Soft-spoken diplomat mirrors sincere partner

Kazuya Endo cannot sing.

He cannot golf, either, according to Kazuya Endo.

This is how you begin to find the Japanese ambassador behind all the diplomatic upholstery.

You ask about the President, eventually the man confesses to singing badly. You ask what he eats in the Philippines and the Indo-Pacific disappears.

“Sisig,” he says. Then he improves the answer.

Preferably “after my terrible play of golf.”

With beer.

You don’t quite expect the man.

The countries have been doing some pretty heavy business together: trains, money, China. Especially China.

Ships, radar, the BRP Teresa Magbanua, BRP Melchora Aquino, big ships and real steel, diplomacy you can stub your toe on.

The future was bright; the partnership was entering a golden age. Japan and the Philippines mark 70 years of diplomatic relations.

Seventy years. A hell of a time to arrive. You expect the man standing in the middle of all this to have elbows and the appetite for the center of the photograph.

Endo does not seem to. He is modest, soft-spoken, easy on the eyes. Almost boyish sometimes. He smiles and doesn’t come at you, doesn’t have that big-shot imperial diplomat swagger beneath where a man enters only after his title had arrived five minutes before he did.

Endo almost disappears inside his. Then he talks. “I am honored to serve and shoulder this responsibility to be the bridge between our two countries at a time like this,” he said when he arrived in Manila.

Endo called himself a bridge. A bridge. A bridge over what?

The answer is strange because almost nobody thinks of it anymore.

Japan now means sushi, Toyotas, Uniqlo, anime, Hibiki, cherry blossoms, cheap flights to Osaka.

That wasn’t always Japan.

For a generation of Filipinos, Japan meant war, most of us have become lucky enough to forget.

The war left deep scars in the Philippines.

Manila was devastated, and many families lost loved ones. Those memories cannot be fully addressed by words or material assistance alone; they require remembrance, understanding, and a commitment to lasting friendship.

Before the bridge came reconciliation, there was a closed door — and behind it, 105 Japanese war criminals. On the other stood Elpidio Quirino. There was no cheap grace in this. The Japanese had killed members of Quirino’s own family. His family. Not somebody else’s names carved into somebody else’s stone. He knew exactly what Japan had taken, then he opened the door anyway.

That wasn’t a bridge yet. One side lays a plank. The other lays another. Somebody comes back. Somebody does business. Somebody hires somebody. Somebody falls in love. A Filipino kid goes to Japan. A Japanese family makes a life here. A Filipino sailor boards a Japanese ship. A Japanese tourist lands in Manila. A Filipino tourist lands in Tokyo.

Bridge between cultures

Somebody learns the other guy isn’t the story his grandfather told him.

Then their children meet.

Then their grandchildren don’t understand why this was ever strange.

And, one day, nearly 85 years after Japanese troops invaded the Philippines, Japanese troops are here again.

This time the Filipinos are waiting for them. Not to fight them. Train. Beside them.

The old uniforms once meant run. Now they mean your friend showed up. Nobody planned that ending in 1945.

That’s one hell of a bridge, Ambassador Endo.

And nobody did all this because Tokyo woke up one morning misty over Manila.

Come on.

Japan needs us. We need Japan. That’s the deal.

A lot of Japan’s trade comes through these waters. Japanese companies have money riding around this neighborhood. Tokyo doesn’t particularly want one big country deciding who gets to do what in the West Philippine Sea.

The Philippines, meanwhile, could use the hardware, the jobs, a rich friend up north who has been watching China a lot longer than we have.

Nobody is handing out Christmas presents. Both ends of the bridge have skin in it. And, after enough years of needing each other, people start liking each other.

Filipinos go nuts for Japan. Japan issued more than half a million visas to Filipinos last year, Endo said.

Young Filipinos go there to study and teach. Filipino crews work Japanese ships. Japanese-Filipino families in Baguio and Davao go back generations.

The government calls it people-to-people relations.

Endo gets out of Manila. General Santos, Cotabato, Baguio, Davao, farms, fish ports, people. He says Tokyo needs to know the “real situation” in the Philippines. You aren’t going to find all of it at a reception in Makati with a morsel of salmon on a cracker.

Maybe that’s why Ambassador Kazuya Endo grows on you.

Here is a Japanese ambassador sitting on top of one of the biggest changes in Philippine-Japan relations since the war, and he keeps talking about everybody who came before him.

Endo arrived late to his own metaphor. He didn’t build the bridge. He would probably hate it if you said he did. He gives the credit backward.

It sounds like modesty, the usual bow from a careful man. After a while it occurs he is simply telling a fact.

His turn was more streamlined. Strengthen the bridge. Expand the ties. Efficient, targeted and free of historical burdens or heavy crisis management.

That’s the thing about bridges.

Nobody remembers the bridge when the crossing is smooth.