Yamashitas Treasure, Golden Lily Treasure, Kin no yuri

[: Michael-Robert.]

Yamashita's Treasure, Golden Lily Treasure, Kin no yuri

Yamashita's Gold - Eyewitness
Reveals Truth Of Fabulous
WWII Hidden Treasure
By Sterling and Peggy Seagrave
South China Morning Post
9-3-1

In the closing months of World War II, in the Philippines, several of Japan's highest ranking imperial princes hid tons of looted gold bullion and other stolen treasure in caves and tunnels, to recover later. This was the wealth of 12 Asian countries, accumulated over thousands of years.

Expert teams accompanying Japan's armed forces had systematically emptied treasuries, banks, factories, private homes, pawn shops, art galleries, and stripped ordinary people, while Japan's top gangsters looted Asia's underworld and its black economy.

There were 175 ''imperial'' treasure sites hidden throughout the Philippines. When American tanks were close, the chief engineers of those vaults were given a farewell party 67 metres underground in Tunnel 8 in the mountains of Luzon, stacked with row after row of gold bars. As the evening progressed, they drank great quantities of sake, sang patriotic songs and shouted banzai (long life).

At midnight, General Yamashita Tomoyuki and the princes slipped out, and dynamite charges were set off in the access tunnels, entombing the engineers. Their vaults would remain secret. The princes escaped to Tokyo by submarine, and three months later General Yamashita surrendered to American troops. Japan had lost the war militarily, but the princes made certain Japan did not lose financially.

This grisly event has remained unknown until now, and the hidden treasure was brushed off as a fanciful legend of ''Yamashita's Gold''. But an eyewitness to the entombment has taken us there and given us his personal account. During the war, Ben Valmores was the young Filipino valet of a senior prince, who was in charge of closing all imperial treasure sites in the Philippines. A sometimes sentimental man, the prince spared Ben's life and led him out of Tunnel 8 just before the dynamite was detonated.


Japan's looting of Asia was overseen by [then-emperor] Hirohito's brother Prince Chichibu. His organisation was codenamed kin no yuri (Golden Lily), the title of one of the emperor's poems. Other princes headed different parts of Golden Lily across the conquered territories. Eventually, Japanese sources told us that Ben's wartime master was prince Takeda Tsuneyoshi, first cousin of Hirohito and grandson of emperor Meiji.

In 1998, we tested Ben with 1930s photographs of many princes, all the names removed, and he instantly identified prince Takeda, Hirohito's brother prince Chichibu and other princes.

Ben said he had spent time with each of them, bringing them food, tea and cigarettes while they inventoried each treasure site. When he saw our photo of Prince Takeda, Ben froze, then began softly crooning the Japanese folk song Sakura, Sakura (Cherry Blossoms), which he said Takeda often sang to himself.

In the final stages of work on a biography of Japan's imperial family titled The Yamato Dynasty, we were told that in October 1945, American intelligence agents learned where some of the Japanese loot was hidden in the Philippines, and quietly recovered billions of dollars worth of gold bullion, platinum, and loose diamonds. This information, if true, revealed the existence of an extraordinary state secret, something the United States Government kept from its own citizens for more than half a century. There was no time to include this in the biography. It had to be investigated separately. Here is some of what we have since learned:


After surrendering on September 2, 1945, General Yamashita was charged with war crimes over gruesome atrocities committed in Manila under the order of an admiral, while Yamashita had ordered withdrawing troops to leave the city unharmed. During his trial, there was no mention of plundered treasure, or of looting during the war.

But we now know there was a hidden agenda. Because it was not possible to torture General Yamashita physically without this becoming evident to his lawyers, members of his staff were tortured. His driver, Major Kojima Kashii, was given special attention. In charge of the torture of Major Kojima was a Filipino-American intelligence officer named Severino Garcia Santa Romana, whose friends called him Santy. He wanted the major to reveal each place where he had taken Yamashita, where bullion and other treasure was hidden for recovery after the war. Supervising Santy during the torture was Captain Edward Lansdale, later one of America's best known ''Cold Warriors''.

Early that October, Kojima broke and led Lansdale and Santy to more than a dozen Golden Lily treasure vaults in the rugged country north of Manila. What they found astounded everyone from General Douglas MacArthur all the way up to the White House. After discussions with his cabinet, President Harry Truman decided to keep the recovery a state secret.

Santy's ensuing recoveries greatly altered America's leverage during the Cold War. According to senior US government officials and high-ranking US Army officers, the Truman administration set this treasure aside along with Axis loot recovered in Europe, as a secret political action fund to fight communism in the Cold War.

Crudely put, it would be used to bribe statesmen and military officers, and to buy elections for anti-communist political parties. The idea for a global political action fund based on war loot had originated with US secretary of war, Henry Stimson. During the war, Stimson had a brain-trust thinking hard about recovered Axis plunder, and how it should be handled after the war. Their solution was to set up what is informally called the ''Black Eagle Trust'', after the black eagle emblem of Hitler's Reichsbank in Berlin.

The Black Eagle Trust was first discussed in secret during July 1944, when 44 nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to plan the post-war economy. This was confirmed to us by a number of high-level sources, including former CIA deputy director Ray Cline, who knew about Santy's recoveries in 1945, and continued to be involved in attempts in the 1980s and 1990s to hide blocks of Japanese war loot still said to be in the vaults of banks in New York.

In November 1945, General MacArthur strolled down row after row of gold bars stacked two metres tall during a tour of vaults opened by Santy. >From what was seen in these vaults alone, it was evident that over a period of years Japan had looted billions of dollars in treasure from all over Asia.Much of this plunder had reached Japan overland earlier, from China through Korea, but the rest was hidden in the Philippines, unable to be shipped to Japan by sea because of the successful US submarine blockade.


According to Ray Cline and others, between 1945 and 1947 the gold bullion recovered by Santy and Lansdale was moved discreetly to 172 accounts at banks in 42 countries.

There were important reasons for all this secrecy. If the recovery of this huge mass of stolen gold was known only to a trusted few, the countries and individuals that had been plundered could not lay claim to it. Truman recognised that the very existence of so much black gold, if it became public knowledge, would cause the metal's fixed price to collapse. But as long as the gold was kept hidden, prices could be maintained and currencies pegged to gold would be stable. Meanwhile, the black gold would serve as a reserve asset, bolstering the prime banks in each country, and strengthening the anti-communist governments of those nations.

To hide the existence of all this treasure, Washington had to tell a number of lies. Especially lies about Japan, which had stolen most of the gold. America wanted Japan to become its anti-communist bastion in Asia, where the mainland was being overrun by communists. If American conservatives and Japanese conservatives were to ally effectively against communism, they had to begin by enlarging their financial resources for the Cold War.

Above all, the source of much of this hidden wealth must never be acknowledged. Washington had to insist, starting in 1945, that Japan never stole anything, and was flat broke and bankrupt when the war ended. Here was the beginning of many terrible secrets.

Because they remained ''off the books'', these enormous political action funds got into the wrong hands, where they remain to this day. We can reveal that in 1960, then vice-president Richard Nixon ''gave'' one of the biggest of these political action funds, the US$35-billion (about HK$272 billion) M-Fund, to leading members of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). In return, he is believed to have sought their support for his presidential campaign that year.

The M-Fund, now said to be worth more than US$500 billion, is still controlled by members of the LDP.

Officially, we are told that Japan's wartime elite the imperial family, the zaibatsu (large industrial business conglomerates), the yakuza (Japanese mafia) and the ''good'' bureaucrats ended the war as impoverished victims of a handful of ''bad'' military zealots. We are told that Japan was badly damaged and impoverished, barely able to feed itself at war's end.


In fact, Japan emerged from the war far richer than before, and with remarkably little damage, except to the homes of millions of ordinary Japanese who did not count, at least in the view of their overlords.

Evidence of Golden Lily loot comes also from straightforward legal actions in America. Such simple things as the probating of the will of Santa Romana (Santy), verification of his tax records, and legal evidence of his fortune deposited in the US, Switzerland, Hong Kong and elsewhere, provide hard proof that the world is awash with clandestine bank accounts growing out of Golden Lily.

Other lawsuits in the US prove that Golden Lily war loot was indeed hidden in the Philippines. Rogelio Roxas, a Filipino locksmith, found a one-tonne solid-gold Buddha and thousands of gold bars hidden in a cave near Baguio only to have it stolen from him by President Ferdinand Marcos. Roxas was subsequently tortured and died in suspicious circumstances. Some believe he was murdered. In 1996, a US Federal Court awarded his heirs a judgment of US$22 billion against the Marcos estate.

As the 1951 Peace Treaty was skewed by secret deals, thousands of Japan's victims have been deprived of any compensation for their suffering. According to Article 14 of the Treaty: ''It is recognised that Japan should pay reparations to the Allied Powers for the damage and suffering caused by it during the war. Nevertheless it is also recognised that the resources of Japan are not presently sufficient.'' To reinforce the claim that Japan was broke, Article 14 noted that ''the Allied Powers waive all reparations claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan...'' By signing the Treaty, Allied countries concurred that Japan's plunder had vanished down a rabbit hole, and all Japan's victims were out of luck. In return for going along with the Treaty, the Allies received portions of the gold bullion recovered by Santy.

We have evidence from former CIA deputy director Cline that the gold bullion Santy and Lansdale recovered was secretly moved to national treasuries and prime banks in more than 42 countries, including Great Britain. We also have evidence from British archives confirming this.

More than half a century later, the last battle of the Pacific War is being waged in courts in the US and Japan where surviving prisoners of war, slave laborers, comfort women and civilian victims of Japan have filed billion-dollar lawsuits to win compensation so mysteriously denied them after the war. In 1995, it was estimated that there were 700,000 victims of the war who had still received no compensation.

Today, their numbers are dwindling rapidly because of age and illness. Backing them is an extraordinary coalition, including international law firms with years of experience, fighting for compensation from German industries and Swiss banks, for crimes committed and money looted during the Nazi Holocaust.


Sterling and Peggy Seagrave are the authors of ''Golden Warriors''. This is an edited extract of the book's prologue. It will be published in French by Editions Michalon in November

 

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[: Michael-Robert.]

The average tourist entering Japan for the first time, Lonely Planet in hand, anticipating the land of contrasts -- of tea ceremonies and conveyor-belt sushi, of sumo and Sony -- would be hard-pressed to imagine anything of comparable intrigue emerging from the stale debate of contemporary Japanese politics. A walk through the evolutionary arms race that is the Shibuya fashion scene, among the Cambrian explosion of hi-tech plastic gizmos and gadgets, of mobile phones and bullet trains, would leave little doubt as to where the real action is. The land of the rising sun is driven by its technological innovation, unified by its culture and traditions; politics is for the politicians, history for the historians, so the thinking goes.

With their recent book, Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold, first published in 2003 by Verso Books with an updated and extended edition out in 2005, Sterling and Peggy Seagrave have provided a much needed antidote to this tired, politically-correct caricature of Japan, much trumpeted by its leaders and echoed in the mass media. They have done so, moreover -- given the implications of the conspiracy they unearth -- at considerable risk to their own safety. The introductory note to Gold Warriorsconcludes with the precaution that "should anything odd happen, we have arranged for this book and its documentation to be put up on the Internet at a number of sites. If we are murdered," they write, "readers will have no difficulty figuring out who 'they' are." [1] In a review of the first edition of the book, Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant and one of the world's leading experts on Japanese history and politics, noted that, in fact, "the list of potential killers from this book alone would include at least several thousand generals, spies, bankers, politicians, lawyers, treasure hunters and thieves from half a dozen countries." [2]

What, you might ask, could the Seagraves have possibly uncovered that could be so earth-shattering as to invite a death wish of this magnitude? The answer begins with a classic tale of hidden treasure -- the stuff of legend for many decades -- referred to as "Yamashita's Gold," named after Japanese army general Tomoyuki Yamashita. Gold Warriors wields nearly one hundred pages of annotations, backed up by archival CDs containing further documents, photographs, maps, letters, and tax records, to deliver a devastating indictment of the Japanese political system and its sordid history of corruption and war crimes. Likened to "a giant vacuum cleaner" passing over East and Southeast Asia, the Seagraves describe how the Japanese government, with the help of key leaders in organized crime, systematically looted the treasuries, banks, homes, and art galleries of twelve Asian countries in the period leading up the end of the Second World War. The proceeds from this plunder, coordinated in secret by the Truman administration following its discovery in the years following the end of the war, was used to finance a covert political action fund to combat communism, referred to as the Black Eagle Trust, enabling the US government to buy elections in countries such as Italy and Greece and to maintain a one-party plutocracy under the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan.


The first half of Gold Warriors largely concerns the complex tale of how Japan managed to accumulate, conceal, and later partly recover this vast quantity of loot from its occupied territories. While some of the plundered treasure was stashed within Japan's borders, from 1943 onwards an American submarine blockade stationed north of the Philippines made it impossible for Japanese ships to deliver the loot without running the risk of being torpedoed. From this point onward, a new strategy was employed. "The solution was obvious," the Seagraves explain, "for gold is a curious commodity. It does not have to change hands. Once you take physical possession of gold bullion, you can put it in any secure place and leave it there for decades or centuries, provided no one else can remove it" [1, p. 64].

And this is precisely what they did. The authors describe how a series of vaults, tunnels, and caves in the Philippines, ingeniously concealed and booby-trapped, served as the hiding place for untold billions of dollars worth of stolen treasure. One of the largest of these, a tunnel complex beneath an army camp in San Fernando, connected a vault the size of a football stadium, called Tunnel-8, to two other gymnasium-sized caverns. In the final throws of the war, with Tunnel-8 stacked "wall-to-wall with row after row of gold bars," General Yamashita and the princes in charge of the operation detonated explosives in the access tunnels to the vault, burying 175 chief engineers 220 feet underground, where they later suffocated to death [1, p. 1]. Numerous others involved in the burial of war loot -- many of them slave laborers forcibly recruited to assist in the war effort -- met with a similar tragic fate.

At the centre of the plunder operation was a secret organization called kin no yuri (Golden Lily), named after one of Emperor Hirohito's favorite poems and overseen by his brother, Prince Chichibu. Created by the Imperial General Headquarters in the aftermath of the Rape of Nanking in an attempt to maintain control over the financial side of the war conquest, Golden Lily brought together Japan's top financial specialists, supported by army and navy units and coordinated through lesser princes stationed throughout the conquered territories. As the Seagraves put it, "When China was milked by Golden Lily, the army would hold the cow, while the princes skimmed the cream." Golden Lily was meticulous in carrying out its operations, with Special Service Units targeting "individual Chinese who owned banks, headed guilds, ran pawn shop networks, or were the elders of clan associations ... In this methodical fashion, Japan went far beyond the wild pillaging of Mongol hordes, or the drunken rampaging of British and French troops" [1, p. 38-39].

At the end of the war, public records show that the American forces reported finding immense quantities of plundered war loot in Japan. Although this type of information was later removed from public archives in the United States, the Seagraves describe how, from the very beginning of the US occupation of Japan, key figures -- General MacArthur, President Truman, John Foster Dulles, and a handful of others -- knew about this loot. An official report prepared by General MacArthur's headquarters admitted as much. While publicly claiming that Japan was financially bankrupt, the report explained that:

One of the spectacular tasks of the occupation dealt with collecting and putting under guard the great hoards of gold, silver, precious stones, foreign postage stamps, engraving plates, and all currency not legal in Japan. Even though the bulk of this wealth was collected and placed under United States military custody by Japanese officials, undeclared caches of these treasures were known to exist. [1, p. 8]

As priorities changed following the end of the war, the potential afforded by the newly discovered war loot for effecting political transformation on a worldwide scale became readily apparent to the architects of the US occupation. The Seagraves report that three underground funds were created to finance this transformation: the M-Fund, the Yotsuya Fund, and the Keenan Fund. The first and most well-known of these funds was named after General William Frederic Marquat, who headed a program ostensibly in charge of cracking down on war profiteering. In fact, however, the Marquat Fund accomplished quite the opposite. Rather than dissolving the banks and conglomerates such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi who were deeply implicated in war crimes, Marquat let them off the hook, demanding nothing more from these major war profiteers than cosmetic changes while leaving their internal structure largely intact.

The Seagraves explain that the M-Fund was subsequently employed in a frantic attempt to suppress the rise of the Socialist Party in the late 1940s: "great sums were distributed by SCAP [Supreme Commander for the Allied Forces] to discredit the Socialist cabinet, and to replace it with a regime more to Washington's liking." [1, p.109] In 1960, the M-Fund was given away by Vice President Nixon to then-Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke in exchange for support of his bid for the US presidency. The Seagraves claim that the M-Fund, the "ultimate secret weapon, a bottomless black bag," has since been employed by seven LDP politicians to maintain a virtual stranglehold on political power in Japan. [1, p. 120] Former US Deputy Attorney General Norbert Schlei, who himself became tragically snared in the complex web of deceit surrounding the fund's disputed existence, estimated that its value has climbed from $35 billion to over $500 billion today, arguing that it "dominates Japanese politics and is a major force in the Japanese economy." [3]

Another of the war-profit slush funds, the Yotsuya fund, is claimed to have been set aside to finance underworld operations aimed at suppressing popular protest and leftist activities in concert with legions of yakuza, headed by Golden Lily's most effective negotiator, Kodama Yoshio. The Keenan Fund, in contrast, served to bribe witnesses at war crimes trials and persuade them to falsify their testimony, aiding to cover up Japan's biological and chemical warfare program and to conceal the looting carried out by Golden Lily. The Seagraves write that POWs liberated from Japanese slave and labour camps by the Allied Forces were "bullied into signing secrecy oaths before they were allowed to go home, forced to swear that they would not reveal anything they knew about war looting or about the chemical and biological weapons testing." [1, p. 113]

The relevance of Gold Warriors in the context of the modern Japanese political landscape becomes immediately apparent when one traces the web of fraud emerging from these post-war funds to its counterpart in the incestuous network of present-day LDP leadership. Current Prime Minister Abe Shinzo is a direct descendant of this legacy, his grandfather Kishi Nobusuke, Prime Minister between 1957 and 1960, having apparently been entrusted with control over the M-Fund from President Nixon in 1960. Kishi reportedly availed of this opportunity to immediately help himself to one trillion yen, or about 3 billion dollars, valued at approximately ten percent of the fund's total assets in 1960. Kishi and his entourage subsequently arranged for the selection of Tanaka Kakuei as Minister of Finance in the new Ikeda administration. The Seagraves write that Tanaka -- who later served as Prime Minister twice in the period between 1972 and 1974 -- personally took charge of the M-Fund for a period of 26 years, until scandal forced him from office in 1986.

It was under Tanaka's control that perhaps the most tangible manifestation of the M-Fund's complex and insidious influence on Japanese society became acutely felt among a small but significant group of domestic and foreign investors. A scheme was devised in which special government bonds, with values ranging from ten billion to fifty billion yen, served as a government-sanctioned repository in which to park huge sums of black money from the M-Fund; Diet approval was not required for the bonds to be technically legitimate as they were issued directly by the Ministry of Finance, of which Tanaka was the chairman. By collecting the profits accumulated through interest on the bonds, Tanaka is claimed to have personally profited from this arrangement to the tune of ten trillion yen.

When the Lockheed bribery scandal in the mid-1970s threatened to create a rift among the club of bond-holders and bring down the entire Ministry of Finance, Tanaka created a new set of bonds (referred to as "57s") to serve as IOUs. The Seagraves explain that the new bonds were unlike anything previously issued by the Japanese government and "were not offered to the public at large, nor were they to be traded on the international bond-market like normal government bonds." [1, p.128] The trick, of course, was that the complete obscurity of these bonds allowed the Ministry of Finance, at its own discretion, to declare nearly all "57s" to be forgeries, with exceptions granted only to those especially close to the LDP leadership, and even then at a heavy discount. Less powerful bond-holders thus directly financed the profiteering of powerful insiders, financial collapse was averted, and the LDP stayed in power, all of it largely out of the public eye. "As power corrupts," the authors note, "secret power corrupts secretly." [p. 139]

And the corruption, it would appear, runs deep indeed. The Seagraves claim that huge quantities of war loot remain to this day stashed in the vaults of well-known international financial institutions such as Citibank, Chase, Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), and Union Banque Suisse (UBS). One of the key characters in the Seagraves' book is a mysterious man of many identies named Severino Garcia Diaz Santa -- known to his friends simply as "Santy" -- revealed in the new edition to have been an agent of the Vatican secret services. Involved in the torture of Major Kojima, General Yamashita's driver in the last year of the war, Santy was able to extract the locations of more than a dozen Golden Lily treasure vaults in the mountains north of Manila, two of which were immediately and easily opened. In the decades following the end of the war, Santy played the role of gatekeeper in an organization referred to as "The Umbrella," set up to move gold from the Philippines "to 176 bank accounts in 42 countries," according to a letter written in 1991 by former Justice Department attorney Robert Ackerman. [1, p.227] Hounded relentlessly by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Santy became worried and took steps to protect himself, hiring a bookkeeper named Tarciana Rodriguez who he put "in charge of billions in cash, bullion, gold certificates, stocks and other assets all over the world." When he finally slipped into a state of deep alcoholic depression leading to his death in 1974, "The Man With No Name," as he was often called, left behind a fortune conservatively estimated at $50 billion to his fourteen heirs. [1, p. 150] The largest single account, stored at Union Banque Suisse, is claimed to contain 20,000 metric tons of gold bullion alone, this according to original UBS documents reproduced on the Gold Warriors CDs. [1, p. 222-223]

Attempts to recover this fortune brought the legitimate heirs to Santy's estate face-to-face with the seedy underbelly of corporate finance. Santy's common-law wife Luz Rambano is reported to have met with a vice-president of UBS in Geneva, who told her, according to an American friend who was with her at the time, that "he wouldn't recommend her trying to claim this account while she was in Switzerland, because before the bank or even the government of Switzerland would agree to allow her to take what this account represented, they would not be beyond having her killed first." [1, p. 224]

Similar results were reported in encounters with other banks. Faced with stonewalling from HSBC and Sanwa Bank, efforts eventually turned to Citibank, and in December 1990 Tarciana traveled to Manhattan to meet with then-CEO John Reed. "According to Santy's own records and documents Tarciana had with her," the Seagraves write, "Citibank held 4,700 metric tons of gold bullion belonging to Santy's Estate." Employing a well-known technique, Reed reportedly responded to the claims by hiring a phalanx of lawyers and moving Santy's assets offshore, to Cititrust in the Bahamas. The case was later taken up by attorney Mel Belli, who charged that "Reed and Citibank have systematically sold and are selling said gold bullion to buyers and converting the sale proceeds to their own use." [1, p. 230] Belli, however, died in 1996 with the case still pending. Reed was later ousted by Citibank under allegations of money laundering.

Thousands of years ago, Thucydides observed that: "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." If the Seagraves' account is to be believed, the tale of Santy's fortune plainly evidences the ugly reality that, behind a facade of exactitude and impartiality, our modern international money system in fact operates largely according to this ancient adage. The authors explain: "Account holders may think some gold or platinum is theirs because they have title to it in bonds or certificates[, but] if they try to redeem the bonds or certs, chances are they will end up arrested, imprisoned, or murdered, and their bonds or certs will be confiscated or vanish." While the tale of Santy's heirs is one in which the assets in question dwarf the political power of the individual claimant, a deeper truth is revealed when one reflects on the basic premise of a banking system as it emerges in such a struggle. "Once citizens of a country relinquish control of their money to private bankers," the authors point out, "they are at the bankers' mercy -- which is the whole idea." [1, p.247]

And here, perhaps, is where this book strikes its most decisive blow. Variously interconnected and complex, the narratives woven together in Gold Warriors -- a small sample of which I have attempted to sketch above -- paint a frightening and yet mystifying picture of world finance that stretches well beyond the borders of Japan. More than anything else, the book shines a powerful spotlight on a corner of society cloaked in secrecy, a small network of powerful players cutting deals of global significance behind closed doors. "Seen as giant spider's web," the authors write, "the involvement of a great many organizations and individuals becomes apparent." [1, p. 271]

It is no great surprise, then, that many of the elementary facts upon whose basis the Seagraves argue their claims have been repeatedly and emphatically denied by the stake-holders who stand the most to lose. Both Tokyo and Washington allege that the "57s" are counterfeit, despite painstaking work by Professor Edmond Lausier at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business which confirms their authenticity. [1, p. 128] The Philippine government, on the other hand, denies outright the very existence of the character named Santy. The Seagraves respond mockingly:

"Tell this to his family. We have interviewed his brother, his mistresses, and his children. We have visited his tombstone. We have amassed [...] indisputable evidence from more than 60 years that Santa Romana is real, and that his vast fortune of cash and gold bullion sleeps in banks all over the world." [1, p. 140]

And yet, despite numerous anchors to documentary evidence and expert testimony verifying its factual basis, the story of Yamashita's Gold necessarily involves a degree of extrapolation. Such extrapolation inevitably lends itself to conspiracy theories which, one might argue, serve to only to further conceal the truth. David McNeill has written that, due to its secrecy, "the M-Fund has become a staple of bad conspiracy thrillers and racy weekly magazines in Japan, a topic used to spice up limp narratives or weak stories."[4] While the story of secret CIA involvement in supporting the LDP through the 1950s and 1960s has been firmly established for over a decade now [5], the much deeper level of corruption and fraud explored in Gold Warriors remains well beyond the bounds of accepted discourse in mainstream politics, both in Japan and in the US, to this very day. Chalmers Johnson summed up the situation well in 1995: "The issue today is not whether Japan might veer toward socialism or neutralism but why the government that evolved from its long period of dependence on the United States is so corrupt, inept, and weak." [6]

While many of the missing pieces in the story of Yamashita's Gold may, like the loot itself, remain forever buried with the thousands who died digging its grave, the Seagraves have nonetheless opened a rare window onto a side of Japanese and American history direly in need of attention. Languishing in obscurity, stories of this kind endlessly spawn tales of conspiracy; confronted head-on, they spark derision and denial. Ultimately, however, if not recognized and addressed, the specters of the past will return to corrupt the society of today and of the future. Indeed, observing the political climate in Japan today, one might say that they already have.

Chris Salzberg is a graduate student at the University of Tokyo. This article was originally posted at gyaku, a media project based in Japan.
Other Articles by Chris Salzberg
* Prachanda and the Corporate Convergence in Khatmandu
* A Sign of the Times: Signing Statements and Executive Power
* Abe's �Normal� Japan

REFERENCES

[1] Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold, Verso Books, London and New York, 2005, p.xii.

[2] Norbert A. Shlei, "Japan's 'M-Fund' Memorandum, January 7, 1991," in Japan Policy Research Institute Working Paper No. 11, July 1995.
JPRI Working Paper No. 11

[3] Chalmers Johnson, "The Looting of Asia," London Review of Books Vol. 25, No. 22, November 2003.

[4] David McNeill, "True Lies," Japan.Inc, April 2004.

[5] Tim Weiner, "C.I.A. Spent Millions to Support Japanese Right in 50's and 60's," New York Times, Oct. 9, 1994.

[6] Chalmers Johnson, "The 1955 System and the American Connection: A Bibliographic Introduction," in Japan Policy Research Institute Working Paper No. 11, July 1995.

 

[: Michael-Robert.]

Gold for gold. Find the gold. Share the gold. Philippines is “Riches Country in the World!” There are 950,000 metric tons of gold ( declared missing in the International Court of Justice in Hague) picked up by Yamashita from its European Ally, Hitler and another 250,000 metric tons of the Japanese loot around Southeast Asia are both now in the Philippines. Very few Filipinos knows this.. ( Wall Street Journal, November 15,1985 issue wrote: “ Two Thirds of all the gold in the world is in Philippines and One third is divided among the rest of the countries of the world”) ; During A TALK SHOW in a U.S. TV , the week following the bombing of the New York Twin Towers, President George Bush was asked this question: Which is the riches country in the world today? With a smile he said; “The Philippines.” In a US TV interview as well with President barrack Obama, in his “700 Billion USD stimulus funds” for US economy, he was asked a question where will he get the billion dollar substantial funds needed and quoted saying.. “ We have friends outside US who will support us”.

The branded Yamashita Treasure was considered “booty”. There were varied country claimants who are victims of the said WWII loots and these countries filed protest and claims after the war in the International Court of Justice. Though, there was a passage of law for thirty years starting 1946, that without a valid claim against it this “booty” it would belong to its new possessor. That would have been in 1976. However, the International Criminal Court (ICC) extended the deadline of the claims to 10 years up to 1986. With the conspiracy of the International Banking Cartel, neither the ICJ denied the existence of these gold and claims. Sadly, Successive governments of the Philippines denied its existence and failed to acknowledgd the gold. For almost 24 years, Information has been conspired to keep from being known to Filipino people.

This country is approximately a holder of estimated 1.2 Million Metric Tons of buried Gold excluding gold bullions way back to history of the “Maharlika” time. Only some of the Yamashita and Prince Chichibu buried gold in the Philippines has been found and the bulk of it is still around all over the archipelago to this day. Up to now, thousands of local individuals, company and foreign groups ventured secretly digging for it, including Japanese Treasure Hunters.

These gold loots are kept, transported, hoarded , concealed and burried in said to be 175 “imperial” vaults constructed in a maze of underground tunnels in the Philippines under the command and implementation of General Chichibu . The looting started in December 1937 in China’s Chinese Capitol of Nanking up to the advent and action of WWII .

Prince Chichibu is the younger brother of Emperor Hirohito and had been selected to head the ultra secret treasure recovery team. The Prime Minister, Prince Asaka had come from the Emperor with instructions to fully implement the plan. This led to the Rape of Nanking and the death of 300,000 Chinese civilians and military. Many had been tortured to reveal the locations of treasures and summarily executed. This secret team was given a code name of the Golden Lily after a poem the Emperor had once written. 6000 metric tons of gold were recovered from Nanking alone plus silver and precious stones.





Prince Chichibu

Top military and government officials meet in Mukden, Manchukuo in late 1936 to discuss the forthcoming war with the Chinese, Americans, Netherlands and French. The Emperor of Japan and others had developed a plan to finance the expansion of their military and to construct the ships, planes and other military hardware that would be required in order to implement their plans.

In December 1937 Japan had openly declared war on China and had surrounded the Chinese Capitol of Nanking. Prince Chichibu, the younger
brother of Emperor Hirohito had been selected to head the ultra secret
treasure recovery team code name: Golden Lily.
In July 1940, Winston Churchill, the wartime Prime Minister of Great Britain, met with Lord Beaverbrook. France had just fallen to Hitler's blitzkreig. The Germans had amassed their troops in the ports of France ready to cross the English Channel and invade Britain. Churchill had learned that the French had transferred their national treasures to French Indochina just before they had signed an armistice with the Germans. He had also learned from the Queen of The Netherlands that they had moved their treasures to the Dutch East Indies. He and the King of England decided to move the British treasures to the supposedly safe island fortress of Singapore off the southern tip of the Malay peninsula.

In 1941, Japan had sunk most of the American Pacific fleet with a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. On December 1941 Christmas Day , Japan had taken most of the major port cities of China and had forced the British into surrendering Hong Kong. By early January 1942 Japan's victories had been nothing short of miraculous. Guam and Wake lands had fallen. Japan had assimilated Thailand and the northern part of French Indochina. The Japanese had launched a vigorous invasion of the Philippine Islands and were pushing the Americans into a final defensive position on Bataan. Her armies were fighting their way down the Malay Peninsula approaching Singapore. Although the Japanese were encountering little resistance they were greatly outnumbered by the British and Indian troops. The Golden Lily team had been greatly expanded to handle these rapidly changing situations. It is fair to say that they were actually overwhelmed.

Emperor Hirohito had requested Prince Chichibu to fly to Hanoi in French Indochina to meet with his younger brother Prince Mikasa.

The Japanese secret police had learned that France had sent their National Treasures there.

But, where were they hidden? Prince Chichibu had ordered the torture of the Bankers and former Diplomats in order to find out. They learned the treasure had been sent to Saigon by rail just before the Japanese troops had moved into Hanoi. The treasure had been hidden in the ruins of an ancient temple at the end of track. The excitement of this recovery was only overshadowed by later events.

The fortress of Singapore fell to General Yamashita and with General MacArthur being ordered out of the Philippines, the last American and Filipino troops on Bataan and Corregidor surrendered to General Homma. The infamous Death March began. The Japanese victories on all fronts were extremely heady. They began to believe in their own invincibility. Burma was now in Japanese hands and invasion plans had been drawn up for a move into Northern Australia. Asia and Southeast Asia and most of the Islands in the Pacific were as good as theirs.

