Introduction. The tale of two empires : Japan and the US as latecomers in colonialism / Kiichi Fujiwara -- Part I. Empires and nation-building. The Philippines and US imperial identity / Julian Go -- Wars with the US and Japan, and the politics of history in the Philippines / Reynaldo C. Ileto -- American impact on elite continuity in post-war Japan and the Philippines / Temario C. Rivera -- Part II. Images of nations and nationalism. The Japanese analogy as liminal crisis-effect in initial Filipino-American encounters, 1898-1899 / Oscar V. Campomanes -- Japan and America in the Filipino nationalist imagination : from Rizal to Ricarte / Floro C. Quibuyen -- On the same terrain of colonial modernity : the mystification of Jose Rizal and the symbolization of Japanese emperor / Yoshiko Nagano -- Memory and mourning : six decades after the two wars / Satoshi Nakano -- Part III. Triangle encounters -- the Philippines, Japan and the USA. Baguio's early 20th-century Japanese community : culture, society, and work in an American "hill station" in the Philippines / Patricia O. Afable -- Competing shadows : Japan and the USA in the Filipino American imagination / Augusto Espiritu -- Singing of modernity and US shadow : bodily aesthetics and ideology in salidummay and shoka / Michiyo Yoneno-Reyes -- Love triangles : Filipinos, Japanese, and the shifting locations of American power / Nobue Suzuki -- Refiguring identities in an Ifugao village : sketches of joint projects from a Filipino filmmaker, a native intellectual, and a Japanese anthropologist under American shadow(s) / Hiromu Shimizu.