GOLD WARRIORS
HOW AMERICA SECRETLY
RECOVERED YAMASHITA’S GOLD
By Sterling & Peggy Seagrave
CAST OF MAIN CHARACTERS
ACKERMAN, Robert A. – Washington lawyer, explained how ex-CIA officials tried to regain control of
black gold accounts in New York banks.
ANDERSON, Robert B. – Toured treasure sites with MacArthur, set up Black Eagle Trust with Japanese
war loot, member of Eisenhower cabinet.
ANGLETON, James Jesus – Top CIA official, used Nazi and Japanese war loot to rig postwar elections
in Italy and Greece.
ASAKA Yasuhiko, Prince – Commanded rape and looting of Nanking.
BARANGAN, General Santiago – His memos to Marcos describe secret talks with top Japanese officials
for joint recovery of war loot in Manila.
BELLI, Melvin – San Francisco lawyer, sued Citibank for misappropriating war gold from Santa
Romana accounts.
BUSH, George H. W. President – Wrote personal note to head of Japan’s LDP that enabled Alexander
Haig to negotiate a billion-dollar IOU.
CANNON, Colonel Jack – Used war-gold to finance death squads in occupied Japan, to eliminate leftists
and labor organizers.
CASEY, William – CIA director; involved with Lansdale gold recoveries and Black Eagle Trust; later
removed Marcos from power.
CATHCART, Daniel – California lawyer whose successful suit against Marcos for theft of the Gold
Buddha won a $43-billion judgment.
CHICHIBU, Prince – Brother of Emperor Hirohito; headed Golden Lily campaign to loot all of East &Southeast Asia, then hid the treasure.
CLINE, Ray – CIA deputy director; used Japanese war loot to manipulate foreign governments; fought for
control of Santa Romana gold at Citibank.
CURTIS, Robert – Mining expert brought in by Marcos to launder gold; engineered major recoveries,
photographed 173 original Golden Lily maps.
DOIHARA, General – Japan’s senior secret agent, one of five top men in Golden Lily, masterminded the
looting of Manchuria and China.
DULLES, Allen – CIA director, brother of J.F. Dulles, oversaw the Black Eagle Trust and setting up
scores of slush funds around the world.
DULLES, John Foster – Arch-conservative Secretary of State, contrived false 1951 peace treaty to
shield Japan’s elite from reparations.
FORINGER, Alan – CIA agent in Nippon Star and Phoenix Exploration; explained how war-gold would
finance private American gestapo.
HIROHITO, Emperor – Received and never returned the finest cultural treasures stolen from 12
countries; kept secret Swiss gold accounts.
JONSSON, Olof — Swedish psychic brought in by Marcos to pinpoint treasure vaults and sunken ships,
saw warehouses filled with stolen gold.
KISHI, Nobosuke, Prime Minister – Headed looting of Manchuria, served in Tojo’s war cabinet; Nixon
gave him control of the M-Fund.
KODAMA, Yoshio – Japan’s top gangster; aided Golden Lily by looting China’s underworld; used
proceeds to set up Japan’s ruling
LDP.
KOJIMA, Kashii – Chauffeur of General Yamashita, tortured by Lansdale and Santa Romana to reveal a
dozen vaults where treasure was hidden.
LANSDALE, Edward G. – Became America’s most famous Cold Warrior thanks to torture of Kojima and
recovery of Japanese gold.
LAUSIER, Edmond C. –Banking expert whose file of Japanese documents proved that notorious “57”
debt instruments were not forgeries.
MACARTHUR, General Douglas –Used war loot to create a trust fund for Hirohito at Sanwa Bank; also
set up the secret M-Fund to back the LDP.
MARCOS, Imelda – Former Philippine first lady, accused of hiding gold in banks around the world;
bribed witnesses to lie about Gold Buddha.
MARCOS, Ferdinand – Philippine dictator, recovered Japanese treasure in the 1970s, shared the gold
with CIA and White House until his downfall.
MCCLOY, John J. – Original planner of global Black Eagle Trust based on Nazi and Japanese war loot;
became head of the World Bank.
MCMICKING, Joseph – MacArthur protégé who presided over torture of Major Kojima; used some of
the war gold to become a global financier.
MIYAZAWA, Kiichi – Finance Minister and one of three Japanese who negotiated rigged 1951 peace
treaty; still chief controller of the M-Fund.
ROXAS, Roger – Found solid gold Buddha looted from Burma; after President Marcos stole it, Roxas
was tortured and murdered to silence him.
SANTA ROMANA, Severino – Tortured Yamashita’s driver, recovered 12 treasure vaults; became CIA
‘gatekeeper’ of the Black Eagle Trust.
SCHLEI, Norbert – Former deputy U.S. attorney general, falsely convicted for trying to negotiate a “57”
IOU; ruined financially and professionally.
SCHWEITZER, General Robert – Advisor to President Reagan; begged Robert Curtis to help White
House recover more war loot.
SINGLAUB, General John – Schweitzer’s partner in gold recoveries, he spent millions in the Philippines
digging holes in the wrong places.
TAKEDA Tsuneyoshi, Prince – Cousin of Hirohito, grandson of Meiji; took charge of hiding war treasure
at 175 vaults in the Philippines.
VALMORES, Ben – Philippine rice farmer; as a boy he was valet to Prince Takeda, visiting all 175
treasure vaults; was given a copy of Takeda’s maps.
WHITNEY, General Courtney – MacArthur’s lawyer and intelligence chief, set up M-Fund to influence
Japanese elections with massive bribes.
WILLOUGHBY, General Charles – MacArthur’s G-2 chief, paid war criminals to rewrite history and
manipulate Japan’s government.
YAMASHITA, General Tomoyuki – Japan’s top general, conqueror of Singapore; wrongly linked to
plunder by the misnomer Yamashita’s Gold.
AUTHORS’ NOTE:
SLAYING THE
MESSENGER
Many people told us this book was historically important and must be published – then warned us that if it
were published, we would be murdered. An Australian economist who read it said, “I hope they let you
live.” He did not have to explain who ‘they’ were.
Japan’s looting of Asia, and the hiding of this war-gold in American banks, is closely linked to the
issue of Holocaust gold hidden in Swiss banks. Revealing the secrets of either is a dangerous business.
Jean Ziegler, a Swiss professor and parliamentarian, did much to expose five decades of official amnesia
in his book The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead. After publishing it and testifying in 1998 before the U.S.
Senate Banking Committee about Jewish assets in Swiss banks, he was charged with ‘treason’ by Swiss
Federal Prosecutor Carla del Ponte. The charge was brought by twenty-one financiers, commercial
lawyers, and politicians of the far right, many of them major stockholders in large Swiss banks. They
accused Ziegler of being an accomplice of Jewish organizations who ‘extorted’ vast sums of money from
Switzerland.
Ziegler is only one of many who have been persecuted for putting ethics before greed. Christopher Meili, a Union Banque Suisse (UBS) security guard, was threatened with murder and the kidnapping of
his wife and children after he testified before a U.S. Senate committee about documents he rescued from
UBS shredders. He and his family were given asylum in America.
We have been threatened with murder before. When we published The Soong Dynasty we were
warned by a senior CIA official that a hit team was being assembled in Taiwan to come murder us. He
said, “I would take this very seriously, if I were you.” We vanished for a year to an island off the coast of
British Columbia. While we were gone, a Taiwan hit team arrived in San Francisco and shot dead the
Chinese-American journalist Henry Liu.
When we published The Marcos Dynasty we expected trouble from the Marcos family and its
cronies, but instead we were harassed by Washington. Others had investigated Marcos, but we were the
first to show how the U.S. Government was secretly involved with Marcos gold deals. We came under
attack from the U.S. Treasury Department and its Internal Revenue Service, whose agents made
threatening midnight phone calls to our elderly parents. Arriving in New York for an author tour, one of us
was intercepted at JFK airport, passport seized, and held incommunicado for three hours. Eventually the
passport was returned, without a word of explanation. When we ran Freedom of Information queries to
see what was behind it, we were grudgingly sent a copy of a telex message on which every word was
blacked out, including the date. The justification given for this censorship was the need to protect
government sources, which are above the law.
During one harassing phone call from a U.S. Treasury agent, he said he was sitting in his office
watching an interview we had done for a Japanese TV network – an interview broadcast only in
Japanese, which we had never seen.
After publishing The Yamato Dynasty, which briefly mentioned the discovery that is the basis for
Gold Warriors, our phones and email were tapped. We know this because when one of us was in a
European clinic briefly for a medical procedure, the head nurse reported that ‘someone posing as your
American doctor’ had been on the phone asking questions.
When a brief extract of this book was published in the South China Morning Post in August 2001,
several phone calls from the editors were cut off suddenly. Emails from the newspaper took 72 hours to
reach us, while copies sent to an associate nearby arrived instantly.
In recent months, we began to receive veiled death threats.
What have we done to provoke murder? To borrow a phrase from Jean Ziegler, we are ‘combating
official amnesia’.
We live in dangerous times, like Germany in the 1930s, when anyone who makes inconvenient
disclosures about hidden assets can be branded a ‘terrorist’ or a ‘traitor’. A few months ago, three ex ambassadors to Japan declared that former American POWs and civilian slave laborers, suing giant
Japanese corporations for compensation, were tantamount to terrorists. Now a CIA official says that leaks
of classified information must be stopped, even if it is necessary to “send SWAT teams into journalists’
homes”.
Everybody’s national security is a serious matter. We have no argument with that. But national
security can be invoked to hide official corruption, and conflict of interest. It’s called tyranny. The only
cure is openness and sunlight.
In this book, we do not question whether President Truman did the right thing in keeping these wargold recoveries secret. That is for others to debate. What we point out is that total secrecy enabled
corrupt people to abuse the resulting slush funds, and these abuses have multiplied like a cancer, ever
since. A global network of corruption has grown around the slush funds. Bureaucrats, politicians, spooks,
and generals, have become addicted to black money. There are indications that a lot of this war-gold has
been siphoned off by America’s far right, under the guise of patriotism. The unintended consequences of
Truman’s decision have become a poisonous part of the world financial system, putting innocent people at
hazard. Those people and institutions benefiting from this corruption will do everything possible to hide
it, including murder.
The only way to get rid of an illness is first to recognize what it is. But when the emperor goes crazy
from syphilis of the brain, the first person to be tortured and burned at the stake is the doctor who made
the diagnosis – slaying the messenger.
Despite the best efforts of the American and Japanese governments to destroy, withhold, or lose
documentation related to Golden Lily, we have accumulated thousands of documents, conducted thousands
of hours of interviews, and we make all of these available to readers of this book on two Compact Disks,
available from our website www.bowstring.net so they can make up their own minds. We encourage
others with knowledge of these events to come forward. When the top is corrupt, the truth will not come
from the top. It will emerge in bits and pieces from people like Jean Ziegler and Christopher Meili, who
decided they had to ‘do something’.
As a precaution, should anything odd happen, we have arranged for this book and all its
documentation to be put up on the Internet at a number of sites.
If we are murdered, readers will have no difficulty figuring out who ‘they’ are. Readers will find
exhaustive annotations at the back of this book. Those wishing to see additional documentation, maps,
images, and photographs in both black-and-white and color, may obtain compact discs containing more
than 900 megabytes of data from the authors’ website at .
PROLOGUE:
BURIED ALIVE
In the closing months of World War II in the Philippines, while General Yamashita Tomoyuki fought a
delaying action in the rugged mountains of Luzon, several of Japan’s highest-ranking imperial princes
were preparing for the future. They were busy hiding tons of looted gold bullion and other stolen treasure
in nearby caves and tunnels, to be recovered later. This was the property of twelve 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 black economy. In this, the
Japanese were far more thorough than the Nazis.
