Background:During the American colonial era, the number of Japanese laborers working in plantations rose so high that in the 20th century, Davao soon became dubbed as a Ko Nippon Koku ("Little Japan" in Japanese) with a Japanese school, a Shinto shrine and a diplomatic mission from Japan. There is even a popular restaurant called "The Japanese Tunnel", which includes an actual tunnel built by the Japanese during World War II.
For fear of discrimination, some fled to the mountains after World War II while many others changed their names in the attempts to assimilate. Many were also killed (c. 10,000 Japanese Mestizos and Japanese) while others were deported as an act of retaliation. Their Japanese identity may take on extremes, some have completely lost their Japanese identity while others have "returned" to Japan, the homeland of their forebears. There is also a number of contemporary Japanese-mestizos, not associated with the history of the earlier established ones, born either in the Philippines or Japan. These latter are the resultant of unions between Filipinos and recent Japanese immigrants to the Philippines or Japanese and immigrant Filipino workers in Japan. Most Japanese mestizos speak Tagalog and/or other Philippine languages.
They may also be known as Japinos, although this term is considered derogatory by many. There are believed to be between 100,000 and 200,000 Japanese-mestizos in the country, but no accurate figure is currently available. Thousands of war-displaced ethnic Japanese still live in the country and are denied recognition as Japanese nationals in order to return to Japan.
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