1910 Japanese Map of the Administrative Divisions of the Philippines

This is a c. 1910 Japanese lithograph map of the Philippine Islands. It shows the provinces and provincial capitals of the Philippines either at the very end of the 19th century or the early 20th century.

A Closer Look at the Map

This map delineates the provinces of the Philippines and their provincial capitals. An inset at top-left shows Batanes Province, a small collection of islands between Taiwan and Luzon. At bottom-left is the portion of Borneo that at that time was the British protectorate of North Borneo. The map uses Greenwich as the prime meridian rather than Tokyo, as was often the case with Japanese maps of this era.

Revolution and American Imperialism

This map likely dates from the late 19th or early 20th century, a period when the Philippines went through rapid and dramatic changes. By the early 19th century, the Spanish colonial system that functioned for three centuries began to break down and the Spanish employed increasingly harsh methods to suppress independence. These developments intersected with the 1898 Spanish-American War, when Americans backed the Emilio Aguinaldo (1869 - 1964) independence faction. At the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, the Philippines were granted to the U.S. and American troops occupied Manila. Tensions grew between U.S. forces and the indigenous revolutionaries, who were unhappy to have been passed from one colonizer to another. Conflict broke out in February 1899, with Emilio Aguinaldo leading the revolutionaries against his former backers. After three years of intense conflict, often combined with atrocities against civilians, most of the rebels were been captured or suppressed, though some continued to fight for another decade. The Philippines was given a degree of autonomy, but full independence would have to wait nearly 50 years; meanwhile, American influence fundamentally changed the diverse cultures of the island nation.

Japan-U.S. Tensions in the Pacific

At the same time that these momentous events were unfolding in the Philippines, Japan was completing an incredible transformation from an insular, feudal state into a modern, industrialized empire. Japan-U.S. relations were quite complicated in the late 19th and early 20th century, as the two countries were clearly the rising powers in the Pacific. The Japanese government was also continually irked by discrimination against Japanese-Americans and Japanese in Hawaii. Some stability was provided by the Taft-Katsura Agreement, crafted on the sidelines of the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905) that ended the Russo-Japanese War (1904- 1905). But the danger of a war between the two countries over the Philippines was everpresent.

The Japanese Community in the Philippines

Given overpopulation and limited resources in Japan, the government actively promoted emigration and many thousands of Japanese migrants settled throughout the Pacific, including the Philippines. Eventually, this group of Japanese settlers, many of them men who married local women, formed part of the commercial class in Manila, Davao, and other port cities. Whether justified or not, both the Japanese and American governments viewed this community as a force for increasing Japanese influence in the Philippines, and some ultranationalists and militarists in Japan advocated for capitalizing on this influence well before the outbreak of the Pacific War.

Publication History and Census

This map contains no publication information. The administrative divisions appear to be from the very late Spanish colonial period (for example, Iloilo was only made an independent city in 1890) or from the early period of American rule.