It was as if a giant vacuum cleaner passed across East
and Southeast Asia. Much of the plunder reached Japan overland through Korea. The rest, moving by sea,
got no farther than the Philippines as the U.S. submarine blockade became complete in early 1943. Hiding
the treasure there was crucial, so that if Japan lost the war militarily, it would not lose financially. In
whatever settlement concluded the war, Japan always expected to keep the Philippines.
Overseen by the
princes, 175 ‘imperial’ treasure vaults were constructed throughout the islands. Early in June 1945, when
U.S. tanks were less than twenty miles from Bambang, the 175 chief engineers of those vaults were given
a farewell party 220 feet underground in a complex known as Tunnel-8, stacked wall-to-wall 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’) over and over.
At midnight, General Yamashita and the princes slipped
out, and dynamite charges were set off in the access tunnels, entombing the engineers. They were buried
alive. Those who did not kill themselves ritually would gradually suffocate, surrounded by gold bars. The
vaults would remain secret. In subsequent days, the princes escaped to Japan by submarine, and three
months later General Yamashita surrendered to American troops.
For half a century, this grisly live burial remained unknown. The hidden treasure was brushed off as
‘the legend of Yamashita’s Gold’.
But an eyewitness to the entombment has taken us to Tunnel-8 and given
us his personal account. During the war, Ben Valmores was the young Filipino valet of an exceptional
Japanese prince, who was in charge of building, inventorying and sealing all imperial treasure sites in the
Philippines. Highly educated and sometimes sentimental, the prince spared Ben’s life at the last moment
and led him out of Tunnel-8, just before the dynamite was detonated. Ben, in poor health in his mid seventies when we interviewed him, told us over many months what he saw and experienced in the
company of his prince, from 1943 to 1945. He provided us with essential clues that eventually enabled us
to identify his prince, and most of the other princes involved.
Japan’s looting of Asia was overseen by Emperor Hirohito’s charming and cultivated brother,
Prince Chichibu. His organization was code-named kin no yuri (Golden Lily), the title of one of the
emperor’s poems. Lesser princes headed different branches of Golden Lily across the conquered
territories. Japanese sources now have confirmed that Ben’s wartime master was Prince Takeda
Tsuneyoshi, first cousin of Emperor Hirohito and a grandson of Emperor Meiji.
To corroborate this, in
1998 we gave Ben a ‘blind test’ with obscure 1930s photographs of many princes; photos that we
obtained from the British Library Oriental Collection. These were photos of the princes in army uniform,
as they looked on the eve of Pearl Harbor. Although we removed the names from each photo, and mingled
photographs of ordinary soldiers, Ben instantly identified Prince Takeda, Hirohito’s two brothers Prince
Chichibu and Prince Mikasa, and the elder Prince Asaka who had commanded Japanese armies at the
Rape of Nanking. Ben said he had spent time with each of them, bringing them food, tea and cigarettes
while they inventoried and closed treasure sites.
Ben Valmores was a rural rice farmer who never left the
Philippines, and never went beyond grade school, so his instant correct identification of the princes was
persuasive. When he came upon our photo of Prince Takeda, Ben froze, then began crooning the Japanese
folk song Sakura, Sakura (‘Cherry Blossoms’), which he said Takeda often sang to himself.
The discovery of Prince Takeda’s identity provided us with a piece missing from a much larger
puzzle. While we were writing a biography of Japan’s imperial family, The Yamato Dynasty, we were
told that in October 1945, American intelligence agents learned the location of some Japanese treasure
vaults in the Philippines, and secretly recovered billions of dollars worth of gold, platinum, cultural
artifacts, and loose gems. This information, if true, revealed the existence of an extraordinary state secret
that the U.S. Government had kept hidden for over half a century. So serious were the implications that we
decided they merited separate investigation. Here is some of what we have learned:
On September 2, 1945, after receiving official notice of Japan’s surrender, General Yamashita and
his staff emerged from their mountain stronghold in the Kiangan Pocket and presented their swords to a
group of U.S. Army officers led by Military Police Major A.S. ‘Jack’ Kenworthy, who took them to New
Bilibad Prison outside Manila. Because of gruesome atrocities committed earlier by Admiral Iwabuchi
Kanji’s sailors and marines in the city of Manila (after Yamashita had ordered them to leave the city
unharmed), the general was charged with war crimes. During his trial there was no mention of war loot.
But there was a hidden agenda.
Because it was not possible to torture General Yamashita physically without this becoming evident
to his defense attorneys, members of his staff were tortured instead. His driver, Major Kojima Kashii,
was given special attention. Since Yamashita had arrived from Manchuria in October 1944 to take over
the defense of the Philippines, Kojima had driven him everywhere. In charge of Kojima’s torture was a
Filipino-American intelligence officer named Severino Garcia Diaz Santa Romana, a man of many names
and personalities, whose friends called him ‘Santy’. He wanted Major Kojima to reveal each place to
which he had taken Yamashita, where bullion and other treasure were hidden.
Supervising Santy, we learned, was Captain Edward G. Lansdale, later one of America’s best known Cold Warriors. In September 1945, Lansdale was 37 years old and utterly insignificant, only an
advertising agency copywriter who had spent the war in San Francisco writing propaganda for the 0SS. In
September 1945, chance entered Lansdale’s life in a big way when President Truman ordered the OSS to
close down. To preserve America’s intelligence assets, and his own personal network, OSS chief
General William Donovan moved personnel to other government or military posts. Captain Lansdale was
one of fifty office staff given a chance to transfer to U.S. Army G-2 in the Philippines. There, Lansdale
heard about Santy torturing General Yamashita’s driver, and joined the torture sessions as an observer and
participant.
Early that October, Major Kojima broke down and led Lansdale and Santy to more than a dozen
Golden Lily treasure vaults in the mountains north of Manila, including two that were easily opened.
What lay inside astounded everyone.
While Santy and his teams set to opening the rest of these vaults, Captain Lansdale flew to Tokyo to
brief General MacArthur, then on to Washington to brief President Truman. After discussions with his
cabinet, Truman decided to proceed with the recovery, but to keep it a state secret.
The treasure – gold, platinum, and barrels of loose gems – was combined with Axis loot recovered
in Europe to create a worldwide covert political action fund to fight communism. This ‘black gold’ gave
the Truman Administration access to virtually limitless unvouchered funds for covert operations. It also
provided an asset base that was used by Washington to reinforce the treasuries of its allies, to bribe
political leaders, and to manipulate elections in foreign countries. In the late 1940s, this agenda was seen
as entirely justified, because the Soviet Union was aggressively supporting communist and socialist
movements all over the world, putting the survival of the capitalist world in peril.
Most readers will be as surprised as we were by this information. Some may be deeply troubled by
Truman’s strategic decision, which others may heartily endorse. It is not within the scope of this book to
examine that decision, or to explore whether it was right or wrong. It might have been a wise decision at
the time, which had tragic consequences in the longer term. Ours is only a preliminary report, and in what
follows we try to remain politically neutral. The only purpose of this book is to lift the veil of secrecy,
and to bring forward and examine the unforeseen consequences, which are many, and troubling.
It was not Truman’s decision alone. The idea for a global political action fund based on war loot
actually originated during the Roosevelt administration, with Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. During
the war, Stimson had a braintrust thinking hard about Axis plunder and how it should be handled when
peace came. As the tide turned against the Axis, it was only a matter of time before treasure began to be
recovered. Much of this war prize was in the form of gold looted by the Nazis from conquered countries
and civilian victims. To eliminate any trace of original ownership, the Nazis had melted it down, and
recast it as ingots hallmarked with the swastika and black eagle of the Reichsbank. There were other
reasons why the gold was difficult to trace. Many of the original owners had died, and pre-war
governments had ceased to exist. Eastern Europe was falling under the control of the Soviet Union, so
returning gold looted there was out of the question.
Stimson’s special assistants on this topic were his deputies John J. McCloy and Robert Lovett, and
consultant Robert B. Anderson, all clever men with outstanding careers in public service and banking.
McCloy later became head of the World Bank, Lovett secretary of Defense, Anderson secretary of the
Treasury. Their solution was to set up what is informally called the Black Eagle Trust. The idea was first
discussed with America’s allies in secret during July 1944, when forty-four nations met at Bretton Woods,
New Hampshire, to plan the postwar world economy. (This was confirmed, in documents we obtained, by
a number of high-level sources, including a CIA officer based in Manila, and former CIA Deputy Director
Ray Cline, who knew of Santy’s recoveries in 1945. As recently as the 1990s, Cline continued to be
involved in attempts to control Japanese war-gold still in the vaults of Citibank.)
After briefing President Truman and others in Washington, including McCloy, Lovett, and Stimson,
Captain Lansdale returned to Tokyo in November 1945 with Robert B. Anderson. General MacArthur
then accompanied Anderson and Lansdale on a covert flight to Manila, where they set out for a tour of the
vaults Santy already had opened. In them, we were told, Anderson and MacArthur strolled down “row
after row of gold bars stacked two meters tall”. From what they saw, it was evident that over a period of
years Japan had looted many billions of dollars in treasure from all over Asia. What was seen by
Anderson and MacArthur was only the gold that had not reached Japan. Far from being bankrupted by the
war, Japan had been greatly enriched.
According to Ray Cline and others, between 1945 and 1947 the gold bullion recovered by Santy and
Lansdale was discreetly moved by ship to 176 accounts at banks in 42 countries. Secrecy was vital. If the
recovery of a huge mass of stolen gold became known, thousands of people would come forward to claim
it, many of them fraudulently, and governments would be bogged down resolving ownership. Truman also
was told that the very existence of so much black gold, if it became public knowledge, would cause the
fixed price of $35 an ounce to collapse. So many countries had linked their currencies to the U.S. dollar,
and the dollar linked to gold, that currency values throughout the world would plummet, causing financial
disaster. This argument may have been greatly exaggerated by those who stood to benefit from the Black
Eagle strategy, but nobody could be certain what the consequences would be. If the gold was kept secret,
prices could be kept at $35 an ounce, the dollar would remain strong, and currencies pegged to gold
would be stable. Meanwhile, the black gold would serve as a reserve asset, bolstering the prime banks of
Allied countries, strengthening the governments of those nations. As a safeguard, the bullion placed in
those banks was carefully controlled; strict limits were placed on the use that could be made of the gold
(a process called earmarking). This enabled Washington to bring pressure, from time to time, on those
governments, central banks and prime banks. Put simply, so long as a country and its leaders cooperated,
and remained allied to the United States in the Cold War, derivatives of the sleeping bullion could be used
for patronage through political slush funds.
Documents do show that between 1945 and 1947 very large quantities of gold and platinum were
deposited in the world’s biggest banks, including Union Banque Suisse and other Swiss banks, which
became major repositories of the Black Eagle Trust. Swiss banks played a pivotal role because
Switzerland had remained neutral during the war and its banks had not been looted, damaged, or depleted.
Documents signed by senior Swiss banking officials show that very large loans backed by this asset base
were then extended to the British government, the Egyptian government, the Chinese Nationalist regime,
and other governments struggling to recover from the war.
What went wrong in the longer term is that the cloak of national security created a situation ripe for
abuse. What protects national secrets also protects government officials and their collaborators in the
private sector. In later chapters we see numerous documented instances when these underground funds
surfaced as huge bribes, or were used to buy elections in Italy, Greece, Japan, and elsewhere. Beneficial
trusts were set up in behalf of influential people throughout the world. Gold bearer certificates were
given as inducements. In the hands of clever men, the possibilities were endless.
Over a period of decades, some of the world’s biggest banks became addicted to playing with the
black gold in their vaults. Now they will do whatever is necessary to keep the gold, even if it means
defrauding account holders or their heirs, as happened with Holocaust gold in Swiss banks.
