalization of violent rhetoric has turned us into a society that relies on brute force rather than careful judgment, on crude words rather than empathy.

It is no longer the hopeful shore that Takayama Ukon and hundreds of Christians sailed to, as they sought solace, silence, and sanctuary. They would not have recognized the land we have become.

We can barely even recognize it ourselves.

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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu