The Philippines Called, and Hiromu Shimizu Felt a ‘Response-ability’ : Wataru Kusaka / Rappler

Hiromu Shimizu

Article shared by Lou Mendez

I ran into this article about one of the students of Mary Racelis who is Japanese and a known anthropologist back in the homeland. Thought this would be of interest as a break from the doom and gloom of the UN etc. As a minor trivia, Mary also spoke at my university graduation ceremonies 1976. She is very much respected and admired in the academic community back in the Phils.
Lou

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Summary
Hiromu “Hiro” Shimizu, a pioneering Japanese Filipinologist and professor emeritus at Kyoto University, passed away on February 22, 2025, at age 73. Over five decades, he became a bridge between Japanese and Philippine cultural scholarship, deeply immersing himself in fieldwork among Aytas, urban poor communities, and post-disaster areas. Central to his anthropological approach was the idea of “response-ability”—a deep moral and intellectual commitment to accompany, not just observe, the people he studied.

Professor Mary Racelis, a leading Filipino sociologist and former UNICEF official, played a formative role in shaping Shimizu’s ethical and participatory research ethos. As his mentor at Ateneo de Manila University, Racelis introduced him to the value of reciprocity in Philippine society and inspired him with her engagement in the Tondo urban poor movement. Shimizu credited her as a role model for engaged anthropology, and later involved her in discussions about publishing his final book in English through Ateneo Press.

Shimizu’s influential works—including Pinatubo Aytas (1989), Politics in Culture (1991), Orphans of Pinatubo (2001), and Grassroots Globalization (2019)—focused on Indigenous resilience, popular movements, and cultural recovery. His final published book, Aeta: Future in the Ashes (2024), was a photo-rich tribute to Ayta communities he had accompanied for 40 years. He was working on an unfinished auto-ethnographic manuscript titled Our Father MacArthur at the time of his death.

Quotes
“In the Philippines, Hiro first studied in a graduate course of Professor Mary Racelis at the Ateneo de Manila University. He learned from her the importance of reciprocity in Philippine society… He regarded her as a role model of an engaged cultural anthropologist.”

“Orphans of Pinatubo (2001) presents many narratives of Ayta, which Hiro dared not to edit or analyze… He emphasized that the Ayta survivors had the voices and stories to tell, and we must listen to them first.”

“According to him, postwar Japan and the Philippines are not only perpetrators and victims of war… but also America’s half-siblings in Asia.”