In retrospect, recovering Golden Lily treasure vaults and setting up the Black Eagle Trust were the easy
parts, done for patriotic reasons and a noble cause. Making intelligent use of so much underground money
during the Cold War was not so easy, when national security made peer review impossible. Who is to
supervise clandestine funds, except those who benefit by using them?
There were other abuses as well. To hide the existence of this treasure, and to secure America’s
position against the tide of communism sweeping across Asia in the late 1940s, Washington told a number
of major diplomatic lies. Especially lies about Japan, which had stolen most of the gold.
Japan’s ruling elite were traditional hard-core conservatives, greatly alarmed by communism. America
wanted Japan to be its anti-communist bastion in Asia, so the source of Tokyo’s hidden wealth must never
be acknowledged. The most ardent anti-communists in Tokyo happened to be indicted war criminals. So
while America introduced democratic reforms and a new constitution, it put Japan back under the control
of men who were devoutly undemocratic, and kept them in power with huge infusions of black money.
Washington insisted, starting in 1945, that Japan never stole anything, and was flat broke and
bankrupt when the war ended. Here was the beginning of many great distortions, which would become
terrible secrets.
Because the treasure amassed by Golden Lily and recovered by Washington had to be kept secret, citizens
of Japan and America were grossly deceived. The 1951 peace treaty with Japan was skewed by these
deceits, so thousands of POWs and civilians (who were forced to perform slave labor for Japanese
corporations) received no compensation for their suffering. To shield Japan from demands for war
reparations, John Foster Dulles met privately with three Japanese to work out the treaty terms in secret.
One of the three, Miyazawa Kiichi, later served as Japan’s prime minister and repeatedly as its minister
of finance. According to Article 14 of the treaty, “It is recognized that Japan should pay reparations to the
Allied Powers for the damage and suffering caused by it during the war. Nevertheless it is also
recognized that the resources of Japan are not presently sufficient.”
To reinforce the claim that Japan was broke, Article 14 stated, “the Allied Powers waive all
reparations claims of the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of any actions taken by Japan”.
(Our italics.) 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, we document that Washington sent secret shipments of black
gold recovered by Santa Romana, to beef up the Allies’ exhausted central banks.
Because the Black Eagle Trust and the political action funds it spawned remained off the books,
some of these slush funds fell into the wrong hands, where they remain to this day, bigger than ever.
According to reliable sources in Washington and Tokyo, in 1960 Vice President Nixon gave one of the
biggest of these funds, the M-Fund, to the leaders of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party in return for their
promise of kickbacks to Nixon’s campaign for the American presidency. This in itself is deeply
disturbing. But the M-Fund, then worth $35-billion and now said to be worth upwards of $500-billion,
has been controlled ever since by LDP kingmakers who use it to buy elections, to keep Japan a one-party
dictatorship, and to block any meaningful reforms. Similar abuses with other secret funds are to be found
all over the world. Secrecy is power. Power corrupts. Secret power corrupts secretly.
As Japan expert Chalmers Johnson nicely put it, “The Cold War is over. Whatever the United States
may have believed was necessary to prosecute the Cold War, the Cold War itself can no longer be used to
justify ignorance about its costs and unintended consequences. 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.”
Where did all this treasure come from? Until now, Japan’s looting of Asia has been brushed off as a
few random acts of theft and violence committed by drunken soldiers. This is disinformation.
Looting as an extension of war is nothing new. In 1860 British and French armies on a punitive
expedition to North China got drunk, ran wild and looted the magnificent Summer Palace outside Peking,
smashing, breaking, or burning everything they could not carry, and finished by torching all but one of the
palaces and pavilions. Unable to believe the gold they found was real, these uneducated soldiers threw
most of it away, or traded it for alcohol. (The commander of this joint force was Lord Elgin, whose father
had removed most of the sculpture from the Parthenon in Athens.) In 1900, Western armies again marched
into Peking, this time to lift the so-called Boxer Siege of the Legations, then went on a drunken rampage
looting and smashing treasures inside the Forbidden City.
What Japan did between 1895 and 1945 was qualitatively different. This was not drunken looting
and smashing. The Japanese were serious, sober, and deliberate, giving special attention to the theft of
valuable books and manuscripts that would have been ignored by common thieves or footsoldiers. They
devoted special attention to looting the Asian underworld – triads, sects, racketeers. Japan also flooded
China with narcotics, giving gangsters drugs in exchange for gold, which brought treasure out of every
hiding place. On a personal level, extortion was used to terrorize wealthy individuals, including tycoons,
clan elders, bankers and businessmen.
Among the most valuable articles taken back to Japan were artworks and historic artifacts. It is a
matter of record that to this day only a tiny bit of this patrimony has been returned to the countries or
individuals from whom it was stolen. Some major artifacts, including solid gold Buddhas, have been seen
recently in underground hiding places in the Philippines. But most of the art and artifacts are still in
private vaults in Japan, or in the imperial collections in Tokyo. Why was Japan allowed to keep it?
Officially, we are told that Japan’s wartime elite – the imperial family, the zaibatsu, the yakuza, and
the ‘good’ bureaucrats – ended the war as impoverished victims of a handful of ‘bad’ military zealots. As
readers will see, this is not true. Many of Japan’s elite, including Emperor Hirohito, ended the war far
richer than when it began, and some made billions just before and after the surrender.
We are told that Japan was badly damaged and barely able to feed itself at war’s end. In fact,
surprisingly few factories and mansions were destroyed or even seriously damaged, and there was little
damage to infrastructure. Most of the damage that has been so widely publicized was to the matchbox
homes of millions of ordinary Japanese, whose suffering did not count in the view of their own overlords.
Obsessed by the urgent need to make Japan a bulwark against communism, Washington excused its
wartime leaders, imperial family and financial elite, from any responsibility for the destruction and
destitution of twelve Asian countries. Only a handful of Japan’s wartime leaders were executed as
scapegoats. Several were coerced or framed into taking the blame for the rest of the leadership. At the
end of the postwar occupation, all Japan’s indicted war criminals were set free, including gangsters and
godfathers who had directed the world’s largest drug trafficking system across East Asia during the 1930s
and 1940s. Washington saw to it that Japan’s government was put back in the hands of the same men who
had started the war. This was equivalent to reinstating the Nazi party in postwar Berlin. There was little
protest in Japan, because all opposition was silenced by a campaign of witch-hunting far more severe
than the McCarthy witch-hunts in America. As we demonstrate, the rebirth of Japan’s far right was
financed with war loot, and corporate profits wrung out of Asia during the war by Japan’s zaibatsu.
It is an inescapable fact that from the beginning of the U.S. occupation, General MacArthur,
President Truman, John Foster Dulles, and a handful of others, knew all about the plunder, and the
continuing extraordinary wealth of the Japanese elite. In an official report on the occupation prepared by
MacArthur’s headquarters and published in 1950, there is a startling admission: “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.” MacArthur’s staff knew, for
example, of $2-billion in gold bullion that had been sunk in Tokyo Bay, later recovered.
Another great fortune discovered by U.S. intelligence services in 1946 was $13billion in war loot
amassed by underworld godfather Kodama Yoshio who, as a ‘rear admiral’ in the Imperial Navy working
with Golden Lily in China and Southeast Asia, was in charge of plundering the Asian underworld and
racketeers. He was also in charge of Japan’s wartime drug trade throughout Asia. After the war, to get out
of Sugamo Prison and avoid prosecution for war crimes, Kodama gave $100-million to the CIA, which
was added to the M-Fund’s coffers. Kodama then personally financed the creation of the two political
parties that merged into Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), strongly backed to this day by
Washington.
Hard evidence of Santy’s secret recovery of Japanese war-gold comes from straightforward legal
actions in America. Such simple things as the probating of his will, the verification of his tax records in
the state of New York at Albany, and legal evidence of his fortune deposited in the United States,
Switzerland, Hong Kong and elsewhere, provide hard evidence that the world is awash with clandestine
bank accounts growing out of Golden Lily.
As we shall see, when Santa Romana died in 1974, some of his biggest black gold accounts were
quickly transferred to the name of Major General Edward G. Lansdale, the man who participated with
Santy in the torture of Major Kojima thirty years earlier, in 1945. By 1974, Lansdale had been retired
from the CIA for over a decade, raising puzzling questions that are only answered by recognizing the role
of Lansdale and other former spooks and generals in America’s new network of private military and
intelligence firms.
There are many other famous names tied to this curious story. Long-time Citibank CEO John Reed
was named in some of these lawsuits as a key figure in the movement of Santa Romana black gold. Among
those instrumental in the lawsuits was San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli. Writing to the editor of The
Las Vegas Sun, Belli said, “I’m now convinced that some very important banks around the world did
have deposits of money [for Santa Romana].” Belli’s suit read in part: “Defendant John Reed, the
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of defendant Citibank, has spearheaded Citibank’s conversion of
the gold bullion which was owned by [Santa Romana]. …Reed and Citibank have systematically sold and
are selling said gold bullion to buyers and converting the sales proceeds to their own use.”
Other lawsuits prove that Golden Lily war loot was indeed hidden in the Philippines. Rogelio
Roxas, a Filipino locksmith, found a one-ton solid gold Buddha and thousands of small gold bars hidden
in a tunnel behind a hospital in the mountain resort of Baguio, which had served as a headquarters for
General Yamashita. The moment he heard what Roxas had found, President Marcos sent thugs to
confiscate the Gold Buddha. When Roxas protested, he was arrested, tortured and ultimately poisoned. In
1996, a U.S. court in the state of Hawaii awarded his heirs a judgment of $43-billion against the Marcos
estate, the largest civil award in history.
Documents discovered in Malacanang Palace show that in 1968, President Marcos sent a team of
army officers to Japan to make a deal for joint recoveries. According to a member of the team, they met
with a prince, “a high-ranking Japanese officer… a cousin of Emperor Hirohito”, who told them that
Japan had hidden over $100-billion worth of treasure in the Philippines and it would take “more than a
century” to recover it all.
A related legal battle was that of former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Norbert Schlei, who had to
fight for his survival after being stung by the U.S. Treasury Department for asking too many questions
about Japan’s secret M-Fund. While Schlei was indicted, prosecuted, bankrupted, and professionally
ruined for trying to negotiate a financial certificate based on the M-Fund, former Secretary of State
Alexander Haig – according to eyewitnesses – went to Japan and negotiated a similar certificate
successfully, with the help of a personal letter from President George H.W. Bush. Why one man
succeeded while the other was destroyed is a chilling story of financial collusion between Washington
and Tokyo.
We have been deeply skeptical about the huge dollar values cited about Golden Lily. Officially,
there are said to be only about 130,000 metric tons of processed gold in the world including bullion,
coinage and jewellery. Official records maintain that Asia, with more than 75 per cent of the world’s
population, holds less than 5 per cent of the total world supply of gold, a statistic that is ridiculous on the
face of it. But in the West at least, the law of gold is drummed into us like the law of gravity. In fact,
nobody really knows how much gold there is. We do not know how much was looted by Spain from the
New World, because once it reached Europe most of it was passed on to the great European banking
families, the Fuggers and Welsers, who had financed the conquest of Mexico and Peru. Whatever the
Fuggers and the Welsers did with that gold they kept very secret. We also have no way of knowing the
actual wealth of families like the Krupps, Rothschilds, Oppenheimers, Warburgs, or Rockefellers, except
that they have been very rich for a very long time and their wealth is dispersed in a multitude of clever
ways.