Prince Chichibu in Singapore was elated when his team found the treasures of Britain stored in the banks. The collection of wealth throughout the conquered lands continued. With over 5000 years of Asia's antiquity to pillage, the amounts collected were astronomical. Far surpassing what was thought to be the total amount of gold ever mined throughout history. With Shanghai in their hands the Golden Lily team found themselves stretched to the limit in keeping up with the collection and melting down of the precious metals. Another surprise experienced by Prince Chichibu was the discovery that the Dutch had moved their treasures to Batavia in the Netherlands East Indies. Now, not only did Japan have the wealth of the Asian continent, but they were rewarded with much of the European treasures as well. Hitler's loss was Japan's gain.

Japan's luck had begun to run out by May 1942. Their first setback was the Battle of the Coral Sea where the Allies had forced Japan to turn back her invasion fleet which they had planned to land in New Guinea. The following month they suffered a further major setback with the Battle of Midway where Japan lost four of her front line fleet carriers and the cream of her trained aviators. These were the same ships and pilots that had attacked Pearl Harbor five months earlier. In August 1942 the Americans landed an invasion force on Guadalcanal. Japan tried for months to dislodge the stubborn American Marines but eventually had to concede this unknown but important island base. After that Japan could never again launch another major offensive anywhere. The war would continue for another three years while the Japanese slowly lost the lands that they had conquered. Japan's dream was over and their nightmare had begun.

By mid-1942 American submarines and aircraft had begun to take a serious toll on Japanese shipping. Prince Chichibu could no longer send the many tons of treasure back to Japan with any guarantee that it would get there and not end up on the bottom of the ocean floor. Actually he had to revise his thinking about where to send the treasures after the Midway fiasco. Following a meeting with his brother, the Emperor, it was decided that the treasures should be hidden in the Philippine Islands. Why the Philippines? Because Japan was certain that they would end up with these islands during surrender negotiations with the Allies. Also, it was the shortest distance from Hong Kong and Singapore where the material was being processed.

Prince Chichibu had begun shipping material to the Philippines even before this decision was made. It was originally intended to be sent on to Japan in returning war ships. The Prince was still nervous about these shipments even after the decision was made. He commandeered four large freighters and had them painted all white with a red cross on their sides. These were "hospital" ships which he loaded with the many treasures. To be absolutely sure that even these ships were not molested he announced their movement on a clear radio channel so that the Americans would know their times of departure and their courses.

PRINCE CHICHIBU IN THE PHILIPPINES

Prince Chichibu had moved his Headquarters to Manila in the Philippines. He had entrusted his younger brother Prince Mikasa and his cousin Prince Asaka to continue the collection of the treasures. Before he left he had begun to cut up the many golden pagodas and Buddhas which were being melted down and poured into 75 kilo bars. This amassing of the treasures would continue until Japan ultimately surrendered.

Prince Chichibu was now faced with new challenges. Where and how to hide the treasures so that they could not be accidentally discovered after the war. The Prince was not as certain as his brother, the Emperor, that Japan would end up with the Philippine Islands following their defeat. He decided that these treasures would have to be hidden in deep, well engineered tunnel systems. He had no experience in mining and basically that was what was going to be required.

Major Nakasone was the only member of the Golden Lily team who had any mining background. He had studied mining engineering but never had any on the job training. He sent for him anyway. In the meantime he asked The Emperor for help and he responded by having someone locate twenty experience men in underground excavation in Japan who were quickly sent to the Philippines. If the Prince needed more workers, he would have to get them from the Filipinos. In addition the Emperor had reminded Chichibu that the POWs of the Americans and the British contained a lot of engineering experts especially those who served in the construction battalions.

Manpower was the least of his problems. There were thousands of POWs who the Japanese considered expendable. If that wasn't enough then there were millions of Filipino males that could be used. As soon as here received his experts he immediately began work in a dozen locations. While this was going on the treasure ships were arriving weekly and their precious cargo had been added to the other treasure already stored in heavily guarded warehouses. There were other problems; the movement of the cargo from the ships to the warehouses attracted a lot of attention. Chichibu decided to construct an underground tunnel system from the piers to the warehouses which were in the capture American base named Fort McKinley. Eventually this tunnel would branch out under Manila and run for 35 miles. The entrance was in Intramuros, the ancient walled city of the Spaniards, which was near the docks. It terminated at MacArthur's headquarters in Fort McKinley.

Prince Chichibu had to make some other major decisions. Why not hide all the treasure in one large location? The Emperor had answered that question. Security!!! Too many people who had worked on the location would know where it was, also if someone should accidentally find the location all would be lost. Early on the Prince had made the decision that except for a few foreign engineers the entire work force would have to be exterminated. The next question was where could this work be done where the local population would not be aware of what was going on there. Japanese military bases were perfect. Only the military had access to them and most bases had POW camps nearby. Prince Chichibu visualized that when the Americans returned to recapture the Philippines that there would be massive bombings. The map makers needed permanent landmarks in order to relocate these sites after the war. The Americans had shown in Europe that they would avoid bombing historical buildings. The four hundred year old historical Spanish Churches and fortifications were perfect. But just to make sure he would house American POWs in them. Mainly women and children. He would then arrange for clear radio communications to announce this fact. It worked, the Americans spared these sites.

Major Nakasone was at Fort Santiago, a 16th century Spanish fortification, collecting slave labors from the Kempeitai Headquarter's dungeons and torture chambers. One of the physically strong Filipino's he selected was Leopoldo Giga. Nakasone knew a Colonel Kantaro Giga who was one of his instructors at the military academy. Out of curiosity he decided to personally interview Giga. He found him an intelligent, 28 year old, who spoke fluent Japanese. He also learned he was a nephew of his academy instructor. Giga's father was the brother of the instructor who was a minor diplomat who had been attached to the Japanese Embassy in the Philippines 1913. Giga's mother had met the Diplomat and had become his common-law wife. Another advantage that Nakasone found in Giga was that he spoke two of the main dialects of the Filipino people. Instead of making him a slave laborer he assigned him to his staff. Giga came to the attention of Prince Chichibu who had him commissioned as a sub-lieutenant in the Imperial Army. He was sent to Japan to attend schooling on tunneling and inventorying the treasure. He returned a Captain and worked on most of the treasure sites.

Prince Chichibu was in Nueva Vizcaya in early 1942. He was examining a major excavation outside of the town of Bambang. He and his staff had a young Filipino boy who had come down with a fever and had died. He had been a houseboy who did the laundry of the Prince and his staff as well as kept their boots and other equipment cleaned and polished. He sent his aide out to locate a replacement. The Aide came back with a 14 year old uneducated farm boy whose name was Benjamin Valmores. During the next three and a half years Valmores traveled with the Prince to many of the sites all over the Philippines. He learned Japanese and a smattering of English. He was never allowed to go down into the tunnels, but he watched them being constructed and filled with the treasures. He and Giga would survive the war.

As the war reached its inevitable climax in early 1945 the Japanese were receiving more treasure than they could prepare sites for in which to hide it. Their warships became useless due to the American air- superiority, so they loaded them with these newly arrived treasures and pretended they were being sent back to Japan. Instead the Japanese deliberately sank or scuttled these ships and machine-gunned their own men so that the ships would go down in predetermined locations and no witnesses would be alive to tell the tale. There were thirteen of these planned sinkings. Some of these went down in Manila Bay; others were sunk in not to deep Philippine Waters throughout the archipelago.

The bloody war was over. The hopes of Emperor Hirohito and others to force the Americans to agree to a treaty that would allow Japan to keep some of the lands they had taken by conquest had been shattered. They had planned the final battle that they were certain would cause the Americans over a million casualties when they invaded the Japanese home islands. The two atomic bombs and Russia's invasion of Manchuria in an attempt to annex some of Japan's conquered lands had cause the Emperor to agree to an unconditional surrender. Now the conquerors wanted to bring to justice those who were responsible for the many atrocities. Over 4000 war criminals were charged. Of these 2400 received a prison sentence of three years or more and 809 were ultimately hung.




