Searching for my father's memory in Japan

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n the mid-1950s, “Cyrano de Bergerac” the movie was showing in Manila theaters when a group of college guys watched it together. Starring the Puerto Rican actor Jose Ferrer, who won an Oscar for his role, the hit film was faithful to the classic play of the same name.

The group of college guys had been rehearsing the play for a theater production at their school, Ateneo de Manila.

As posses of young men have been wont to do since time immemorial, they could act like a pack of wolves, feeding off each other’s excess energy. In this case, they were quite harmless and a bit more refined than other examples I could give of such posses, but no less audacious.

Fresh from theater rehearsals, they immediately recognized the play’s immortal lines, stood as one in the darkness and began a full-throated recitation of the lines as the characters, especially Ferrer’s Cyrano, delivered them. It was an early, less orchestrated version of a flash mob.

The rest of the audience, quite understandably, was rather annoyed. Drunk with youthful exuberance, these amateur performers didn’t care, concealed in the dark like Cyrano and eager to show off their thespian chops in something akin to a cultured fraternity stunt.

One of those gleeful college guys was my father.

I had known him most of my life as a reserved diplomat who didn’t talk much about his youth. He certainly didn’t tell me about that movie-theater caper where he and his buddies all channeled their inner love-struck, frustrated Cyrano.

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ince my dad died nearly six years ago, I’ve been trying to fill in the gaps in his life I never knew about, especially his college days, a happy and exhilarating time from the little he told me.

I reached out online to his college friends, now a rapidly dwindling cohort hitting their 90s. I had met a few of them when my dad was alive, as they got together often through the decades, sometimes to sing their old glee club songs. They were as close as any group of aging friends. One of them was my lone ninong at my baptism.

Some time during the pandemic, one of his college friends, whom I had never met and never even knew about, messaged me with an offer to share his Google drive of old photographs.

It was the artist and photographer in the class, Amadio Arboleda, also known as Bobby, whom I began to call Tito Bobby. He left the Philippines right after college and lived in various countries before finally settling in Japan where he has been married to a Japanese woman.

The author's father, Sepoy Severino, second from right, next to Doreen Gamboa, later known as Doreen Fernandez, the scholar and writer, at a college party in 1955. Photo by Amadio Arboleda

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ito Bobby’s archive of vintage photos turned out to be a panoramic window into a charmed chapter of my father’s life.

In nostalgically hazy black-and-white images, baby-faced men in their late teens were engaged in all manner of joyful, wholesome activities — theater rehearsals, glee club performances, playing patintero on the beach, clowning around in the office of the college literary magazine where my father was once the editor. There were many pictures of their outings, some of them with young ladies their age, usually those they met in joint theater productions. Amazingly, nearly all the photos were accompanied by captions with names and descriptions from 70 years before. It was a glorious archive.

Engaged in playful banter with a coed while on a swing was my dad’s popular classmate Tony Ayala, who later became a leading banker who died young. The class’s star football player, Tony Romualdez, was photographed darning his pants. Tony Mercado, who would become a titan in the advertising industry, was playing Scrabble. My Ninong Alran Bengzon, the future neurologist and health secretary, was in several photos, a spitting image of one of his future sons.

And my reed-thin dad, he with large geeky glasses, seemed full of unadulterated joy in Tito Bobby’s stolen pictures. In one of them, my father is at an al fresco buffet table chatting with a young and elegant Doreen Gamboa (later Fernandez), then a graduate student who would become a leading cultural scholar, beloved teacher, and popular food writer. Tito Bobby would tell me that particular dinner was at the end of a fun day at the beach in Parañaque, when that place still had seaside resorts.

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he collection of vintage pictures included many that depicted 1950s Philippines, men in crew cuts and women in ankle-length dresses, city streets still lined with shady trees, a metropolis without malls and blessed with plenty of open space, an Ateneo campus in the middle of nowhere. Less than ten years removed from a devastating war, the photos captured a carefree time and buoyant mood.

This was my father’s world in his youth, long before the taciturn years when he’d be at the wheel of the family car lost in thought, perhaps thinking of the best time to leave my mother. He would wait until after I finished college.