A trillion dollars sounds like a lot, but economists tell us that today there is some $23-trillion in the
hands of the well-heeled, much of it sleeping in offshore private accounts where banking secrecy and
local laws keep these assets hidden from the tax-man, spouses, and clients. We know even less about the
gold holdings of the great Asian and Middle Eastern dynastic families, trading networks, and underworld
syndicates. Western tycoons may own banks and oil companies, and influence or control governments, but
wealthy Asians never trusted governments or banks, preferring to keep their wealth in small gold or
platinum bars, and gems. In China this absolute distrust goes back thousands of years. We can be sure that
what was tucked under the rug in Asia over 2,000 years is far more than what has been deposited in U.S.
and European banks since Western banking (and the gold market as we know it) came into existence
barely three centuries ago. The U.S. Government refuses to disclose how much gold it holds, and the last
public audit of Ft. Knox was in the early 1950s. In short, gold is one of the world’s biggest secrets. There
are good reasons for this.
The point of our book is not to guess how much was stolen, how much was hidden, how much was
secretly recovered, or how much is still waiting to be found. Because of all the lying and deception, the
full details may never be known.
In this book, in its annotations, and in our two archival CDs containing over 900 megabytes of
documents, photographs, maps and other images, we provide hard evidence that huge quantities of war gold remain today in the coffers of international banks such as Citibank, Chase, Hongkong & Shanghai
Banking Corporation (HSBC), Union Banque Suisse, and others. We provide photocopies of letters,
contracts, waybills, state government tax records, insurance covers, and interviews with brokers who
carried out Black Eagle deals.
We document how a secret trust was set up at Japan’s Sanwa Bank, jointly held by General
MacArthur and his old adversary Emperor Hirohito. This account, known as the Showa Trust after
Hirohito’s reign title, was so big that by 1982 it was paying nearly $1-billion interest per year. We also
have identified one of the three trustees of the Showa Trust. And we show how President Marcos
discovered the existence of this account and used it to blackmail the government of Japan.
We include documents and color photos of major postwar gold recovery operations while they were
under way, on land and sea. Santa Romana and Lansdale only recovered a portion of the treasure from
1945 to 1947. A decade passed before other significant recoveries occurred, as Japanese began coming
back to the Philippines, alone or in groups, to reclaim parts of the hoard.
We were given exclusive access to an archive of some 60,000 documents, and hundreds of hours of
audio and videotapes made or collected over 25 years by American mining expert and metallurgical
chemist Robert Curtis, who actually recovered $8-billion in gold bars for President Marcos from Teresa 2. After nearly being murdered by Marcos, and fleeing the Philippines, Curtis became absorbed by the
historical importance of documenting the treasure. In the course of engineering five major Golden Lily
recoveries for Marcos, Curtis was able to study many of the sites personally, in and around the city of
Manila, giving him an unrivaled understanding of the techniques employed by Golden Lily engineers.
During the months that Curtis worked with President Marcos, he photographed 172 of the 175
original treasure maps. We reproduce several of the maps on our CDs.
We also tell the epic saga of Japan’s recovery of the Op ten Noort, a captured Dutch passenger liner
used by Golden Lily to carry treasure safely to Japan under guise of being a hospital ship. After returning
to Japan in 1945, she was scuttled by Japanese navy officers near the Maisaru Naval Base with tons of
gold and platinum aboard. Her treasure was recovered in the early 1990s. The names of the Japanese
recovery ships, and the Australian recovery ship and submersible, all are clearly visible in the
photographs we reproduce, taken by one of the participants.
Included here are handwritten letters and diagrams showing how a group of senior U.S. Government
officials and Pentagon generals hoped to use Golden Lily treasure to create a new private FBI and a
military-industrial complex controlled by them, in partnership with the John Birch Society, the Moonies,
and far-right tycoons. This is confirmed by tape recordings of a 1987 conference in Hong Kong that
included retired U.S. Army General John Singlaub and General Robert Schweitzer of the National
Security Council under President Reagan. As a measure of their common sense, we show readers how
their group dug a hole 400 feet deep beneath a kitchen near Manila, in the misguided belief that the
Japanese had dug a similar hole in 1942 to hide gold bullion. More than 300 feet of this hole was under
water, so the generals and colonels brought in U.S. Navy deep-sea divers and decompression chambers to
carry out the recovery. After many months of toil, and over $1-million in costs, they found nothing and
gave up.
We recount a number of equally bizarre misadventures that show why peer review and full
disclosure are urgently needed. National security not only shields bureaucrats and hides corruption, it
also hides folly.
It has taken Holocaust victims nearly six decades to recover assets hidden in Swiss banks, to win
compensation for slave labor at German corporations like Volkswagen, and to regain possession of art
stolen from their homes and offices. Their success, along with the 50th anniversary of the surrender of
Japan, encouraged other victims to come forth with valid demands for compensation. This led to
unprecedented cooperation among the victims.
This last battle of the Pacific War was being waged in California state courts, where surviving
POWs, slave laborers, comfort women, and civilian victims filed billion-dollar lawsuits to win
compensation so mysteriously denied them after the war. In 1995, it was estimated that 700,000 victims of
the Pacific War still had received no compensation. Their numbers are dwindling rapidly because of age
and illness. Backing them is an extraordinary coalition of activists and law firms. Britain tried to sidestep
this tide of legal discovery by making one-time pay-offs to victims, to shut them up.
Washington took a different approach by moving the California lawsuits to federal courts, where
they were blocked by political pressure and intervention by government agencies. The Department of
State and Department of Justice are using Article 14 of the 1951 peace treaty to prevent POWs and other
victims from suing immensely rich Japanese corporations such as Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo. At
U.S. Senate hearings in June 2000, chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah challenged State and Justice attorneys
about the legitimacy of their claim that the 1951 Peace Treaty canceled all rights of victims. “You mean
our federal government can just say, ‘To hell with you, Bataan Death Marchers, and you people who were
mistreated, we’re just going to waive all your rights…’ Constitutionally, can our government take away
the rights of individual citizens just because they put it in a treaty…? We’re not asking the Japanese
government to pay. We’re asking the companies that did the acts to pay, some of these companies are
multi-billion-dollar companies today.”
Despite such impassioned appeals, on September 21, 2000, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn
Walker ruled against American POWs and other slave laborers. Walker dismissed their suits, saying it
was dangerous to upset the diplomatic alliance that existed between America and Japan since the end of
the war.
Three former U.S. ambassadors to Japan then published a letter in The Washington Post making the
astounding assertion that these American ex-POWs and their attorneys were virtual terrorists.
The real issue is conflict of interest. During the Clinton Administration, U.S. Ambassador to Japan
Thomas Foley was adamant in rejecting compensation for POWs and other slave laborers, insisting that
“The peace treaty put aside all claims against Japan.” His Deputy Chief of Mission, Christopher J.
Lafleur, echoed this dogma at every opportunity.
It was a matter of some interest to victims that Foley’s wife was a well-paid consultant to
Sumitomo, one of Japan’s biggest zaibatsu conglomerates, heavily involved in wartime slave labor and a
target of the lawsuits. The moment Foley ended his tenure as ambassador and returned to America, he
signed on as a paid advisor and lobbyist to another huge conglomerate – Mitsubishi – one of the biggest
wartime users of slave labor.
Of greater significance, perhaps, is that Lafleur is married to the daughter of former prime minister
and finance minister Miyazawa, one of the three Japanese who secretly negotiated the 1951 treaty with
John Foster Dulles. (Miyazawa also is considered by Professor Lausier and others to be the financial
overseer of the M-Fund.) Conflict of interest does not seem to be an obstacle in diplomatic appointments
to Tokyo.
Today, there is enough evidence of financial collusion between Tokyo and Washington to merit
Congressional hearings and a General Accounting Office investigation. After half a century of diplomatic
lies, corruption, and cover-up, it is time to strip off the fig leaf of national security, which is an insidious
form of tyranny. To Congress, to the American people, and to the principles of democracy itself,
Washington owes a full and guileless accounting.
Just down the coast from Manila in Batangas Province is a dramatic treasure site that someday
could be turned into a Golden Lily theme park. It has been the target of several Japanese recovery efforts
in recent years. Overlooking the South China Sea, it is a big headland with so many tunnels and gun
emplacements that it earned the nickname ‘Guns of Navarone’. (We were asked not to identify the location
precisely.) This underground complex was started by the Japanese in the early 1920s, as part of their
long-term strategy for the conquest of the Philippines. It was filled with treasure in 1944. Three of its
tunnels have since been opened by Japanese groups, who found trucks loaded with gold bars. They were
so happy with what they found in these outer reaches of the tunnels that they went no farther. Deeper
passages appear undisturbed. Where did all this treasure come from? It all began with Korea.
CHAPTER ONE
BEHIND THE MASK
During the night of October 7, 1895, thirty Japanese assassins forced their way into Korea’s royal palace
in Seoul. Bursting into the queen’s private quarters, they cut down two ladies-in-waiting and cornered
Queen Min. When the Minister of the Royal Household tried to shield her, a swordsman slashed off both
his hands. The defenseless queen was stabbed and slashed repeatedly, and carried wailing out to the
palace garden where she was thrown onto a pile of firewood, drenched with kerosene, and set aflame. An
American military advisor, General William Dye, was one of several foreigners who heard and saw the
killers milling around in the palace compound with drawn swords while the queen was burned alive.
Japan declared that the murders were committed by “Koreans dressed as Japanese in European clothes”
— a gloss greeted with ridicule by the diplomatic community. According to the British minister in Tokyo,
Sir Ernest Satow, First Secretary Sugimura of the Japanese legation in Korea led the assassins.
The grisly murder of Queen Min was a turning point in Japan’s effort to gain control of Korea. Her
husband King Kojong was a weakling, controlled by the queen’s faction, who were allied with China
against Japan. Once the queen was dead, the Japanese could easily control the king, and put an end to
Chinese interference.
The coup was planned by Miura Goro, agent of Japan’s aggressive Yamagata clique. At first, the
killing was to be done by Japanese-trained Korean soldiers, so it could be passed off as an internal
matter. But to make sure nothing went wrong, Miura called for help from the Japanese terrorist
organization Black Ocean. Many of its members were in Korea posing as business agents of Japanese
companies, including the oldest zaibatsu, Mitsui. Black Ocean and another secret society called Black
Dragon functioned as Japan’s paramilitaries on the Asian mainland, carrying out dirty work that could be
denied by Tokyo. They were in position throughout Korea and China, running brothels, pharmacies,
pawnshops, and building networks of influence by supplying local men with money, sexual favors,
alcohol, drugs, pornography, and Spanish Fly. While Black Ocean was obsessed with Korea, Black
Dragon (named for the Amur or Black Dragon River separating Manchuria from Siberia) was dedicated
to blocking Russian encroachment, and seizing China for Japan. Black Ocean provided Miura with the
professional assassins he needed, and the rest of the killers were security men from Japan’s consulate.
Whether they intended to kill the queen in full view of foreign observers is another matter. Japanese
conspiracies often began quietly, then went out of control.
Many Japanese leaders like statesman Ito Hirobumi were enlightened and reasonable men who
would have vetoed the murder, had they known. But there was a deep contradiction inside Japan
following the Meiji Restoration in the nineteenth century. Two cliques competed ruthlessly for power
behind the throne, and for influence over the Meiji Emperor. Those associated with Ito were more
cosmopolitan, emulating the role of Bismarck in guiding Kaiser Wilhelm, or Disraeli in guiding Queen
Victoria. Those allied with General Yamagata were throwbacks to medieval Japan, where power worked
in the shadows with assassins, surprise attacks, and treachery. While Yamagata built a modern conscript
army to replace Japan’s traditional samurai forces, he also built a network of spies, secret police, yakuza
gangsters and super patriots. These were key elements of the police state Yamagata was creating in Japan.
Underworld godfathers were a vital component of Japan’s ruling structure. Members of the imperial
family, and the financial elite that controls Japan, had intimate ties to top gangsters. When Yamagata’s
armies invaded Korea and Manchuria, gangsters were the cutting edge. Thereafter, Japan’s underworld
played a major role in looting Asia over fifty years, 1895-1945.