THE BRANDING OF “YAMASHITA GOLD”

The famous Yamashita Gold treasure trove takes its name from General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who assumed command of Japanese forces in the Philippines only in 1944, a year before the war ends. But, the irony of it, the whole treasure troves was not all buried by Yamashita as many believe. There are team of Japanese Officers and Generals assigned who lead the 14th Army in the Philippines ahead of him since the Japanese invasions and occupations in 1941 .

These generals were Lt. General Masaharu Homma ; Vice Admiral Ibo Takahashi; Vice Admiral Nishizo Tsukahara; Lt. General Shizuiki Tanaka; Lt. General Shigenori Kuroda and some of their Chief of Staffs Major Gen. Takaji Wachi; Lt General Haruki Isayama; Lt. Gen. Tsuchino Yamaguchi; Lt Gen. Ryuzo Sakuma and Lt. Gen. Akira Muto were burying already the bulk of gold loots carried over by the command and implementation of Prince Chichibu or General Chichibu way back starting 1942 up to early 1945. Only why it was branded as “Yamashita Gold” due to first news informed treasure recoveries in the late 70’s particularly of “Roxas – His Golden Budda” and the gold recoveries of “Sta Romana” in Northern Luzon buried by Yamashita who also was in charge then for the quick burying concealment because Japan is already loosing the war . He was as well known as “Tiger of Malaya” and strongly identified as the general tasked to transport the bulk of gold loots from Singapore to Philippines by Japanese Navy Fleets carrying himself to his new command post in the Philippines in September 1944 as 14th Area Army Commander. And the fact that, Yamashita was the last General on command of the Japanese forces in the Philippines during the unconditional surrender of Japan in 1945. The "gold" includes many different kinds of valuables looted from banks, depositories, mosques, temples, churches, shops, museums and private homes. It was intended that loot from South East Asia would finance Japan's war effort. Most of the loot was first shipped to the port of Singapore, where it was then relayed to the Philippines. From the Philippines, it was intended that the treasure would be shipped to the Japanese home islands which did not materialized.

When the gold was buried, it was done in anticipation that the Americans would defeat the Japanese and the underground vaults, tunnels, and entrances were booby trapped with gas, explosives, and water. The water traps were created by digging 300 - 350 feet underground in the dry months, at which time the water table was at its lowest.


As the Pacific War progressed, Allied submarines and aircraft took a heavy toll on Japan's shipping. Some ships carrying gold loots back to Japan were sunk. The Japanese military began to hide the loot in caves and underground complexes throughout the Philippines, hoping to recover it after the war was over. Many of those who knew the locations of the loot were either executed or incarcerated for war crimes, including Yamashita. Thus, the whereabouts of the treasure locations were lost. Many years later, Former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos located some of the treasure and obtained part of his personal fortune from it. His recoveries are known as the "Marcos Gold”or “Marcos Wealth". Aside from these finds, others finds are not sufficiently documented.



HITLER’S NAZI LOOT OF EUROPE, THE VATICAN AND ANTONIO DIAZ STA ROMANA CONTROVERSY:

In the early 1930’s , Europe was in depression and Germany was financially bankrupt, An unknown party leader emerged and promise the German people that he could create jobs and boost the economy. The Germans dared him and put him in power. His name is Adolf Hitler. In 1933, the Vatican and Hitler, a Roman Catholic signed a concordat and mutual protection and enhancement. That was apparently that Vatican was spared of the ruins of war in Europe during WWII. “Hitler was loaded with gold and money”. He built a massive army and manufactured weapons of war. Then Hitler took Poland. Before 1918 there was no Poland. That land was part of Germany and used as a buffer zone to separate Germany from Russia. But when Hitler reclaimed it, England declared war on Germany.

By the advent of the WWII, Germany and Japan made strong allies and positioned their army forces and manufactured weapons not only for war or expanding their empire but conquest for wealth and connived for the European and Asian Looting.

After the War, accordingly “Fr. Jose Antonio Diaz,”aka Fr Hayes; Severino Garcia Sta Romana, et al and other used names formerly of the OSS and CIA was entrusted by the Vatican to take charge of Vatican gold buried on the Philippines. The claims of the “Vatican gold” was identified as bullion that had been “captured by Hitler” and that had belonged to the royal families of Europe and been placed under the trusteeship of the Vatican. It also includes gold bullions that was plundered by the Japanese under General Chichibu and buried in the Philippines.

Fr. Diaz had “assumed several names when he moved to the Philippines.” One of these was “Col. Severino Sta. Romana.” Being with the OSS after the war, he was able to retrieved, unlock on only some of the buried gold bullion treasures in Northern Part of Luzon, Philippine Island. By peacetime, he was also the major catalyst for the safe return of 640,000 metric tons of Gold owned by the royalty family of the former “maharlika” or the Philipines borrowed by the Vatican in 1939 and facilitated its return to the original owners in Philippines and rewarded with paid commissions of 30% of the returned gold. The value of the gold now estimated at $4 trillion in which anyone could raise eyebrows its existence. Where it is now? It was noted that Sta. Romana during that time had “hired the young Marcos as his lawyer and trustee.” By 1949, It was said the Two (2) richest man in the world were Fr. Jose Antonio Diaz and Atty. Ferdinand E Marcos . Perhaps, there is a good reason to believe now for people who defended and stay on hold to the programs of the former “strong man” that his wealth is “Not Ill-Gotten”.
In 1974, Fr, Jose Antonio Diaz, alias Severino Sta. Romana died and all that 30% commission in gold become the legendary “MARCOS GOLD”. In power, after providing for his family in Marcos “Letter of Instruction”, the whole wealth derived from this was supposed to be given to the FILIPINO PEOPLE. However, the “MARCOS GOLD or MARCOS WEALTH” was labeled as “Ill-Gotten” as some of Philippine Politicians and Churchmen kept on saying. There was nothing secret about the said.. “Marcos Secret Account”. History of and by the said “Letter of Instructions”, will show that the money was not stashed away and inaccessible but available to truly deserving Filipinos. Filipinos should know this. The grand scheme of these with these International banking cartels with the backdrop control of Superpower Nations with so much interest no less than by greed so that this country and its people will remain a slave and shackled to these foreign powers. They don’t want our country to be made a “ First World Country”. The phony scheme of the CIA backed EDSA “PEOPLE POWER REVOLUTION” exhibition in 1986 continually blinded FILIPINOS up to now and keep repeating that MARCOS was a thief so that those hundreds of billions of “ MARCOS WEALTH” will remain froze and not given to the Filipino people.
WHO SHOULD OWN THE GOLD TREASURES IN THE PHILIPPINES?
Apparently, after 1986 under the International Court of Justice, the gold treasure buried in the Philippines or in other nations will be owned by the possessor of it. Who are they? For Filipinos, Its us Filipinos who have the control of private or government land allegedly to contain of these buried gold loots. However, in reality, we have to accept the fact that it was not ours since time in memorial these gold were owned by varied international country claimants. But who to prove it that its theirs? Even the International Court of Justice up to now denied its existence for reason how will they prove it? To “someone” who had accumulated the German and Japanese plundered gold gathered in by General Chichibu and General Yamashita obviously preferred not to come forward with their claims because such claims would possibly reveal the source of such wealth. To take note the Japan’s ravage of the war in Burma and Asian neighbors where their historical and ancient gold was looted , was cut , stripped, melted and formed into another gold bars. The war was over and it would be difficult to identify the actual ownership of these gold if found. However, gold hallmarks can do so, and the hallmarks still carry international warrants for claims. The come and go to the Philippines of mandates and representatives by the international gold bullion buyers from Europe, China, America etc. are taking advantage of huge buying % discounts from who would be finders and holders/sellers of the gold loots. To note, before transporting these items , a must buying policy that these hallmarks of gold identity would be first erased or removed and re-melted again into new dory or plain bars form before shipment and payments. Other buying schemes would have it shipped out after making any financial payment guarantees to the sellers and after re-melting and refining, payments can be done off-shore. Thus , legalizing and documenting said gold treasures would be easy for them.

 

[jeff of pa]

moved to

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Treasure Legends

 

[: Michael-Robert.]

All SHOULD READ.

 

[Audi]

Thanks for sharing.

