Eating in Prewar Davao: Japanese Migrants, Filipino Neighbours and the Abaca Frontier

Beside their house in Guianga, Cebuano plantation workers Narciso and Benedicta Lapaza planted durian trees. Patricia Irene Dacudao’s history of prewar Davao preserves this small domestic detail alongside the region’s abaca industry. It is a useful place to begin: with people feeding a household while working within a much larger export economy. Source 1

A food history of prewar Davao has to move between those scales. The plantation, garden, store, school lunch and town refreshment shop each reveal something different about how people ate. Japanese migration is central to the story, but it becomes more illuminating when followed through the neighbours, workers and families who made daily life possible. The result is more specific than a list of dishes said to show Japanese influence.

Abaca brought people; an export crop did not cook their dinner

The Japanese consulate’s 2023 commemoration connects the labour migration beginning in 1903 with two kinds of work: constructing Kennon Road in Benguet and producing abaca in Davao. Abaca supplied strong fibre commonly called Manila hemp. The account also presents credited photographs of a 1930s harvest and a Japanese classroom. Read together, the images point beyond a temporary crew of labourers towards a settled community with children. This commemorated movement is one episode in a much longer history of contact between Japan and the Philippines. Source 7

An export industry gives a region income and employment opportunities, but it does not explain a household’s dinner by itself. To connect the two, ask where workers lived, which food they could grow, what they bought and how they obtained it. Those questions bring the history into kitchens without pretending that a crop-production figure is a menu.

Lydia N. Yu Jose and Patricia Irene Dacudao’s 2015 article identifies a recurring imbalance: Japanese settlers receive disproportionate attention in accounts of Davao’s development, although they were a minority compared with Filipino settlers. A history of eating should not reproduce that imbalance by making Filipino cooks and agricultural workers disappear from the same landscape. Source 3

The landscape already contained food knowledge

Fay-Cooper Cole’s 1913 account of the then Davao District describes Bagobo rice cultivation alongside sweet potato, corn, banana, sago and coconut. Salt arrived through trade with coastal people and Chinese traders; a small local pepper, katombal, provided another seasoning. His account describes pounding and winnowing rice before pot cooking, and birds roasted with a covering of green banana leaves. These are recorded preparations and trading connections within a named community, rather than evidence of a landscape waiting for migrants to introduce food. Cole’s colonial terminology and judgements require care: his observations are selective, dated and not a complete account of Bagobo life. Source 2

The distinction matters whenever Davao is described as a frontier. A place may be new to an investor while already holding farms, cooking techniques, exchange routes and claims to land. Starting the story with a plantation’s founding date can erase the labour that fed the people who were there before it. Starting with food makes that omission harder to sustain.

Oliver Charbonneau’s archival study of U.S. military governance in the southern Philippines explains how colonial officials sought to reorganise labour and land around their own ideas of productive work. Existing agriculture, craft production and trade did not fit the supposedly idle landscape that officials described. This is regional context rather than a single Davao household’s testimony, but it changes the reading of an abaca boom: labour recruitment and agricultural expansion operated within unequal colonial power, not simply through an untroubled meeting of cuisines. Source 12

Inside the household, continuity and adaptation coexisted

Josefa Saniel’s 1966 study distinguishes rural Japanese households from affluent urban families and from employees living in more modest accommodation. It describes farm households obtaining supplies through Japanese cooperative stores, women working alongside men in fields, and a preference for Japanese food and chopsticks. It also records shoe removal in some rural homes and a mixed working language called Abaca Spanish. These are retrospective observations from a limited study, not fixed characteristics of every Japanese resident. They nevertheless show why neither complete isolation nor immediate cultural blending adequately describes the community. Source 5

The material house could carry both familiarity and change. The consulate’s museum account describes homes raised on stilts and built with local bamboo while retaining Japanese-style features, including a bathing arrangement. Shops, restaurants and other community businesses developed alongside them. Adaptation was therefore visible in the space around a meal as well as in the ingredients used. A household could preserve valued habits while altering the structure and materials that accommodated those habits. Source 6

Food identity is often discussed as though a person must either preserve a cuisine or abandon it. The household evidence suggests a more useful set of questions. Which practices required a special purchase? Which could continue with available materials? Who did the shopping and preparation? A change in the way a house was built does not establish a change in every dish served there; a familiar utensil does not prove that ingredients or daily circumstances remained unchanged.

