This article is based on a true character, a famous Japanese TV documentary producer and an intimate friend.

In Japan, during medieval days, Bushi meant warrior, and Bushido meant the way of the warrior.

Nishida (name changed for privacy) is a modern-day Bushi whom I met in Mindanao. He was a journalist and television documentary producer who became famous for exposing the Minamata disease (mercury poisoning) that was named after the town whose residents exhibited symptoms only after 20 years of cumulative ingestion of mercury-laden fish from a nearby lake.

As journalists, Nishida and I were covering a human barricade by residents against a bulldozer in a violent land dispute in Kidapawan, North Cotabato. The issue with the land is now a blur in my mind, but the people and circumstances are still crystal clear, including Nishida.

Nishida had asked me to join him in investigating a Japanese multinational that was tapping the hot geothermal liquid (magma) thousands of meters under Mt. Apo, the tallest mountain in the Philippines, for the energy project of the Philippine National Oil Company (PNOC). Mt. Apo is home to the ancient Bagobo (bago means new, obo means people, hence new people) tribe.

During the exploration, arsenic leaked into the rivers and caused health problems for both the Bagobos and their farm animals. It became a big issue in the media both here and in Japan. The PNOC was forced to re-inject the arsenic-laden liquid back into the earth during exploration instead of dumping it into the rivers. This resulted in the cooling of the magma underneath, which was the heat source for the geothermal plant.

During our field investigation, with armed PNOC escorts, Nishida nudged me when he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a place where we could take samples of the geothermal liquid. Knowing the escorts would not permit it, he ran to the place, escorts in hot pursuit, and scooped up a sample into a film canister. The escorts wanted to but failed to confiscate the sample, after Nishida told them, “Over my dead body.”

That was my first encounter with the modern-day Bushi. He would not budge despite the threats of the PNOC armed escorts. He knew they would not dare cause an international incident by arresting a famous Japanese TV documentary producer.

Another time, Nishida produced a TV documentary for TVS, a Japanese network, concerning reports that a large number of Japanese post-war stragglers had resorted to cannibalism on Mt. Kitanglad in Bukidnon. They were the largest known group of World War II stragglers in history. They were sentenced to death by a local court but President Quirino pardoned them later.

Nishida asked me to be the executive producer and coordinate the production with the locals, as well as be the translator to English of the interviews.

He later apologized profusely because he had run out of production money and could not pay me.

But two months later, when he returned to the Philippines after his documentary went viral on Japanese media, he gave me my “salary” — cash plus a brand-new top-of-the-line broadcast-quality video camera, which earned a lot of income for me later on.

Nishida, the modern-day Bushi, who helped report to the Japanese people what Japanese multinationals were doing in the Philippines, then receded from my view. He went into semi-retirement in his senior years, but remained an independent TV producer. He told me he would go crazy if he stopped doing exciting documentaries for Tokyo-based TV networks like TVS.

The two documentaries — on the cannibalism and arsenic issues — catapulted this modern-day Bushi into the hall of fame in Japan.