 

[: Michael-Robert.]

you are welcome

 

[yamazues]

Corrected Truths

Very good summary, but there are many more than 175 burial sites in the Philippines and each site can have 1 to 21 separate deposits. Most have 1 to 3 deposits each, gold bars, diamonds and a Buddha. I know personally dozens of sites in a small portion of Mindanao including what I believe is listed as 7 Generals which has 20 booby trapped entrances and at least that many vaults. Many are jewels and Diamond only vaults very difficult to detect. Yamashita sites are mostly all marked well alrhough sometimes obscure. Usual markings include a big stone at entry area, but not always. Sometimes it's tree(s), waterfall, cave, carved markings on stones or acid etched stone maps. Sometimes they are whole rocks shaped for markings such as a 12ft heart shaped rock I know of. Markings are used to tell story and entry locations, but also used every step of the way to guide you down a twisting, turning path through many booby traps to get to vaults safely. Tunnels are a mere 18x27 inch oval. 3 to 6 inches at sides are 1/16 inch rope wires, self-igniting gas tube bombs and large poisons both chemical and biological. Exactly next to tunnel are also poisons. Nothing within the 18x27 inch designated tunnel area. Treasures are usually perched over deep underground river fissures, with booby traps causing gold bars to fall deep underwater down the natural earth cracks if improperly excavated straight down on them. These treasure burials were not hastily buried in retreat as the false account written in the book 'Gold Warriors', although there were some that were buried in a hurry because the volume confiscated by IJA was larger than anticipated. I consider myself as foremost expert on the IJA designs and codes. I have spent 10 years digging and researching including interviews with still alive guerilla soldiers from WW2. These treasure burials were started as early as 1936 as IJA excavation and tunneling projects in preparation for the War to come. The gold and other wealth was captured in 1942. The final burials concluded in pre-fabricated vault areas after that. The share for Emperor and Japan went to Japan via Burma railroad mostly. The share for the military was sent via IJN ship to the Philippine Islands which Japan planned to keep indefinitely and transfer all military bases to.
Anybody care to write a new book?
Contact me @ (63)9175400665 or
[email protected]

Yamashita's Gold - Eyewitness
Reveals Truth Of Fabulous
WWII Hidden Treasure
By Sterling and Peggy Seagrave
South China Morning Post
9-3-1

In the closing months of World War II, in the Philippines, several of Japan's highest ranking imperial princes hid tons of looted gold bullion and other stolen treasure in caves and tunnels, to recover later. This was the wealth of 12 Asian countries, accumulated over thousands of years.

Expert teams accompanying Japan's armed forces had systematically emptied treasuries, banks, factories, private homes, pawn shops, art galleries, and stripped ordinary people, while Japan's top gangsters looted Asia's underworld and its black economy.

There were 175 ''imperial'' treasure sites hidden throughout the Philippines. When American tanks were close, the chief engineers of those vaults were given a farewell party 67 metres underground in Tunnel 8 in the mountains of Luzon, stacked with row after row of gold bars. As the evening progressed, they drank great quantities of sake, sang patriotic songs and shouted banzai (long life).

At midnight, General Yamashita Tomoyuki and the princes slipped out, and dynamite charges were set off in the access tunnels, entombing the engineers. Their vaults would remain secret. The princes escaped to Tokyo by submarine, and three months later General Yamashita surrendered to American troops. Japan had lost the war militarily, but the princes made certain Japan did not lose financially.

This grisly event has remained unknown until now, and the hidden treasure was brushed off as a fanciful legend of ''Yamashita's Gold''. But an eyewitness to the entombment has taken us there and given us his personal account. During the war, Ben Valmores was the young Filipino valet of a senior prince, who was in charge of closing all imperial treasure sites in the Philippines. A sometimes sentimental man, the prince spared Ben's life and led him out of Tunnel 8 just before the dynamite was detonated.


Japan's looting of Asia was overseen by [then-emperor] Hirohito's brother Prince Chichibu. His organisation was codenamed kin no yuri (Golden Lily), the title of one of the emperor's poems. Other princes headed different parts of Golden Lily across the conquered territories. Eventually, Japanese sources told us that Ben's wartime master was prince Takeda Tsuneyoshi, first cousin of Hirohito and grandson of emperor Meiji.

In 1998, we tested Ben with 1930s photographs of many princes, all the names removed, and he instantly identified prince Takeda, Hirohito's brother prince Chichibu and other princes.

Ben said he had spent time with each of them, bringing them food, tea and cigarettes while they inventoried each treasure site. When he saw our photo of Prince Takeda, Ben froze, then began softly crooning the Japanese folk song Sakura, Sakura (Cherry Blossoms), which he said Takeda often sang to himself.

In the final stages of work on a biography of Japan's imperial family titled The Yamato Dynasty, we were told that in October 1945, American intelligence agents learned where some of the Japanese loot was hidden in the Philippines, and quietly recovered billions of dollars worth of gold bullion, platinum, and loose diamonds. This information, if true, revealed the existence of an extraordinary state secret, something the United States Government kept from its own citizens for more than half a century. There was no time to include this in the biography. It had to be investigated separately. Here is some of what we have since learned:


After surrendering on September 2, 1945, General Yamashita was charged with war crimes over gruesome atrocities committed in Manila under the order of an admiral, while Yamashita had ordered withdrawing troops to leave the city unharmed. During his trial, there was no mention of plundered treasure, or of looting during the war.

But we now know there was a hidden agenda. Because it was not possible to torture General Yamashita physically without this becoming evident to his lawyers, members of his staff were tortured. His driver, Major Kojima Kashii, was given special attention. In charge of the torture of Major Kojima was a Filipino-American intelligence officer named Severino Garcia Santa Romana, whose friends called him Santy. He wanted the major to reveal each place where he had taken Yamashita, where bullion and other treasure was hidden for recovery after the war. Supervising Santy during the torture was Captain Edward Lansdale, later one of America's best known ''Cold Warriors''.

Early that October, Kojima broke and led Lansdale and Santy to more than a dozen Golden Lily treasure vaults in the rugged country north of Manila. What they found astounded everyone from General Douglas MacArthur all the way up to the White House. After discussions with his cabinet, President Harry Truman decided to keep the recovery a state secret.

Santy's ensuing recoveries greatly altered America's leverage during the Cold War. According to senior US government officials and high-ranking US Army officers, the Truman administration set this treasure aside along with Axis loot recovered in Europe, as a secret political action fund to fight communism in the Cold War.

Crudely put, it would be used to bribe statesmen and military officers, and to buy elections for anti-communist political parties. The idea for a global political action fund based on war loot had originated with US secretary of war, Henry Stimson. During the war, Stimson had a brain-trust thinking hard about recovered Axis plunder, and how it should be handled after the war. Their solution was to set up what is informally called the ''Black Eagle Trust'', after the black eagle emblem of Hitler's Reichsbank in Berlin.

The Black Eagle Trust was first discussed in secret during July 1944, when 44 nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to plan the post-war economy. This was confirmed to us by a number of high-level sources, including former CIA deputy director Ray Cline, who knew about Santy's recoveries in 1945, and continued to be involved in attempts in the 1980s and 1990s to hide blocks of Japanese war loot still said to be in the vaults of banks in New York.

In November 1945, General MacArthur strolled down row after row of gold bars stacked two metres tall during a tour of vaults opened by Santy. >From what was seen in these vaults alone, it was evident that over a period of years Japan had looted billions of dollars in treasure from all over Asia.Much of this plunder had reached Japan overland earlier, from China through Korea, but the rest was hidden in the Philippines, unable to be shipped to Japan by sea because of the successful US submarine blockade.


According to Ray Cline and others, between 1945 and 1947 the gold bullion recovered by Santy and Lansdale was moved discreetly to 172 accounts at banks in 42 countries.

There were important reasons for all this secrecy. If the recovery of this huge mass of stolen gold was known only to a trusted few, the countries and individuals that had been plundered could not lay claim to it. Truman recognised that the very existence of so much black gold, if it became public knowledge, would cause the metal's fixed price to collapse. But as long as the gold was kept hidden, prices could be maintained and currencies pegged to gold would be stable. Meanwhile, the black gold would serve as a reserve asset, bolstering the prime banks in each country, and strengthening the anti-communist governments of those nations.

To hide the existence of all this treasure, Washington had to tell a number of lies. Especially lies about Japan, which had stolen most of the gold. America wanted Japan to become its anti-communist bastion in Asia, where the mainland was being overrun by communists. If American conservatives and Japanese conservatives were to ally effectively against communism, they had to begin by enlarging their financial resources for the Cold War.