Queen Min’s murder marks the beginning of this half-century of extreme Japanese brutality and
industrial scale plunder. Her killing shows how easily the mask of Japan’s good intentions could slip, to
reveal hideous reality.
Other Japanese strategies also began quietly, then got out of hand. For example, it is unlikely that
Japan intended all along to have its army stage the Rape of Nanking in 1937, butchering some 300,000
defenseless people in full view of foreign observers with cameras. Had the Rape happened only once, it
might have been a grotesque accident. But variations of Nanking occurred many times during Japan’s
lightning conquest of East and Southeast Asia. By the time they overran Singapore in 1942, the atrocities
committed against Overseas Chinese civilians there — the Sook Ching massacres — were happening all
over Southeast Asia, and not only to Chinese. That this occurred so often suggests there was more to
Japan’s aggression than a purely military operation. Why, after successfully conquering a neighboring
country, did Japan torment the Chinese and others who had money or property? The explanation lies in the
shadows behind the army. Few history books take into account the role of the underworld, because
scholars rarely study outlaws. With Japan, we must always consider the underworld because it permeates
the power structure, as darkly satirized by the films of Itami Juzo.
The conquest of Korea was Japan’s first experiment in foreign plunder on an industrial scale, so
there was plenty for the underworld to do. Westerners know so little about Korea that it is surprising how
much there was to steal. Today, North and South Korea are only vestiges of a distinguished past. Historian
Bruce Cumings points out that “Korea’s influence on Japan was far greater than Japan’s influence on
Korea”. In ancient times Japan was raided by marauders from the Korean peninsula, and raided Korea in
return, but these were bands of swordsmen and archers, not armored regiments. Such raids caused a
mutual loathing of Koreans and Japanese that has its parallel in the Catholic and Protestant troubles of
Northern Ireland. A quick thumbnail history explains this hatred, and shows how Japan’s aggression
began.
When they first started feuding two thousand years ago, there was no Korea or Japan, as we know
them today. In different parts of the Korean peninsula were city-states with highly developed economies
supporting magnificent religious, literary and artistic cultures. Their porcelain is among the most prized in
the world today, along with elegant paintings, sculpture, and gold filigree. The elite lived in palaces on
great estates, with thousands of slaves. Taking no interest in commerce or warfare, they developed
astronomy, mathematics, wood block printing, and invented movable type long before anyone else. Until
the sixteenth century, Korea had one of the world’s most advanced civilizations.
Meanwhile, in the secluded islands of Japan, immigrants from China and Korea were linked in a
loose confederation ruled by Shinto priests and priestesses. For a thousand years, these rival domains
feuded among themselves, before finally submitting to the central military dictatorship of the shoguns.
Chronic conspiracy produced what one historian calls Japan’s ‘paranoid style’ in foreign relations. If
Japanese treated each other ruthlessly, why treat foreigners otherwise?
Koreans regarded Japanese as ‘uncouth dwarfs’. Chinese were more cultivated, so Korea willingly
accepted a tributary role with China. In return, China protected Korea from Japan.
In the sixteenth century, after Japan was unified by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, he launched an invasion of
Korea with 158,000 men. His plan was to crush Korea and erase its culture from the face of the earth. He
nearly succeeded. After several years of cruel occupation, Korea was rescued by Admiral Yi Sun-shin’s
famous Turtle Ship, the world’s first ironclad — 65-feet long, firing cannon balls filled with nails.
Admiral Yi cut Japan’s supply routes and destroyed its ships. Humiliated, Hideyoshi died soon afterward.
Despite this failure, the invaders profited richly by looting Korea. Their army included monks and
scholars assigned to steal Korea’s finest manuscripts. Samurai kidnapped masters of ceramics such as the
great Ri Sam-pyong, and made them slaves in Japan. A Korean scholar said the Japanese were “wild
animals that only crave material goods and are totally ignorant of human morality”. Centuries later, when
Japan invaded Korea again, its armies once more included teams of monks and scholars to find and loot
the finest artworks.
Korea never recovered. In the nineteenth century, it was the weakest, least commercial country in
East Asia, ripe for picking. China’s Manchu government, on the verge of collapse, was in no shape to
defend Korea.
Following the Meiji Restoration, Japan made a convulsive effort to modernize, becoming the first Asian
nation able to compete militarily with the West. As her army and navy developed, she was in a position to
launch a campaign of mechanized conquest on the mainland, to acquire a colonial empire of her own. Her
first target was Korea. Politicians and army officers argued that if Japan did not grab Korea, Manchuria,
and Taiwan, they would be grabbed by Russia, France or England. General Yamagata and Black Ocean
boss Toyama Mitsuru needed an incident that would give them an excuse to invade, while putting the
blame on Korea. Yamagata told Toyama to “start a conflagration” — then it would be the army’s duty to
go “extinguish the fire”.
Starting a fire in Korea was easy. Black Ocean terrorists attacked a rural religious sect called
Tonghak. The Tonghaks struck back, causing some Japanese casualties. With this excuse, Tokyo rushed in
troops to ‘protect’ its citizens in Korea. When news came that China was sending 1,500 soldiers aboard a
chartered British ship, the S.S. Kowshing, a Japanese squadron intercepted the vessel and sank her with
all aboard. This surprise attack set a precedent, followed many times by Japan in later decades.
China’s tottering Manchu government foolishly declared war on Japan. In September 1894, in the
mouth of Korea’s Yalu River, the Japanese destroyed half of China’s navy in a single afternoon. Japan
then captured Manchuria’s ‘impregnable’ Port Arthur, and the fortified harbor at Weihaiwei in Shantung
province, sinking all Chinese ships in the harbor. China sued for peace. By the end of February 1895,
Japan controlled the whole of Korea and also Manchuria’s strategic Liaotung peninsula. China also gave
Japan control of Taiwan, which became Tokyo’s first colony. When South Manchuria and Port Arthur also
were turned over to Japan, France, Germany and Russia pressured Tokyo to return them.
It was at this point that Queen Min refused to cave in to Japanese bullying, and was murdered. The
stage was now set for the unprecedented cruelties of the twentieth century.
Having humiliated Manchu China, Japan felt ready to take on Tsarist Russia, which was building
railroads into Manchuria. On February 8, 1904, Japan launched two more surprise attacks, one on the
Russian naval base at Vladivostok, another on two Russian warships in the mouth of Korea’s Inchon
harbor. In reply, the Tsar sent his Baltic fleet half way around the world, only to see it destroyed by
Japan’s navy in the battle of Tsushima, in May 1905. As China had done, Russia sued for peace, giving
Japan the lower half of Sakhalin Island, transferring to Japan its lease on South Manchuria, and giving
Japan control over the southern section of its Manchurian Railway, between Port Arthur and Changchun.
Now feeling invincible, Japan formally declared Korea a colony. Nobody asked Koreans what they
thought. Western governments did not protest. Great numbers of Japanese arrived in the peninsula to make
their fortunes. With them came legions of agents for the great zaibatsu conglomerates, seizing every
commercial opportunity, every natural resource. Japan took control of law and order, creating new police
and secret police networks. No longer making any pretense of chivalry, Japanese abused Korean
sovereignty at every turn, crushing all resistance. A newspaper editor was arrested when he wrote: “Ah,
how wretched it is. Our twenty million countrymen have become the slaves of another country!”
Not all Japanese were predators. Some earnestly believed that they were in Korea to help, not to
plunder. Ito Hirobumi told Korean officials, “Your country does not have the power to defend itself… I
am not insisting that your country commit suicide… I expect that if you thrust forward boldly, the day will
come when you will advance to a position of equality with us and we will cooperate with one another.”
The appointment of Ito as the first Japanese viceroy of Korea gave the country some hope of rational
government. But General Yamagata saw to it that Ito’s staff included Black Dragon boss Uchida Ryohei.
Secretly financed from army funds, Uchida’s thugs went on a rampage, murdering 18,000 Koreans during
Ito’s time as viceroy. Disgusted by the bloody meddling, Ito resigned in 1909 only to be shot dead by paid
assassins. His murder was used as a pretext to demand full annexation of Korea. On August 22, 1910,
Korea ceased to be a mere colony and was fully incorporated into Japanese territory. Japan’s army now
had its own domain on the Asian mainland, free of interference from Tokyo politicians. One of
Yamagata’s most rabid followers, General Terauchi Masatake, was appointed first governor-general of
Korea. Terauchi, who had lost his right hand during a great samurai rebellion in the 1870s, had been army
minister during the Russo-Japanese War. He now supervised the looting and plunder of Korea.
Although some Japanese Army officers were chivalrous, showed mercy, or refused to indulge in
wanton killing, Terauchi was extraordinarily brutal, setting a precedent for Japanese behavior in all the
countries it would occupy over coming decades. Determined to crush all resistance, he told Koreans, “I
will whip you with scorpions!” He set up a sadistic police force of Korean yakuza, ordering it to use
torture as a matter of course, for “no Oriental can be expected to tell the truth except under torture”. These
police were closely supervised by Japan’s gestapo, the kempeitai.
Most kempeitai agents wore civilian clothes, identified only by a chrysanthemum crest on the
underside of a lapel. Eventually Japan spawned a network of these spies, informants, and terrorists
throughout Asia. At the height of World War II, 35,000 official kempeitai were deployed throughout the
Japanese Empire. The unofficial number was far greater, because of close integration with Black Dragon,
Black Ocean, and other fanatical sects, working together ‘like teeth and lips’. Black Ocean boss Uchida
reviewed all appointments of kempeitai officers sent to Korea.
Korean resistance was intense, but futile. In 1912, some 50,000 Koreans were arrested; by 1918 the
number arrested annually rose to 140,000. During Korea’s first ten years of Japanese rule even Japanese
schoolteachers wore uniforms and carried swords. Japan’s army stood guard while kempeitai and Black
Ocean thugs pillaged the peninsula. Japanese police controlled rice production from paddy field to
storehouse, so the majority could be shipped to Japan. Yakuza were expert at extortion. In Japan, they
used intimidation, extortion, kidnapping and murder, restrained only by prudence in selecting the victims.
On the mainland there was no need for such restraint. Because Terauchi’s style was so brutal, Japanese
bankers and businessmen made a public display of showing contempt for mercy. Eventually, the Terauchi
style spread across Asia, remaining in place till 1945.
To be sure, Japan did modernize Korean industry, to some extent, but at terrible cost. Korean
workers were paid one-fourth the wages of Japanese counterparts in the same factories. Terauchi forced
Koreans to eat millet, while their rice was sent to Japan.
In this merciless way, the peninsula was stripped of everything from artworks to root vegetables. As
Korea now belonged to Japan, the transfer of cultural property – looting – was not theft. How can you
steal something that already belongs to you?
First on the wish-list was Korea’s famous celadon porcelain, which many thought surpassed China’s
Tang porcelain. Korean stoneware was distinctive for its translucent blue-green glaze, with floral designs
incised in the clay and filled with color before glazing. A Western expert called it “the most gracious and
unaffected pottery ever made”. Although Japan had kidnapped Korea’s celadon masters in the sixteenth
century, and these experts had discovered sources of fine clay in Kyushu, the porcelain they made in Japan
was not the same spiritually. Japanese valued Korean celadon above all others for ritual purposes and tea
ceremony. Coveted also were examples of Korea’s punch’ong stoneware, and Choson white porcelain.
Some of this plunder was put on display at Tokyo’s Ueno Museum. Most ended up in private
Japanese collections where it was never on public view, and rarely was seen even in private. Japanese
collectors keep their treasures in vaults, taking single pieces out for personal viewing. So, most of
Korea’s stolen antiquities remain lost from sight to this day.
