General Tomoyuki Yamashita was one of the most feared men in World War 2. Dubbed as ‘The Tiger
of Malaya’ because of his conquest of the nation within 70 days from the British,
Yamashita was one of Japan's most significant military assets.
The general also planned and carried out the ignominious fall of Singapore from
the United Kingdom to Japan, which Prime Minister
Winston Churchill once called the largest capitulation in English military history.
Despite his lengthy list of feats during the conflict,
General Yamashita's personal legacy is mainly tied to an almost 80-year-old
mystery that supposedly occurred during the last months of World War 2.
For decades after the war, professional and amateur treasure hunters have traveled to the
Filipino mountains to search for a legendary bounty worth hundreds of billions of dollars,
with one Filipino man even suing the president for the value of a supposedly stolen Golden Buddha…
The General and The Prince
Beginning in the late 1930s,
Japanese troops pillaged through Asian nations that they had colonized.
For eight years, the soldiers rampaged through China, Korea, Manchuria, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
The Japanese stripped each of the countries' wealth and
precious jewels built up over thousands of years.
In the process, the army committed some of the most atrocious and cruel war crimes ever heard of.
By early June of 1945, as Japan was about to lose the war against the Americans and their Allies,
General Tomoyuki Yamashita decided to bury the alleged treasure in 175 tunnels
dotted around the Japanese-occupied islands of the Philippines in the Cagayan Valley.
It is said that Yamashita was aided by Prince Takeda, a member of the Japanese Royal Family,
and that the duo hastily devised the Golden Lily Operation,
named after a poem penned by Emperor Hirohito.
In Golden Lily, the men allegedly devised a series of complex tunnels carefully constructed by
specialist engineers and slaves and prisoners of war who worked hurriedly under the searing heat.
The story goes that one night, after a small victory, Prince Takeda took 175 of
his staff into a bunker inside tunnel #8 to celebrate their achievements.
After several hours of partying, drinking, and singing, the General and the Prince quietly
slipped away from the makeshift room and blasted the entrance with dynamite,
locking everyone inside and leaving them to perish surrounded by vast riches.
Most of the slave laborers would suffer the same grim end.
This way, no one would know the location of the treasure tunnels except them.
Prince Takeda would have then traveled back to Japan aboard a submarine,
while General Yamashita took the remainder of his weak army to the North,
where he faced an overpowering American resistance before finally surrendering on September 2.
Although historians have never unearthed credible scientific evidence of the treasure,
now known as ‘Yamashita's Gold,’ the story took on a life of its own.
Seven decades after the General and his royal accomplice supposedly walked away from the
mountain hiding spot and surrendered to the American infantrymen, the tale is still a part
of Filipino lore. Hundreds of accounts, published in books, papers, and films,
as well as from Filipino elders, claim that the treasure remains hidden in the valley.
Unsurprisingly, the story of Yamashita's Gold has lured countless treasure hunters
from around the globe, and many people claim that the gold has already been found.
Black Gold
Conspiracy theorists and published authors -some with dubious credibility-
claim that the US government owns most of the loot.
According to lore, American intelligence learned about the hidden treasure even
before the end of the war. Then, disguised as hospital ships traveling the Filipino waters,
the Americans watched as the Prince, the General,
and their workers unloaded the vast treasure into almost 200 vaults.
In the 1940s, Asian gold was primarily unaccounted for in global finance, and such
immense riches could be used as a secret fund to help the Americans fight against Communism.
However, when General Yamashita was tried for his horrible war crimes, his face was in every
paper in the world, and the Americans could not force him to shed light on the burial sites.
Thus, it is said that an agent from the Office of Strategic Services and a Filipino American
torture expert turned to the General's personal driver, who quickly broke down under pressure.
Once inside the first vault, the men found row after row of gold bars,
platinum, and ceramic jars filled with jewelry, priceless artwork,
and solid gold buddhas. One vault alone was allegedly worth billions in 1945 dollars.
The story goes that the team immediately reported back to General Douglas MacArthur,
who quickly traveled to Washington to brief then-President Harry S. Truman.
Knowing that repatriating such treasures would be almost impossible and cause the
gold price to plummet, the president would have decided to keep the discovery a secret.
It is said that the Americans recovered hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Japanese treasure
from the Philippines over two years, depositing it in almost 200 banks across the world.