Shinzo Hayase’s history gives another reason to resist a single image of the Japanese migrant. Families settled, women and children became part of the community, intermarriage created different household connections, and Okinawan residents had a substantial presence. His discussion also warns that widely repeated population totals are difficult to verify. For a food history, the useful point is the social variety behind the label Japanese: migration status, family ties and regional background shaped different possibilities for everyday life. Source 8

Company provisions, packed lunches and the work of eating

Evelina Ayson and Andrea Campado’s history of Mintal describes company-store credit and accommodation differentiated by workers’ position. It also records Japanese enterprises producing foods and drinks, including barquillos, cakes, sweets, soy sauce and soft drinks. Food commerce was part of the settlement economy. Buying provisions through a company arrangement also placed household consumption within a relationship of employment and authority. The presence of a store alone cannot tell us whether every family could buy what it wanted. Source 4

The company store raises questions that a celebratory account of commercial growth may skip. Was an item affordable in cash, available on credit or tied to the worker’s employer? Could a family choose another seller? How much work was required to obtain it? The surviving accounts do not answer all these questions for every plantation, but asking them gives prosperity a household scale. A well-stocked shop and a well-fed worker are connected only when access can be shown.

Ayson and Campado also recorded Julian Tomatsu Mani’s memories of school in Mintal. He recalled bringing baon, or packed food, and eating in the classroom under teachers’ supervision; teachers’ meals were supplied by the administration. His recollection gives the meal a location and a social arrangement without supplying an exact lunch menu. That distinction is valuable: an ordinary packed meal can be historically revealing even when its contents are no longer recoverable. Source 4

A sweet-mongo shop offers a precise kind of connection

Dacudao identifies the Kansendo Sweet Mongo Shop on San Pedro Street and the Uedo Sweet Mongo Shop on Claveria Street. Her account connects the refreshment with sweetened beans, shaved ice and a small addition of evaporated milk. Those named shops offer firmer ground than a sweeping claim about who invented a modern dessert: they place a particular kind of merienda within Davao’s prewar commercial life. Source 1

The shop is a useful unit of food history because it joins preparation, supply and a customer’s choice. The name on a business can identify its operator, but an explanation of the food also has to follow the ingredients, equipment and people buying it. None of those elements automatically belongs to only one national tradition. A history becomes richer when it shows the connections without forcing them into a single ownership claim.

This is also why a resemblance to a present-day dessert is a beginning for research rather than a completed genealogy. To demonstrate an unbroken line, one would need evidence of names, preparations, makers and transmission across time. The prewar shops establish a documented moment. They allow Davao’s own commercial food history to remain visible without asking that moment to explain every later version of a familiar refreshment.

Neighbourhood ties did not protect everyone from war

In a 2012 interview recalled by SunStar in 2017, Hiroyuki Mizuguchi described arriving in Davao as a twelve-year-old in 1932. His father made abaca-stripping machinery in Toril; his mother ran a dress shop on Anda Street. The report remembers his Filipino classmates and baseball teammates. At the outbreak of war, food again appears in his account: Filipinos brought provisions to Japanese detainees, while some friends were later killed by Japanese forces. These memories hold everyday attachment and terrible violence together. They do not allow friendship before the war to become an excuse for what followed. Source 9

The consulate’s museum account distinguishes the prewar abaca economy from the wartime use of fields to produce food for the Japanese army. That change should not be read backwards into the earlier period. A crop grown to feed a military force and a garden used by a working household belonged to different circumstances, even when both occupied land in the same region. Source 6

War interrupted the relationships that make a food business possible: a supplier, a familiar customer, a household able to remain in place. In writing about this rupture, it is better to retain the named recollection and its limits than to invent a complete closing scene for every shop. The surviving evidence can tell us that the social setting changed profoundly without supplying the last day on which each cook served a meal.

What the museums preserve—and what the land complicates

In Rudolph Alama’s 2024 report, IMIN Museum head curator Karina Melissa Yoshida Cadiogan, a fourth-generation Nikkei descendant, describes the institution’s work of remembrance. Founded in 1994 with support from Davao-born Uchida Tatsuo and renovated in 2019, the museum includes a reconstruction of 1930s San Pedro Street and an experience of low dining-table seating. These are contemporary ways of interpreting a vanished setting, not a claim that a complete prewar dining room has survived untouched. Descendants and curators remain active participants in deciding how that history is told. Source 10

The land also resists a simple before-and-after story. Alyssa Paredes’s 2025 ethnography follows later Japanese-linked banana production in Guianga and Calinan. In discussing earlier plantation land, she records local officials’ accounts that many Calinan abaca farms became coconut plantations, complicating a universal straight line from abaca to Cavendish bananas. That later research cannot reconstruct a 1930s dinner. It can remind us that even the ground beneath the food history changed through more than one route. Source 11

What remains most compelling is the scale of ordinary provision: a tree beside a worker’s house, a packed school meal, a purchase on credit, a named shop selling merienda. These details invite a history of Davao that can recognise Japanese settlement while keeping Filipino workers, Indigenous food knowledge and unequal access to resources in the picture. They make the past more inhabited—and the meal more than an emblem of influence.