When all Korea’s private collections were confiscated, experts studying court records and ancient
manuscripts determined that the finest celadons still slept in the tombs of kings. To disguise the looting of
these tombs, Terauchi introduced laws for the ‘preservation’ of historic sites. By preservation, he meant
that the tombs would be looted and the valuable contents preserved in Japan. He then opened some two
thousand tombs, including a royal tomb in Kaesong, which were emptied of their ancient celadons,
Buddhist images, crowns, necklaces, earrings, bronze mirrors, and other ornamental treasures. Along the
Taedong River near Pyongyang, some 1,400 tombs were opened and looted.
This wholesale theft was overseen by General Terauchi, personally. One of his first acts was to
destroy the 4,000-room Kyungbok-goong Palace to make way for the construction of a residence for
himself. To decorate his personal quarters, he chose 600 artworks from thousands being prepared for
shipment to Japan.
Japanese private collectors and antique dealers carried off not only artworks, but classic literary
texts and important national archives — all in the name of academic research at Japanese museums and
universities. Tens of thousands of the finest books listed as Korean national treasures, including all 1,800
volumes of the Ri dynasty archives, were shipped to Japan. Scholars say some 200,000 volumes of
ancient books of lesser distinction were then burned, as part of a deliberate program to erase Korea’s
distinctive culture. They list more than 42,000 cultural relics, including ancient manuscripts, taken to
Japan for ‘study’, and never returned. For good measure, the Japanese used dynamite to blow up a
monument to King Taejo (1396-1398), and a monument to Sam-yong, the militant Buddhist priest who led
the resistance to Japan’s samurai invasion in 1592.
“Japan’s aim,” said Korean historian Yi Kibeck, “was to eradicate consciousness of Korean
national identity, roots and all, and thus to obliterate the very existence of the Korean people from the face
of the earth.”
Once stripped of their heritage and identity, Koreans were to be made-over into second-class
Japanese. Divested of their inherited land, they had their names changed to Japanese names, and were
forced to adopt Shinto in place of their own Buddhist, Confucian or Christian beliefs. Japan’s emperor
would be their only god, and any Korean who refused to acknowledge his divinity was arrested. Temples
were looted of bronze bells and Buddhist statuary. Even ordinary religious metalwork was removed and
melted down for weapons as ‘spiritual cooperation behind the guns’. Koreans were to speak only
Japanese; Korean-language newspapers were closed, political parties disbanded; Korean writers could
only publish in Japanese, and all schools taught only in Japanese. At home, Koreans were expected to
speak Japanese to each other.
In 1907, Tokyo forced King Kojong to abdicate in favor of his retarded ten-year-old son. They
styled the boy ‘Crown Prince Imperial Yi Un’ and sent him off to Tokyo, claiming he would be educated
side-by-side with Meiji’s grandsons — Princes Hirohito, Chichibu and Takamatsu. In truth, the boy was a
hostage, whose survival depended on continued cooperation by Korea’s royal family. For some reason,
Emperor Meiji found the boy sympathetic, and lavished attention and gifts on him, the sort of affection he
never demonstrated toward his own grandsons. The boy was easily persuaded to sign away his claim to
the Korean throne.
In subsequent decades, thousands of other Korean cultural artifacts were forcibly removed by Japan
and never returned, despite promises. When people are so thoroughly terrorized, it is impossible to come
forward later with a precise list of what was stolen, or a stack of receipts. In 1965, the South Korean
government demanded the return of 4,479 items that it was able to identify individually. Of those, Japan
grudgingly returned only 1,432, taking another thirty years to do so. The great mass of Korean cultural
treasure remains in Japan to this day, in private collections, museums, and the vaults of the Imperial
Family. Much of this patrimony is beyond price. Here alone is evidence that Japan was far from bankrupt
at the end of World War II.
There always are collaborators. Over forty years, a Japanese antique dealer named Nakada
amassed a fortune looting and exporting ancient Koryo celadons. His partner was a former high official of
the Ri dynasty, who also became a millionaire.
Most Korean landowners were stripped of their estates and agricultural properties, which were
snapped up by Japanese developers. One developer acquired over 300,000 acres in Korea, where he
intended to settle Japanese immigrants. As tenant farmers lost their land, they and the urban poor were
rounded up and shipped off as slave labor to work in mines and construction brigades in Japan, or in the
desolate Kurile Islands. Sixty thousand Koreans were forced to toil as slave labor in coal mines and
military factories in the Sakhalin peninsula of Siberia. Of these, 43,000 were still in Sakhalin at the end of
World War II, when they came under Soviet control, and had great difficulty getting home.
Before 1945, it is believed that over six million Korean men were forced into slave labor
battalions. Of these, nearly one million were sent to Japan. Others were sent to the Philippines or to the
Dutch East Indies, to do construction work for the Japanese Army and navy, and to dig tunnels and
bunkers for war loot, where they were worked to death or buried alive to hide the locations. On August
24, 1945, a group of 5,000 Korean slave laborers who had spent the war digging a major underground
complex for war loot in Japan’s Aomori Prefecture, were put aboard the warship Ukishima Maru to be
‘taken home to Korea’. The ship sailed first to Maisaru Naval Base on the west coast of Japan. There the
Koreans were sealed in the cargo holds, and the ship was taken offshore and scuttled, by blowing a hole
in the hull with dynamite. Out of 5,000 Koreans aboard, only 80 survived. Tokyo claimed that the Koreans
locked in the hold had scuttled the ship themselves. Fifty-seven years later, 15 of these survivors, and
relatives of others, at last won a lawsuit against the Japanese government, for compensation. A court in
Kyoto ruled in August 2001 that the Japanese government must pay 3-million yen (less than $30,000) to
each of the plaintiffs. But the court also ruled that there was no need for the government of Japan to
apologize for the ‘incident’.
Aside from the six million Korean men dragooned as slave labor, tens of thousands of young
Koreans were conscripted into the Japanese Army, to serve as cannon-fodder in campaigns far to the
south, many ending up in Burma or New Guinea.
Saddest of all were thousands of Korean girls duped into going to Japan for employment, instead
ending up in brothels. It was in Korea that the kempeitai set up its first official army brothels in 1904.
These were filled with kidnapped women and girls, forerunners of hundreds of thousands of Korean
women later forced to serve as Comfort Women in army brothels all over Asia. Koreans were targeted
because it was believed that if Japanese women and girls were forced into prostitution for the army,
soldiers might mutiny. The Japanese Army took pains to characterize Korean women and girls as mere
livestock. Mercy was in short supply.
Bruce Cumings sums up their predicament: “Millions of people used and abused by the Japanese
cannot get records on what they know to have happened to them, and thousands of Koreans who worked
with the Japanese have simply erased that history as if it had never happened.”
Korea’s tragedy can only be appreciated fully by contrast to the mellow experience of Taiwan,
Japan’s other new colony. Neglected by China, Taiwan had never become an independent nation, although
an attempt was made in 1661 when a half-Chinese, half-Japanese merchant warlord called Coxinga
chased away Dutch traders and set up his own domain there. Unluckily, Coxinga built his headquarters
beside a mosquito-infested swamp and died a year later of cerebral malaria, his rebel kingdom
collapsing. A play based on his romantic legend became popular in Japan, so many Japanese had an
idealized image of Taiwan as an unspoiled paradise, where they could do what they pleased. There was
little resistance by native Taiwanese. Unlike Koreans, they had no ancient loathing of Japan, and no
experience of war. Most important, they had nothing to steal — no rich cultural patrimony built up over
thousands of years, no magnificent artistic heritage, and few big tombs to loot.
In Japan’s eagerness to turn what they renamed Formosa into a money-making venture, they made
life on the island better than ever before. They rationalized its agriculture, established an efficient
government, and imposed strict public order. As always, along with the army, police, and colonial
administrators came yakuza, carpetbaggers and businessmen looking for local partners. Their chief
enterprise was to set up morphine and heroin laboratories, to pour drugs into China’s mainland across the
strait.
By the 1930s, Taiwan also became Japan’s most important staging base for the conquest of South
China, and Southeast Asia. Huge sums were invested to create a permanent military platform on the
island. The First Air Fleet made its headquarters in an underground complex at Kookayama Mountain,
with quarters for 1,000 men. From bases on Taiwan, Japanese bombers took off to destroy America’s air
force on the ground at Clark Field in the Philippines. Conscript labor was not required of Taiwanese until
the 1940s, when thousands were sent off to the Philippines as slave labor. But Taiwan’s bland experience
was an exception. Korea’s terrible subjugation and plunder were the norm, as millions of people in China
were about to discover.
CHAPTER TWO
ROGUE SAMURAI
Racing through the streets of Tokyo with drawn swords in September 1905, mobs led by Black Dragon
thugs burned Christian churches, streetcars, police boxes, and ransacked a pro-government newspaper –
all symbols of foreign influence. Riot police charged them with batons and swords, leaving 17 dead and
500 wounded before calm was restored. The riots were staged to intimidate American railway magnate
E. H. Harriman, and to discourage Japan’s government from selling him the South Manchurian Railway, a
war prize from Japan’s victory over Tsarist Russia earlier that year.
Harriman watched the smoke and flames from the secure vantage of the Mitsui Club, a mansion near
the Imperial Palace. He was not alarmed but amused. The club, staffed with European-trained stewards,
interpreters, and hostesses, boasted all the facilities of the finest men’s clubs in New York or London. His
host, Baron Mitsui, had arranged for Harriman to be entertained by a demonstration of the martial arts. It
was performed by Black Dragon boss Uchida, the same man who had arranged the riots. Harriman wanted
to buy the South Manchurian Railway to complete a round-the-world transportation network under his
exclusive control — a plan that Uchida and Baron Mitsui intended to block. The riots alarmed Japan’s
government, which decided not to sell Harriman the railway.
While Black Dragon knew all about Harriman, he knew little about them, or their plans for
Manchuria. To Japan’s super patriots, Manchuria would be the test bed of empire, and a base from which
to invade China. However, Manchuria posed unexpected problems.
Korea had been a poorly guarded warehouse, filled with the wealth of two thousand years. Once
Korean resistance was beaten down, it was only a matter of confiscating everything and shipping it to
Japan. This was too easy, and the Japanese became complacent, thinking all of Asia would be as facile.
The challenge of Manchuria was different. Though twice as big as Texas, and many times the size of
Korea, it was not a packed warehouse but a great wilderness.
Its only conspicuous wealth was in the industrialized cities of the Kwantung Peninsula in the south.
The Treaty of Portsmouth, which concluded the Russo-Japanese War, gave Japan all of Russia’s interests
in South Manchuria, including the commercial port of Dalian, the naval base at Port Arthur, and the
southern spur of the Russian-built railway running from Port Arthur north to Changchun. (Eventually, this
railroad would open the way for Japan to seize the whole of North China.) Many Russian firms had
invested in South Manchuria, so thousands of Russian families there immediately fell prey to Japanese
soldiers, kempeitai, bureaucrats, and gangsters.
But the rest of China’s great northeastern province was a
vast expanse of desolate mountains and windswept plains, extending north into Siberia and west into
Mongolia, inhabited only by poor farmers growing sorghum and other crops that, like the farmers
themselves, could somehow endure poor soil, hard summers, and brutal winters. Manchuria’s real wealth,
like that of Alaska or British Columbia, was in land, forests, and mineral deposits.
So Russia and Japan
were drawn to Manchuria not by art, antiquities, and gold bullion, but by its strategic position, and fine
harbors that controlled naval access to the commercial centers of North China. Railway links would
someday bind this region into a hive of prosperity. Till then there was little to steal except land. If Japan
were going to squeeze blood out of this stone, it would take determination and ingenuity. Meanwhile,
many utopian plans would be abandoned, and the dreamers would turn Manchuria over to the rogues.