In those last few years before any of them would be married, these guys had each other. One poignant photo of my dad seemed to capture their brotherly affection: He was reclining languidly on a sofa in a small living room with two buddies, a partially lit image from Tito Bobby’s last day in the Philippines. My dad and his classmates were waiting to escort Tito Bobby to Tutuban station where he would travel by train to Bicol for a boat trip to America. He would never live in the Philippines again. It reminded me of the day a group of Ateneo high school classmates saw me off at the airport for my flight to college in the US. I was touched by that gesture as I’m sure Tito Bobby was when his friends waved goodbye as his train took him to his future.

“I wanted to take photos of everything I could in order to remember it. I knew that I'd probably never come back to live there again. That's one of the reasons I kept so many pictures,” Tito Bobby would tell me.

The author's father, Sepoy Severino, at the home of his classmate Bobby Arboleda just before the latter's trip to the US. Arboleda would not live in the Philippines again. Photo: Amadio Arboleda

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he result of that conscious effort is a treasure trove of photographs that sparked a rich four years of online chatting between me and Tito Bobby where he patiently and promptly answered my questions about the images, including a gossipy query about whose crush was the young woman with the radiant smile standing by her gate.

I was engrossed by a well-documented epic journey my father and his band of brothers took with the legendary Jesuit Miguel Bernad in a borrowed school bus they drove to the Ilocos. It was not an official trip, and more of a spur of the moment that was immortalized in a travelogue which made it to the college’s literary magazine, Heights. The story was co-written by my dad, Rod Severino, and his best friend Alran Bengzon.

Some of the photos accompanying the article were shot by Tito Bobby, but his archive contained so many more images from that trip, including a group shot with my dad next to Fr. Bernad in a white sutana. My father loved the Jesuits and named me after one of his favorite ones, Fr. Horacio de la Costa, the teacher and prominent historian.

My online exchanges with Tito Bobby revealed an erudite, organized man with varied interests and a lucid memory. In his late 80s, his ability to recall details surpassed my own. He wrote a book that I would review for this website about a comely Japanese sprinter who charmed the masses at the Asian Games in Manila in 1954, helping create friendlier relations after the massacres of World War 2 just nine years earlier. Published when the author was 88, the book ("Mabuting Loob") was a love letter to both his adopted country Japan and the Manila he left in his youth.

I needed to meet him. Soon after pandemic restrictions loosened, I began to plan a trip to Japan.

My family had been wanting to take a vacation in Japan, so the stars aligned. Last July, we met Tito Bobby at his place of work a short walk from busy Yoyogi Station in Tokyo. Yes, at 89, he was still working, but no longer in the major institutions in Japan that had employed him for decades. After his last retirement, he had begun yet another career — as a violin maker. We met at the small violin shop where he now makes fine versions of that classic instrument, and he introduced us to the American co-owner, Louis Caporale, a master violin maker himself with a quick, teasing sense of humor. When I complimented Tito Bobby for being a Renaissance man, Louis quipped, “Yes, he was indeed born during the Renaissance.” After some hearty chuckles, we all surmised that Amadio Arboleda could be the oldest violin maker in the world, and could eventually even challenge the 18th century master Antonio Stradivari, who made his last violin at 93, in longevity.

This latest occupation was the fulfillment of a childhood dream that started after he watched the violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin perform in New York in the 1940s. Tito Bobby never got the chance to learn to play. But 12 years ago, having retired as a professor at a Japanese university, he saw an article about Louis in The Japan Times and asked him if he could apprentice. He took enough lessons to be able to test the violins he was making, but his focus since then has been on the centuries-old art of making this instrument.

Howie Severino with his father’s 90-year-old college classmate, Bobby Arboleda, now a violin maker in Tokyo. Photo: Alon Severino

On that hot day last July when we finally met, three weeks before his 90th birthday, he walked with a ramrod posture to a restaurant across the street from the shop. He stayed fit by lifting weights in a gym, guided by a Japanese trainer who specialized in exercises for the elderly. Tito Bobby and his trainer were planning a book in Japanese on physical fitness for the elderly.

“The Japanese government spends a huge amount of money on elderly care,” he explained to my family over lunch of seafood pasta. “My feeling is that they should spend money on preventing you from getting weak which would save them money on taking care of you. Many of these elderly could be stronger and able to continue doing certain things like working longer. That would help to bring in needed tax income from older workers.”

Tito Bobby could easily be the poster child for that cause. But I learned that this stage in his life was about much more than staying fit and working longer. In addition to writing more books, he wants to produce a play that he wrote in college.

