Yamashita's gold
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Yamashita's Gold is the name given to loot worth tens of billions of dollars stolen in Southeast Asia by Japanese forces during World War II and hidden in caves, tunnels and underground complexes in The Philippines.[1]
The "gold" reportedly included many different kinds of valuables looted from banks, depositories, temples, churches, other commercial premises, mosques, museums and private homes. It takes its name from General Yamashita Tomoyuki, who assumed command of Japanese forces in the Philippines in 1944.
According to various accounts, the loot was initially concentrated in Singapore, from where it was later relayed to the Philippines.[2] The Japanese hoped to ship the treasure from the Philippines to the Japanese home islands after the war ended. As the Pacific War progressed, Allied submarines and aircraft inflicted increasingly heavy losses on Japanese merchant shipping. Some ships carrying loot back to Japan were sunk. For this reason, University of the Philippines professor Rico Jose has questioned the extent to which treasure from mainland South East Asia was transported to the Philippines: "[by 1943] the Japanese were no longer in control of the seas... It doesn't make sense to bring in something that valuable here when you know it's going to be lost to the Americans anyway. The more rational thing would have been to send it to Taiwan or China."[3]
Nevertheless, several historians have made well-documented cases that Yamashita's Gold did exist.[4] Sterling Seagrave & Peggy Seagrave have written two books which deal with Yamashita's Gold: The Yamato Dynasty: the Secret History of Japan's Imperial Family (2000) and Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold (2003). They have supported their claims with CD-ROMs containing 900 megabytes of documents, maps and photographs, available with the initial edition of Gold Warriors.
The Seagraves and other historians have argued that looting was organized on a massive scale, by both yakuza gangsters such as Yoshio Kodama, and the highest levels of Japanese society, including Emperor Hirohito.[5] The Japanese government intended that loot from Southeast Asia would finance Japan's war effort. The Seagraves allege that Hirohito appointed his brother, Prince Chichibu, to head a secret organization called Kin no yuri ("Golden Lily"), for this purpose. Many of those who knew the locations of the loot were killed during the war, or later executed or incarcerated for war crimes. Yamashita himself was executed for war crimes on February 23, 1946. The whereabouts of the treasure locations were officially lost.
However, the Seagraves and other historians have claimed that U.S. military intelligence operatives located much of the loot, colluded with Hirohito and other senior Japanese figures to conceal its existence, and used it to finance U.S. covert intelligence operations around the world during the Cold War.[6] The total amounts involved are unknown.
It is also alleged that Ferdinand Marcos (who was President of the Philippines in 1965-86), recovered U.S.$8 billion from one concealed tunnel known as "Teresa 2", 61 km (38 mi) south of Manila, in Rizal province.[7] In 1996, a U.S. Federal Court made a ruling that Marcos had stolen a cache of recovered Japanese loot, from a man named Rogelio Roxas.[8] According to his family, Roxas found a one-tonne solid-gold Buddha and thousands of gold bars in a tunnel near Baguio in 1971. Roxas died prematurely in suspicious circumstances, leading to suggestions that he was murdered. The court awarded U.S.$22 billion, against Marcos's estate, to the heirs of Roxas. This amount was greatly reduced on appeal.[9]
Many individuals and consortiums, both Filipino and foreigners, continue to search for treasure sites. A number of accidental deaths, injuries and financial losses incurred by treasure hunters have been well-documented.[10]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Chalmers Johnson, "The Looting of Asia", London Review of Books v. 25, no. 22 (November 20, 2003) Access date: January 10, 2007.
- ^ Johnson, Ibid.
- ^ Asian Pacific Post, "Searching for the lost treasure of Yamashita" (Wednesday, August 24, 2005) Access date: January 10, 2007.
- ^ See, for example, Sterling & Peggy Seagrave, 2000, The Yamato Dynasty: The Secret History of Japan's Imperial Family (Corgi); Ikehata Setsuho & Ricardo Trota Jose (editors), 2000, The Philippines under Japan: Occupation Policy and Reaction (Ateneo de Manila University Press/University of Hawaii Press, 2000); Richard Hoyt, 2002, Old Soldiers Sometimes Lie: What Happened to Hirohito's Gold (St Martin's Press) and; the Seagraves' 2003 book, Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold (Verso)
- ^ Johnson, Ibid.
- ^ See, for example, Johnson, Ibid.
- ^ Johnson, Ibid.
- ^ Channel 4 (UK), (no date) "Yamashita's gold". (Access date: January 10, 2007)
- ^ Roger Roxas and the Golden Budha Corporation, a Foreign Corporation, Plaintiffs-Appellees/Cross-Appellants, v. Ferdinand E. Marcos and Imelda Marcos, Defendants-Appellants/Cross-Appellees, No. 20606, Appeal from the First Circuit Court (Civ. No. 88-0522-02), November 17, 1998. Moon, C.J., Levinson, Nakayama, JJ. Opinion of the Court by Levinson, J. . Access date: January 10, 2007.
- ^ See, for example, Asian Pacific Post, 2005, Ibid and; BBC, "WWII Japanese bomb kills Philippines treasure hunters" (March 22, 1998). Access date: January 10, 2007.
