In the quiet steadiness of Dumaguete historiographer Justin Jose Bulado, we find the unlikely poet of the archives—the kind of scholar who listens for the murmurs beneath the dust. Born on 18 October 1989, in the city that would shape both his sensibility and his vocation, history for him, from the very beginning of his vocation, was never simply the catalog of dates and decrees. It began, as all obsessions must, with a story told by a grandfather—his, a boy in wartime Manila, remembering the Japanese occupation not through the lens of textbooks, but through the sharp scent of fear and the soft ache of hunger. These recollections became the seed of his own historical imagination.

Years later, while most of his generation were seduced by the immediacy of the digital and the disposable, Justin found his own cinema in the sepia. For example, watching HBO’s Band of Brothers did not romanticize war for him—but it made him curious about how ordinary people endure a catastrophe like a devastating war. He followed that curiosity to Silliman University, where he would complete his BA, MA, and PhD—all in history, the university’s corridors becoming both his archive and his crucible. By 2020, he had earned his doctorate in Social Science.

But if there is a word that best defines Justin’s work, it is “local.” In the age of global histories, Bulado’s gaze remains grounded in the soil of Negros Oriental. His scholarly work has revolved around the Japanese occupation of the province—its collaborators and resistors, its hunger and survival, its silences and its hauntings. He writes, as he teaches, from a conviction that the stories of small places illuminate the great movements of history. The world war, filtered through Dumaguete or Siquijor, becomes less abstract and more intimate: a neighbor’s betrayal, a family’s starvation, a child’s lost innocence.

This is what the best local historians do: they remind us that the grand narratives are composed of a thousand small tragedies. Yet Justin is also aware of the danger in this intimacy. “Some people,” he warns, “attempt to write local history by inventing stories or glorifying relatives without basis.” This, he insists, is mythmaking, not scholarship. History demands evidence, not nostalgia. The work of the historian, then, is not to embroider but to excavate—to find, beneath the gossip and legend, the fragile truth that time has tried to erase.

In this sense, his historical essays and journal articles are not mere academic exercises; they are acts of reclamation. His paper “We All Must Work, Fight, or Starve,” published in Philippine Studies in 2023, is emblematic of this. It reconstructs the wartime food crisis in Negros Oriental, showing how hunger became both a weapon and a wound. Another article, a forthcoming one on Japanese atrocities under Colonel Satoshi Oie, has taken him nearly a year of painstaking research to complete—a year spent listening to the ghosts of the past whispering through military reports and faded testimonies. For Justin, writing history is not about being first or being famous. It is, he says, “driven by curiosity and a desire to piece together narratives that have not yet been told.”

To write local history, he believes, is to swim against the current of forgetfulness. It is to labor over scarce sources, to make meaning out of fragments. The difficulty is real: archives are incomplete, memories are frail, and politics often distort the record. Yet this is where the historian’s artistry comes in. The challenge is not only to reconstruct but to interpret, to find the connective tissue between a forgotten town and the larger body of the nation. “Wars have no real victors, nobody wins in wars,” Justin regularly reminds his students. “At the end of the day, it is the civilians who suffer the most.” This moral clarity gives his scholarship both its edge and its empathy.

He amply demonstrates this hardship in his article, “’We All Must Work, Fight, or Starve’: The Food Supply Problem in Negros Oriental during the Japanese Occupation,” published in Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints in 2023:

Dumaguete’s supply of milk was largely obtained from Cebu, and when Cebu fell to the Japanese forces, the supply was cut off. Fortunately, Bais Sugar Central, the largest producer of sugar in Negros Oriental, helped the people of Dumaguete by providing “one hundred cases of their milk,” most of which were rationed to “sick or very small children.” Soon enough, the stocks of flour would run out, primarily due to hoarding. There was a time before the Japanese occupation when the people of Dumaguete did not have a steady supply of bread. Later, it was found out that around a hundred sacks of flour were kept in a certain storehouse in Dumaguete. It was a case of hoarding—perhaps the flour was going to be sold in the black market in the future for a higher price. Eventually, the owner of the storehouse begrudgingly decided to sell the flour, and it was good enough for a few weeks of bread for the townspeople.

It is easy to see why, in 2023, he was chosen as part of the Emerging Scholars Workshop of the Jenny Craig Institute of War and Democracy at the National World War II Museum in Louisiana. Among the North Americans, he was the lone Asian voice—a historian from Dumaguete bringing the war in Negros to an international table. It was not just a career highlight; it was a moment of historical symmetry: a scholar from a once-occupied nation reclaiming his place in the world’s remembrance of war.

What, then, does Bulado teach us about writing local history? That it is a moral act as much as an intellectual one. That to write about one’s town is to love it enough to tell its truth, however inconvenient. That documentation is resistance—against amnesia, against myth, against the lazy habit of thinking that the stories of small places do not matter. Local history, in his practice, becomes a form of justice.

He plans, in the long run, to turn his dissertation on wartime collaboration into a book, alongside a collected volume of essays. But his heart, he insists, remains in teaching—at Negros Oriental State University, where he has found his equilibrium between the classroom and the archive. He teaches not just historical method but historical ethics, the discipline of doubt, the humility of evidence. In a world drowning in misinformation, that may be the most radical lesson of all.

And so, perhaps this is how one should end a story about a historian: not with accolades, though he has many, but with the image of a man at his desk at dusk, the computer light falling on yellowed documents, the city outside quieting into night. In that silence, he listens—for the echoes of wartime Negros Oriental, for the footsteps of people history forgot, for the pulse of a local past refusing to die. Because in the end, history is not merely the study of what happened. It is the ongoing act of remembering—and in Justin Bulado’s hands, remembering becomes a form of devotion.