PREFACE: A FOREWARNING? The Pearl Harbor attack of 7/8 December 1941 created uncertainty as to the future among Philippine residents.  They included my parents and me, for we were unaware that an event of nearly a decade earlier (ca. 1933) in effect had foreshadowed our wartime fates.  That event occurred during a visit to Baguio, the country’s (nearly) mile-high summer capital, roughly 150 miles north of Manila.  One day we drove the 40 or so miles from the Pines Hotel (where we usually stayed) to Mount Santo Tomas, which is about a half-mile higher than is Baguio.  (Described in Wikipedia as a “potentially active” volcano, it last erupted in 1641.)  We parked at the base of the mountain and hiked up the steep earthen trail to the Lodge at the top (there was no road to the top then).  We had intended to return the same day, but rain, accompanied by premature darkness, compelled us to stay overnight at the Lodge rather than hike down the rain-slick trail in the dark.  We had no idea, of course, that our somewhat ill-starred escapade augured that eventually we would be involved, next time unwillingly, with another place also named after the 13th-century theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Santo Tomas.  Nor did I know that the unpleasant version of Santo Tomas would affect my entire post-1941 life.

[Note:   From our overnight stay at the Lodge, I remember several details: a blazing fireplace (something new to me); a cat that I played with; sleeping in my father’s shirt in lieu of pajamas; and a fabulous view of a clear sunrise, with clouds floating by below our elevated location, and Baguio in the distance, as it is in this photo from the mountain top.]
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I. INTRODUCTION.  In 1936 an instant best-selling book was published with the title My Ten Years in a Quandary and How They Grew.  Title and book were typical of the noted humorist, author, film actor and columnist Robert Benchley (1889-1945).  As it happens, his was one of the many books I read during my three-plus years as an honored civilian guest of the Imperial Japanese Army in Manila’s Santo Tomas Internment Camp (STIC) during World War II (WWII).  But obviously I did not foresee that, some eight decades later, I would modify Benchley’s book title to use for myself.  My story herein is the first of two accounts tracing the Camp’s impact on me, first during and then after WWII.  This first recollection is intended to answer one of the typical questions asked of ex-internees about life in a Nipponese prison camp.  (Unlike Benchley, though, my primary objective is not to elicit amusement.)

[Note: Thinking back to Nipponese instructions on preparing for Manila internment, I briefly considered the title “My Three Days in a Quandary — and How They Grew”; but I assumed that some potential readers would not would not understand the reference to the instructions that said to bring with you to the Nipponese processing of enemy aliens ‘enough food and clothing for three days.’ ”.]

Thanks to record-keepers extraordinaire Cliff Mills and Maurice Francis, my written answers to several of the aforesaid typical questions — necessarily centered only on the STIC scene — have been preserved and disseminated.  They have dealt with such matters as Camp living conditions, interactions with Nipponese guards, and the paucity of personal hygiene items (e.g., toilet paper).  The question to be dealt with herein is hinted at in the above title — specifically, what did I do (in effect, what was it even possible to do) to pass time during more than three years of enforced detention?  (And I had even more leisure time than did most internees older than I was, for when first interned I was too young by one year to be assigned a job.  Even when old enough, I was on an infrequently-utilized grass-cutting detail, composed of fellow teen-age males and equipped with dull and rusty scythes).  

The broad answer to the time-passing question is simple — while of course nothing out of the ordinary could be done, nevertheless many of the usual pastimes of life in the mid-twentieth century were available to the denizens of STIC both adults and non-adults. This narrative discusses the various pastimes chiefly from the perspective of the Camp’s non-adult members; the adults can speak and of course have spoken for themselves, in innumerable forums over the past eight decades.  As for non-adults, the concern here is with STIC youths — defined here to range from about 10-15 years in age — as opposed to younger children.  By way of preview, youths had available leisure activities chiefly involving sports, non-athletic games, and reading — plus their purely personal diversions from Camp life.  And a final introductory note on numbers — the Camp’s population of around 4,000 (sometimes more, sometimes less) included about 700 persons under the age of 21, and of that number roughly half fell into each side of the divide between 12 and 13.
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