Japan’s rogues, called tairiki ronin, were carpetbaggers, spies, secret policemen, financial
conspirators, fanatical gangsters, drug dealers, and eccentric army officers. Together they did what the
dreamers could not do. They turned Manchuria into Asia’s biggest center for hard drugs, and a black
money machine. In the process, they committed Japan to conquer China next.
Manchuria’s economy was managed by Japan’s South Manchurian Railway Company (Mantetsu).
Half of Mantetsu stock was owned by the Japanese government, with Emperor Hirohito as the largest
private shareholder, followed by the Mitsui and Mitsubishi industrial and banking conglomerates, each
with its own spy networks. Mitsui spent $500,000 a year to maintain spies. Its overseas business offices
provided cover for secret military operations. Driven by patriotism and greed, Mitsui executives
collaborated with Black Dragon in stroking and coddling the Kwantung Army – for only the army could
grab the Chinese concessions that Mitsui wanted.
Under cover of research, Mantetsu began building a huge intelligence service of its own. Highly educated Mantetsu researchers provided the army with inside information needed to hijack Chinese
resources in Manchuria “to feed the Japanese war machine and to expand the front farther South”.
Meticulously, they began itemizing China’s agricultural, industrial, cultural and personal wealth, for the
day when it all could be confiscated. Mantetsu research bureaus soon had branches in Shanghai, Nanking,
Hankow, Canton, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. This brain trust flowered into Japan’s most influential
center for China studies. In time, its experts would be sent to assist the army in looting, all the way south
to Java, and west to Burma.
While Mantetsu managed the economy, the Japanese Army applied strong-arm tactics. In 1911, when
China’s imperial government collapsed, chaos made all of Manchuria vulnerable to aggression. The army
pressed local warlords for more and more mining and timber concessions, and the right to extend
Mantetsu rail lines in all directions. Mitsui and Mitsubishi made huge unsecured loans to bribe more
cooperative warlords, and groups of Japanese officers were assigned to them as advisors. The most
powerful warlord, Chang Tso-lin, had fifty Japanese watching him closely. They supplied him with
weapons in return for more concessions. A secret arms-supply agency — ironically called the Taiping
(Heavenly Peace) Company — was set up by Mitsui in 1907, with the army keeping all but five percent of
the profits. This gave Japan’s Kwantung Army so much financial independence, its senior officers grew
rich. Freed of Tokyo’s economic and political control, they turned Manchuria into a separate power base.
Here the Kwantung Army could do as it wished. If Tokyo politicians tried to interfere, they would be
murdered, and replaced by generals. The Kwantung Army and tairiki ronin had become self-sustaining, a
dangerously independent force.
Whoever controlled warlord Chang Tso-lin controlled Manchuria. More than a match for the
Japanese at first, he played them off against Russians and Chinese. Tough and wily, he was also
remarkably charming. The son of a poor seamstress, as a boy Chang had borrowed a hunting rifle, shot a
bandit, took his horse, and organized his own cavalry. During the Russo-Japanese War he rented this
cavalry to the Japanese for a small fortune. A patriot nonetheless, he then turned against Japan, allying
himself to Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang Party, the KMT, to block Japanese expansion in Manchuria. In
1916, the Japanese struck back when an assassin threw a bomb into his horse-drawn carriage, but Chang
Tso-lin survived and ruled Manchuria twelve more years, collaborating with the Japanese only when it
helped him stay in position. A small, delicate, good-looking man with a thin moustache and tiny hands, he
cut a dashing, chain-smoking figure in fur-lined greatcoats, always accompanied by beautiful teenage
concubines.
During those turbulent years, it was hard to keep track of the warlords without a dance-card.
China’s northern capital at Peking changed hands frequently. At the end of 1924, ‘Christian’ warlord Feng
Yu-hsiang (who baptized his men with a fire hose) took control and forced the last Manchu emperor, Pu
Yi, to vacate the Forbidden City for more modest quarters in the outskirts. A few weeks later, with
Japanese backing, Chang Tso-lin arrived with an elite force and expelled General Feng, installing in his
place the hard-eyed Marshal Tuan Chi-jui, as the new military boss of North China. With Marshal Tuan as
their puppet in Peking, Japan enjoyed a free hand until 1925, when Dr. Sun Yat-sen died and his KMT
political party was taken over by conservatives supporting Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.
This was one of history’s fateful turning points, for in April 1927, Generalissimo Chiang turned on
his former allies, the communists, staging a bloody purge that crippled the communist urban center, and
led to civil war. Whether right or left, patriotism and nationalism were catching on in China, becoming a
nuisance to Japan’s plans for conquest. Chinese students demanded the return of political and economic
concessions wrested from China earlier. In Manchuria, nationalists boycotted Japanese goods, and staged
noisy demonstrations. When warlord Chang Tso-lin allowed the boycotts to go ahead, the Japanese were
greatly annoyed. After decades of bribing him, they decided to kill him.
His murder was planned by Colonel Komoto Daisaku, one of many Japanese rogue adventurers who
carried out conspiracies with Tokyo’s blessing. Such men craved fame, excitement, and a share of the
spoils. Whatever they did was cloaked in patriotism, so assured of support. To divert suspicion, the
colonel blew up minor railway bridges, calling them ‘terrorist attacks’. He then poisoned two Chinese
gangsters, planted incriminating documents on them, and put their corpses next to track belonging to Chang
Tso-lin’s company, and mined the track with Russian explosives.
Whenever he traveled, Chang Tso-lin sent his current teenage mistress ahead in a decoy train,
following later in his own luxury express. Accompanying him on the night of June 2, 1928, was a
Japanese advisor, Major Giga, who earlier had been based in Manila and Shanghai. While the train
clattered north through the night, the two men drank beer and played mah-jong. Just shy of Fengtien the
major excused himself to pee, hurried to the rear of the train, and braced himself with a tight grip on the
steel railing. A huge explosion lifted the train and flung it aside, killing Chang Tso-lin and everyone else
but Major Giga, who suffered only a few cuts and bruises.
Colonel Komoto expected China to retaliate, giving Tokyo a pretext to send more troops, and seize
all of Manchuria. To his dismay, Japan’s cabinet refused to send more troops, so the conspiracy fizzled.
But the warlord’s murder was not in vain. According to the diaries of his own military aides, Emperor
Hirohito showed no anger when he heard that officers acting on their own had murdered the Manchurian
leader. He personally sanctioned a cover-up, indulged this insubordination, and thereby encouraged the
army rogues to continue in the same manner. The emperor’s message was clear: Ronin were free to
conspire all they wanted, so long as they enlarged Japan’s domain.
The dead warlord’s son, ‘Young Marshal’ Chang Hsueh-liang, had a long memory. In 1938, after a
lapse of ten years, assassins sent by him tracked Major Giga to the military academy in Tokyo and
murdered him.
As killing Chang Tso-lin had not produced the desired results, the Japanese high command next sent
its most brilliant and eccentric agent — Lieutenant Colonel Ishihara Kanji. He had served in Berlin, read
Nietzsche, and was fascinated by the apocalyptic doctrines of Japan’s medieval Buddhist monk Nichiren.
This led Ishihara to promote a final, cataclysmic Total War with the West, in which Japan would
completely destroy the Soviet Union and America, to become the dominant world power. His suicidal
visions excited students at Japan’s War College, and contributed to Ishihara’s fame as an unorthodox
genius.
It was Ishihara’s mission to contrive a new incident where Japan would seem the victim, China the
bully. Whatever Japan did would then seem defensive and justified. (Historian Louise Young said:
“Inverting the roles of victim and aggressor … transformed a Japanese military conspiracy into a
righteous war of self-defense.”)
For three years Ishihara waited for the right moment. Then Generalissimo Chiang gave it to him.
In spring 1931, the Generalissimo refused to extend the lease to Manchuria’s Kwantung Peninsula,
demanding that Japanese forces pull out and relinquish the railway system that was Mantetsu heart and
soul. Tokyo refused, denouncing China’s government as anti-Japanese. Tempers rose as native
Manchurian farmers attacked Japanese immigrants, and were put down harshly by Japanese police. A
minor fracas, it was inflated to war frenzy by the Japanese media. In a separate incident, a Japanese
officer carrying surveying instruments and packs of narcotics for bribes was arrested by Chinese soldiers
and executed on the spot.
Here was the moment Colonel Ishihara had been waiting for. He blew up a lonely stretch of
Mantetsu track and blamed the ‘sabotage’ on Chinese soldiers. In what was called self-defense, the
Kwantung Army swarmed onto a Chinese base at Fengtien, used artillery to flatten crowded barracks,
then machine-gunned Chinese soldiers as they scrambled out of the rubble. In the confusion, following
Ishihara’s game plan, the Kwantung Army waged a series of lightning campaigns that brought four
provinces of northeast China under its control, including all 440,000 square miles of Manchuria. To dress
up the aggression, Japan announced that Manchuria would now become the ‘independent’ nation of
Manchukuo.
China had so many problems it was unprepared for war. Generalissimo Chiang ordered Chinese
soldiers not to resist. But he vigorously protested the seizure of Manchuria, and demanded that the League
of Nations intervene. According to Prince Mikasa, Hirohito’s youngest brother, the League of Nations
delegation sent to Manchuria, headed by the Earl of Lytton, was served fruit laced with cholera germs in
an attempt to frustrate their fact-finding mission. Luckily, no one in Lytton’s team got sick. They concluded
that the Manchurian Incident was phony, the state of Manchukuo was only a Japanese puppet, and Tokyo
had committed aggression. When the League of Nations endorsed Lytton’s report in spring 1933, Japan’s
delegation withdrew from the League, committing Japan to a collision with its Western rivals.
War fever was sweeping Japan. Magazines and newsreels gave heavy coverage to army actions,
boasting that ten Japanese could defeat a hundred Chinese. All Chinese were engaging in “looting,
violence and atrocities”. Killing Chinese civilians was justified because “anyone in the street in
Manchuria [is] a plainclothes soldier”. In one of the more outrageous justifications of rape and murder, a
Japanese soldier told readers, “Everybody thinks that only men are plainclothes soldiers. But there are
women, kids… all kinds. Once a young woman of twenty-two…came up to me looking very friendly…
But then I had a bad feeling…and I shouted out a warning. …I strip-searched the girl…she couldn’t
understand me so I gestured with my hands … Underneath her clothes she was wearing two pairs of
panties. Hidden inside, sure enough, there was a pistol. I did not want to kill her but she tried to hit me
with the gun and that was why she died… I was provoked.”
Glorification and public hysteria drove government and business leaders to give the army all it
wanted, to carry out its Manchurian Experiment.
Manchukuo became a Japanese Army dictatorship fronted by the figurehead Pu Yi, the last Manchu
emperor of China, rescued from ‘evil warlords’ in Peking. Spirited out of Peking by Colonel Doihara
Kenji, Pu Yi was kept temporarily in luxurious quarters at the Japanese concession in the port of Tientsin.
Doihara was one of Japan’s top secret agents. He posed as mayor of Mukden in Manchuria, but was
actually director of military intelligence for the whole region. He read widely, including the works of T.E.
Lawrence, so he was called the Lawrence of Manchuria. Unlike Lawrence, Doihara was overweight and
deceptively mild-looking. He knew where all the bodies were buried, having put many there himself.
When he first offered to make Pu Yi an emperor again, the young man hesitated. With plenty of money and
amusement, why should Pu Yi involve himself in tedious ritual and protocol? Doihara insisted. To make
his point, he sent Pu Yi a basket of fruit containing an unexploded bomb.