Above all, the source of much of this hidden wealth must never be acknowledged. Washington had to insist, starting in 1945, that Japan never stole anything, and was flat broke and bankrupt when the war ended. Here was the beginning of many terrible secrets.

Because they remained ''off the books'', these enormous political action funds got into the wrong hands, where they remain to this day. We can reveal that in 1960, then vice-president Richard Nixon ''gave'' one of the biggest of these political action funds, the US$35-billion (about HK$272 billion) M-Fund, to leading members of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). In return, he is believed to have sought their support for his presidential campaign that year.

The M-Fund, now said to be worth more than US$500 billion, is still controlled by members of the LDP.

Officially, we are told that Japan's wartime elite the imperial family, the zaibatsu (large industrial business conglomerates), the yakuza (Japanese mafia) and the ''good'' bureaucrats ended the war as impoverished victims of a handful of ''bad'' military zealots. We are told that Japan was badly damaged and impoverished, barely able to feed itself at war's end.


In fact, Japan emerged from the war far richer than before, and with remarkably little damage, except to the homes of millions of ordinary Japanese who did not count, at least in the view of their overlords.

Evidence of Golden Lily loot comes also from straightforward legal actions in America. Such simple things as the probating of the will of Santa Romana (Santy), verification of his tax records, and legal evidence of his fortune deposited in the US, Switzerland, Hong Kong and elsewhere, provide hard proof that the world is awash with clandestine bank accounts growing out of Golden Lily.

Other lawsuits in the US prove that Golden Lily war loot was indeed hidden in the Philippines. Rogelio Roxas, a Filipino locksmith, found a one-tonne solid-gold Buddha and thousands of gold bars hidden in a cave near Baguio only to have it stolen from him by President Ferdinand Marcos. Roxas was subsequently tortured and died in suspicious circumstances. Some believe he was murdered. In 1996, a US Federal Court awarded his heirs a judgment of US$22 billion against the Marcos estate.

As the 1951 Peace Treaty was skewed by secret deals, thousands of Japan's victims have been deprived of any compensation for their suffering. According to Article 14 of the Treaty: ''It is recognised that Japan should pay reparations to the Allied Powers for the damage and suffering caused by it during the war. Nevertheless it is also recognised that the resources of Japan are not presently sufficient.'' To reinforce the claim that Japan was broke, Article 14 noted that ''the Allied Powers waive all reparations claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan...'' By signing the Treaty, Allied countries concurred that Japan's plunder had vanished down a rabbit hole, and all Japan's victims were out of luck. In return for going along with the Treaty, the Allies received portions of the gold bullion recovered by Santy.

We have evidence from former CIA deputy director Cline that the gold bullion Santy and Lansdale recovered was secretly moved to national treasuries and prime banks in more than 42 countries, including Great Britain. We also have evidence from British archives confirming this.

More than half a century later, the last battle of the Pacific War is being waged in courts in the US and Japan where surviving prisoners of war, slave laborers, comfort women and civilian victims of Japan have filed billion-dollar lawsuits to win compensation so mysteriously denied them after the war. In 1995, it was estimated that there were 700,000 victims of the war who had still received no compensation.

Today, their numbers are dwindling rapidly because of age and illness. Backing them is an extraordinary coalition, including international law firms with years of experience, fighting for compensation from German industries and Swiss banks, for crimes committed and money looted during the Nazi Holocaust.


Sterling and Peggy Seagrave are the authors of ''Golden Warriors''. This is an edited extract of the book's prologue. It will be published in French by Editions Michalon in November

 

[: Michael-Robert.]

More

I know....lol. Those are the Imperial sites. There is probably around 1.5 million smaller sites.

Very good summary, but there are many more than 175 burial sites in the Philippines and each site can have 1 to 21 separate deposits. Most have 1 to 3 deposits each, gold bars, diamonds and a Buddha. I know personally dozens of sites in a small portion of Mindanao including what I believe is listed as 7 Generals which has 20 booby trapped entrances and at least that many vaults. Many are jewels and Diamond only vaults very difficult to detect. Yamashita sites are mostly all marked well alrhough sometimes obscure. Usual markings include a big stone at entry area, but not always. Sometimes it's tree(s), waterfall, cave, carved markings on stones or acid etched stone maps. Sometimes they are whole rocks shaped for markings such as a 12ft heart shaped rock I know of. Markings are used to tell story and entry locations, but also used every step of the way to guide you down a twisting, turning path through many booby traps to get to vaults safely. Tunnels are a mere 18x27 inch oval. 3 to 6 inches at sides are 1/16 inch rope wires, self-igniting gas tube bombs and large poisons both chemical and biological. Exactly next to tunnel are also poisons. Nothing within the 18x27 inch designated tunnel area. Treasures are usually perched over deep underground river fissures, with booby traps causing gold bars to fall deep underwater down the natural earth cracks if improperly excavated straight down on them. These treasure burials were not hastily buried in retreat as the false account written in the book 'Gold Warriors', although there were some that were buried in a hurry because the volume confiscated by IJA was larger than anticipated. I consider myself as foremost expert on the IJA designs and codes. I have spent 10 years digging and researching including interviews with still alive guerilla soldiers from WW2. These treasure burials were started as early as 1936 as IJA excavation and tunneling projects in preparation for the War to come. The gold and other wealth was captured in 1942. The final burials concluded in pre-fabricated vault areas after that. The share for Emperor and Japan went to Japan via Burma railroad mostly. The share for the military was sent via IJN ship to the Philippine Islands which Japan planned to keep indefinitely and transfer all military bases to.
Anybody care to write a new book?
Contact me @ (63)9175400665 or
[email protected]

 

[: Michael-Robert.]

Read my other posts.

 

[KXMember]

Here is one our friend found there... View attachment 1172955

 

[renantagum30]

is that a nickel babbit? how many tons are there in the said site/? nice find from your friend.

 

[Hitndahed]

WOW,,,

This IS one of the best accounts of the activities surrounding this "treasure".
So much more than the normal one or two line threads where uninformed seekers are here posting inquiries about digging bunkers or strange WW2 markings on concrete.

A very informative read for sure and I thank you for taking the time to research then post it up for all of to read.
Excellent job

Hit

 

[renantagum30]

a long time ago, i found a video where the same nickel babbit piles were also seen. it must have been a different site, but i am not sure if these are different sites or same sites. it was posted by zobex in tseatc.com

 

[Hitndahed]

So Embrym,,,

How long have you been working on this?
This is a lot of information you have presented.

From what I have read,,, it was split into many,,MANY smaller hoards and hidden all over the Philippines and Japan areas.
This is a huge amount of real estate to check. I am ASSUMING,,(I could be wrong ,,please do not say here) you have already found some of it,,,

Are the "clues" you used from military records ?,, old veterans who assisted ?,, or verbal accounts of accidental witnesses ?
Also I did read somewhere there were NOT too many "visual" clues to the locations.

I would really love to hear more,,, please do PM me if you want.
And NO,,, I am NOT anyone who is any form of "threat" to anything.
Just really into this story,, I really like the "AMBER ROOM" story too.

Thank you again

Hit

 

[KXMember]

a long time ago, i found a video where the same nickel babbit piles were also seen. it must have been a different site, but i am not sure if these are different sites or same sites. it was posted by zobex in tseatc.com

This find made local news and this picture is of that same find.

 

[KXMember]

These areas were marked in a similar fashion as how the ancients marked their hoards.

 

[renantagum30]

These areas were marked in a similar fashion as how the ancients marked their hoards.

WHAT do you mean by that statement sir kxmember?

 

[KXMember]

Using a mathematical templates and the common nature of Man and Animals to explain direction, topography, environmental conditions, death traps, depth, contents ect.

 

[natalylam]

Hi Everyone,

My name is Nataly Lam and I am an associate producer for the Travel Channel original series EXPEDITION UNKNOWN. The show is hosted by Josh Gates who is a life adventurer with a degree in archeology. The show follows Gates as he investigates iconic mysteries around the world.

We are preparing to travel to the Philippines to film and I wanted to reach out to any current treasure hunters in search of Yamashita's Gold or anyone with information that they would like to share.

Please contact me at anytime at [email protected]. Thank you so much!