With these billions, the United States could now manipulate governments around the globe
in favor of their interests, buy elections and bankroll
near-limitless black operations without spending a single penny of their own.
Recent documents published as part of the Edward Snowden leaks place the United States
black budget, or spending not paid out of taxes or government revenue, at $52 billion a year,
almost three times NASA's budget.
It is speculated that the money was also used on top-secret aircraft
Aurora and other projects with contractors like Lockheed Martin.
And while most people believe the source for the unaccounted money comes from illegal affairs,
the sheer size of the black budget suggests some other, more esoteric source,
with some claiming that the true nature of the
secret budget is the legendary looted Japanese gold, seized 75 years ago.
The Golden Buddha
In the decades after World War 2, dozens of treasure hunters traveled to the Philippines
looking for Yamashita's treasure vaults, and in 1971, one Filipino man apparently hit the
jackpot with disastrous consequences. A decade before, a Japanese soldier gave
locksmith Rogelio Roxas a map of the supposed treasure volts.
After years of digging, he and a small team of men allegedly spotted a tunnel entrance. The
tunnels were said to be quite elaborate and filled with booby traps, and after days of excavation,
the men supposedly found a passageway filled with remains of the entombed Japanese soldiers.
Upon further investigation, Roxas and his team said that they discovered a fantastic treasure:
a one-ton solid Gold Buddha statue and hundreds of gold bars. The men then grabbed as much
treasure as they could handle, with Roxas taking the statue and 24 blocks of gold.
The locksmith then met with three prospective buyers who allegedly validated its solid gold
purity. Unfortunately, one of the mysterious buyers worked for the
then-ruling dictator and President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos.
Not long after the meeting, soldiers from the President's private army supposedly
stormed Roxas's family home and took most of the treasure, including the Buddha.
And although Roxas reported the raid, the authorities refused to help.
The locksmith then turned to the media.
His story made it into several international newspapers,
but in an attempt to smear the locksmith's version of events, President Marcos's men
released articles claiming that he was paid by the opposition to tell lies.
Then, on May 18, 1971, three of Marcos's men arrested Roxas
under the guise of a negotiation with the president.
However, the locksmith claimed to have been taken into a shoddy building,
where he was tortured and told to publicly admit that all his allegations were false,
only to be asked about the location of the remaining vaults.
When the locksmith refused, he alleges that the torture worsened,
eventually yielding to the men's demands. Sometime later, after allowing his wounds
to heal, he was photographed as proof that he colluded with the political opposition.
After briefly meeting up with his family, Roxas was brought back to captivity,
where he claims to have continued suffering at the hands of the soldiers for more information.
Roxas says that he was alone in the room one night and used his abilities to pick the lock,
climb through the window, and silently walk down the building's roof.
The Roxas family then escaped to a remote region of the Philippines, where they
remained for over a decade. They claimed to have never seen the Golden Buddha again.
When President Marcos's dictatorship fell in 1986, he and his wife Imelda fled to Hawaii,
where the ruler passed away three years later. His widow once admitted on record
that the majority of their immense wealth was primarily attributable to Yamashita's treasure.
Then, while suing the Marcos estate for the value of the stolen golden statue and bars,
Roxas passed away under dubious circumstances.
Fortunately, Roxas's deposition and other testimonies were enough to convince the jury
to vote in his favor, awarding 22 billion dollars to Rogelio's estate and heirs.
However, when the judgment debt inflated to 43 billion dollars, Mrs. Marcos appealed to
the Supreme Court of Hawaii, who reduced the sentence to 13 billion. The court justified
its decision by stating that the value of the treasure could never be appropriately determined.
The Marcos estate has only been paid 1.4 million dollars so far.
Skepticism
Although thousands of treasure hunters have searched the Philippines for Yamashita's Gold,
it is said that only the Americans and Rogelio Roxas have found some of the treasure.
However, according to legend, the Prince and the General built 175 of them,
and thus it would be unlikely that more amateurs haven't stumbled upon at least one of them.
Furthermore, it is said that the amount of gold involved goes up to 300,000 tons,
which would trump the amount of gold ever known to be mined in history,
leaving many to believe that the story of Yamashita's Gold is nothing more than a legend.
In fact, Filipino lore has had mythical fortune legends for hundreds of years,
and Golden Lily is likely just another iteration of the legendary and nonexistent bounty.
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