By 2024, he had been in Japan for 55 years and was now a Japanese citizen. After a stint as a chemist in Germany and dictionary editor in the US, he arrived in Japan in his 30s to be an English-language editor of a university press. He would eventually serve as a United Nations official and a university professor.

He traveled often for work, occasionally visiting the Philippines. But as he had expected, he never came back to live in the land of his father. Tito Bobby was born in the United States to a Filipino migrant and an American nurse of mixed race, and grew up on Staten Island in New York as one of the few non-white kids in his school.

Repelled by the discrimination that could have prevented his children from getting a college education, his father took the family back to the Philippines shortly after the war when his son Bobby was an adolescent. At first resenting the adjustment to a society much less advanced, the teen soon began to appreciate being around extended family and people of his race. He recalls that at age 16, he stood in the middle of his family’s garden in San Juan and shouted his declaration that he was a Filipino.

Enrolled in FEU High School, he excelled in dramatics both as writer and performer. He was even in radio plays broadcast on dzBB. When his father decided he would transfer to the Ateneo de Manila for college, young Bobby reacted as if he was being punished.

But he soon found his footing as the most prolific artist and photographer in the class, his work gracing nearly all college publications, many of which he has preserved as well. Like my father, he was active in theater and in the Ateneo glee club founded during the time of the Jesuit luminary James Reuter, SJ.

He told me about the time they shouted Cyrano de Bergerac’s lines in the movie theater. “Balagtasan was very popular at the time so Filipinos were used to declaiming. And they liked doing that,” he recalled. “We didn't have smart phones, computer games and things like that to distract us. So we did things like memorize poetry.”

Bobby Arboleda (left), one of the class photographers, kept the archive of his college days that inspired this article.

Mentored by brilliant young teachers like Reuter, De la Costa, Bernad, and Fr. Catalino Arevalo, Tito Bobby took nothing for granted. If he and his family had stayed in 1940s and '50s racist America, he might not have gotten a college degree at all.

“Everything that happened to me was new and fascinating. And I knew that I'd probably never see it again,” he said. “And so I took pictures and wrote notes. I kept diaries about it.”

Today, of all of my father’s old friends, it’s Tito Bobby, the one who went away, who is the keeper of their memories, easily recalling many names, places and dates, and possessing much material evidence of that golden time.

The one college experience he would mention repeatedly to me was the grand week-long journey he made to northern Luzon with some of his closest friends, my father included. My Ninong Alran Bengzon kept a diary which became the basis of a lengthy piece in Heights, the school’s literary journal. Of course, Tito Bobby had a handy copy in his archives. He took pictures of the article and emailed them, transporting me to a time when such a trip was considered daring, coming less than a decade after the war whose effects were still seen in many places of the country. The trip was full of innocent fun, with accounts of singing, punning, hiking, swimming in the sea and in rivers, and even pillow-fighting.

They were hosted by families and friends of classmates throughout the journey. At one dinner in Baguio, the Ateneans spotted a piano in the restaurant; one of the gang played and the rest sang songs from their theater productions. A group of young ladies heard them, and answered with their own piano playing and chorus. That memorable occasion had the two impromptu ensembles joyfully taking turns entertaining the dining crowd, ending the night with both men and women singing kundimans that they apparently knew by heart.

Some of the college friends who went on a coming-of-age journey to northern Luzon in 1955.

The article mentions my father several times, referring to him by his college nickname, Sepoy (supposedly given by a teacher who thought my dad looked like a “sepoy,” or an Indian soldier in colonial regimes). At one dinner he was “the butt of all jokes.” My father, the dignified ambassador, rarely cracked a joke in public. But back then, looking skinny, pale, and awkward, it wasn’t hard to imagine the teasing by friends.

“We set off on a voyage of discovery and discovered our own country and ourselves,” the story of their journey began. Their first stop was Malolos where they made a pilgrimage to Barasoain Church, an image of which was then on the back of the one-peso bill.  “We thought, how appropriate it was for a Philippine Republic to be born in a provincial town,” their account noted.

These were mostly city-bred boys going to an elite school. During that trip to small towns where they sometimes pumped water for their baths, they came of age. My dad, as well as most of his friends, would travel to many countries in their lifetimes. But that first journey started it all.

In one of the last years of his life, when he was already very frail, my father called me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to take a drive to Malolos. I dropped what I was doing and we drove there. He didn’t tell me why. Now I know. —JCB, GMA Integrated News