Once in the palace at Changchun, Pu Yi and Empress Elizabeth were supplied with heroin by
Doihara and watched over by his sidekick Major Tanaka Takayoshi. Here was another old China hand, a
great bull of a man who had spent two decades running covert operations in Shanghai. Tanaka saw to it
that Empress Elizabeth was sexually exhausted by the attentions of a 24-year-old Manchu princess called
Eastern Jewel — a daughter of Prince Su — who had served the Rising Sun with both men and women
since her late teens. Rounding out the group was Colonel Itagaki Seishiro, a bon vivant who later became
Japan’s war minister. Their counterpart as chief of the military secret police in Manchukuo was Colonel
Tojo Hideki, later to be Japan’s wartime prime minister. From 1932 to 1936, this quartet of Doihara,
Tanaka, Itagaki, and Tojo ran all black operations in Manchukuo, including kidnapping, extortion, and
murder.
On his enthronement, Pu Yi was congratulated by Hirohito, who sent his brother Prince Chichibu to
the coronation. (Congratulations also came from Chang Yuching, one of Shanghai’s underworld bosses.)
In June 1935, Pu Yi flew to Tokyo, where Hirohito held a banquet in his honor. Pu Yi responded by
helping Japan plunder northeast China. Before he was kicked out of the Forbidden City, Pu Yi had
removed a hoard of imperial treasure. He later admitted to taking “the most valuable pictures, calligraphy
and antiques in the imperial collections out of the palace by pretending that I was giving them to [my
brother] Pu Chieh…” These included imperial seals of the Emperor Chien-lung, and thousands of
manuscripts, scrolls and paintings. He said, “Pu Chieh [also] used to take a large bundle home after
school every day for over six months, and the things we took were the very finest treasures in the
collections.
As it happened, the heads of the Household Department and my tutors were checking through
the pictures and the calligraphy at the time, so all we had to do was to take the items they selected as
being of the very highest grade. In addition to paintings and calligraphy we also took many valuable
ancient editions of books. We must have removed over a thousand hand scrolls, more than two hundred
hanging scrolls and pages from albums, and about two hundred rare Sung Dynasty printed books.” These
were moved to Manchuria and stored on the palace compound in a small white building behind the Hall
of Harmony and Virtue. Later, Pu Yi said, “when it was becoming increasingly obvious that Japan was
losing the war… I spontaneously gave a lot of gold, silver and jewelry to the Kwantung Army. …I
presented them with the carpets from the palace floors and hundreds of items of clothing. All these actions
of mine were widely publicized and made the task of looting easier for the Japanese officials…” When
the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo collapsed in August 1945, all these treasures had vanished, shipped to
Japan long in advance of the surrender.
Once Pu Yi was enthroned, the Kwantung Army launched its hugely expensive attempt to
industrialize Manchuria overnight as a model of central-controlled state capitalism. To justify the cost,
Manchuria was promoted as the solution to all Japan’s problems. Its agricultural potential, mineral
wealth, industry, and cheap Chinese labor, would boom overnight, providing Japan with a broad range of
industrial and consumer goods. Bright young economic planners rushed to Manchuria to perform magic,
foremost among them Kishi Nobosuke. He put Mantetsu under the control of one relative, and put
Manchuria’s economy in the hands of another, who headed the Nissan zaibatsu. Kishi’s circle was called
the Ni-ki-san-suke clique (the ‘two ki, three suke’ clique). The two ‘ki’ were men whose names ended in
‘ki’: General Tojo Hideki, now the Kwantung Army chief of staff, and the opium monopoly boss Hoshino
Naoki, who later became Emperor Hirohito’s chief cabinet secretary. The three others were economist
Kishi Nobusuke, Mantetsu president Matsuoka Yosuke, and Nissan boss Aikawa Gisuke, whose names
ended in ‘suke’. They controlled everything in Manchuria through a mega-corporation called Manchurian
Heavy Industries. Nissan provided the brains. Tojo supplied the muscle.
They spent recklessly. Between 1932 and 1938, forty-eight Manchurian cities were laid out with
running water, sewer systems, flush toilets, electricity, gas, telegraph, roads, railway, and military
facilities. Japanese government funds poured in. Financiers in Osaka and Tokyo had serious doubts, but
they feared being murdered if they did not support the army. What was not borrowed from banks was
stolen.
The Kwantung Army had deep pockets because it looted all the banks in Manchuria. The day after
Colonel Ishihara staged his bogus Manchurian Incident, in September 1931, the Kwantung Army advanced
into Mukden and seized all the assets of the Frontier Bank, and the Bank of the Three Eastern Provinces,
and their administrative records. While soldiers sealed the borders, Tojo’s kempeitai stormed all
branches of the Kirin Provincial Bank, and the Heilungkiang Provincial Bank. All these banks were
Chinese owned and operated. The assets were used to set up the Central Bank of Manchukuo, which
printed its own occupation scrip, posing as the new national currency. Everyone was ordered to exchange
Chinese money for this scrip. The Choson Bank of Korea (a Japanese bank based in Korea) established
twenty branches in Manchuria to help carry out this vandalism; its New York office hustled American
loans for the development of Manchuria, which were never repaid.
Another source of easy money was extortion. Simon Kaspe, son of a Jewish hotel and theater owner
in Harbin, was kidnapped in 1933. When a ransom note arrived demanding $100,000 his father refused to
pay. Although Japanese police ‘cooperated’ in searching for the boy, many in the Jewish community
suspected that the kempeitai was involved in the kidnapping. On December 3, Simon Kaspe’s body was
found; he had been beaten, starved, tortured, mutilated, and kept in an underground pit, before he was
finally shot. The extreme brutality was taken as evidence that it was done by Tojo’s kempeitai or its
Black Dragon or Black Ocean allies. At his funeral, mourners shouted “Down with the kempeitai!”,
“Down with the Imperial Japanese Army!” Police arrested some alleged kidnappers. They were tried,
then released. Outraged but frightened, the Jewish community in Manchuria began crossing the border to
settle in what they hoped would be more peaceful circumstances in China.
Bank robberies, currency fraud, and extortion could be done only once or twice before the victims
were exhausted. Steadier cash flow came from narcotics, which became Manchukuo’s chief product.
Accounts of the Manchurian Experiment avoid this dark side. In fact, Japan as a whole became deeply
involved in Manchurian opium, heroin and morphine production. In 1911, the region had produced less
than 2,500 kilos of opium. Fifteen years later annual production on Mantetsu territory, and huge farms
taken over by the Japanese underworld, rose to 36,000 kilos. After Japan seized all of Manchuria in
1932, tens of thousands of hectares were put under poppy production, and dozens of laboratories were
built to convert opium tar into various grades of morphine and heroin. Under protection of the Kwantung
Army, drug traffickers in Manchuria spread their distribution across the Great Wall, down into North and
Central China. The Central Bank of Manchukuo built up major reserves from profits generated by the
army drug monopoly. Pharmaceutical factories flooded China with heroin tablets, to soften it up for
invasion.
The Opium Monopoly was directed by Hoshino Naoki, one of the ruling Ni-kisan-suke clique, a
former tax official who managed all Manchukuo’s financial affairs. Thus the economy of Japanese
Manchuria was inextricably bound to hard drugs. Later, when Naoki was promoted to become Emperor
Hirohito’s chief cabinet secretary, a direct link was established between the emperor and Japan’s massive
drug trade. Given this link, it would be hard to believe that Hirohito was ignorant of Japan’s profiteering
in narcotics. In 1934, the Opium Advisory Commission in Geneva accused Japan of operating the world’s
largest single venture in illicit drugs. Japan gave farmers in Manchuria cash-incentives to take up poppy
cultivation. It was Mitsui itself, Japan’s oldest zaibatsu (today one of the world’s richest conglomerates),
that processed the opium into morphine and heroin.
The Opium Monopoly actively encouraged addiction,
hooking new users by distributing free medicines spiked with morphine, and free cigarettes trademarked
Golden Bat, laced with heroin. This drug-trade grew quickly into a major source of income for the
Kwantung Army, estimated to have been as much as $300-million a year ($3-billion a year in today’s
values). Hoshino was able to use heroin futures as collateral for bank loans. Both the kempeitai and
Special Section 8 of the Imperial Intelligence Division operated narcotics dens. By 1937, ninety percent
of the world’s illicit opium and morphine were of Japanese origin. The Manchurian Experiment had
changed from a fantasy to a pipedream.
Manchuria also became the main proving ground for Japan’s biological warfare program, called
simply Unit 731. Headquartered at Ping Fan, outside Harbin, it was headed by Colonel Ishii Shiro, a 1920
graduate of Kyoto University, who persuaded the high command to let him develop chemical and
biological weapons, and test them on Chinese in Manchuria. Pu Yi said he learned that his subjects were
being enslaved by the Japanese to build these installations, then were poisoned to keep the locations
secret. Later, during the Pacific War, other labs were set up in Peking, Canton, and Singapore,
experimenting on Allied POWs and civilian prisoners. Emperor Hirohito was briefed about it in detail
during at least one recorded meeting with Colonel Ishii. The emperor’s brothers toured Ping Fan to
observe experiments. Prince Mikasa, Hirohito’s youngest brother, revealed after the war that he had seen
films in which “large numbers of Chinese prisoners of war…were made to march on the Manchurian
plain for poison gas experiments on live subjects”. Others, he said, were “tied to posts in a wide field
[and] gassed and shot. It was a horrible scene that could only be termed a massacre.”
Narcotics aside, by 1936 Manchuria’s boom was acknowledged to be an expensive failure. Its
products were inferior, consumer goods were in short supply; not enough coal or other material was
available to supply the needs of its private industry. The system of economic controls invented by Kishi
was a botch, dragging down Japan’s home economy as well. The child was cannibalizing its parent. Even
so, fortunes were made in sweetheart deals cooked by Kishi, who arranged unsecured loans at zero
interest. In exchange for these loans, kickbacks were paid to Kishi, other members of his clique, and the
Kwantung Army brass.
There are many ways to plunder a country. What happened in Manchuria was different from what
had happened in Korea, but the end result was the same. Like any binge, it did not last long. From the
seizure of all of Manchuria in 1932, to recognition of the army’s failure in 1936, only four years passed.
For the victims, time passed differently.
The Kwantung Army was stoned on its success with narcotics. Some officers recognized that the
wealth generated by drugs, and by the looting of Korea and Manchuria, was artificial, the result of armed
robbery. But that’s what they did for a living. While there was more to be stolen, why stop? Planners said
the Manchurian Experiment could yet be made to work, if the army seized control of China, putting Japan
in monopoly control of that vast consumer market. If utopia did not work in Manchuria, it would work in
China. And if it did not work in China, well, there was still Southeast Asia, India, and Australia.
The army was impatient. With so many careers at stake, and so many young officers moving up the
ranks hoping to share the glory, stopping was out of the question. Everyone looked longingly at the
‘unopened treasure house’ just across the Great Wall to the south.
CHAPTER THREE
THE RAPE OF CHINA
In the rest of China, Japan’s violent seizure of Manchuria provoked rage and apprehension. Many
believed the Japanese would continue to bite off parts of China in the years ahead, until they swallowed
the entire country. A Mantetsu researcher said: “We need to think more about why it was that our good
intentions…did not communicate to the Chinese masses.” In Shanghai, portraits of Hirohito were paraded
with paper daggers piercing his heart. Chinese newspapers reported a failed attempt by a Korean patriot
to assassinate Hirohito, the bullet hitting another carriage. Ten days later, on January 18, 1932, five young
Japanese dressed as Buddhist monks paraded down a crowded Shanghai street, singing songs celebrating
Japan’s victories. Outraged Chinese lynched one of them on the spot. The monks were expendable agents
sent by Special Services Major Tanaka Ryuchi. The provocation was staged to give Japan an excuse to
intervene, to protect its citizens. The Imperial Navy had ships stationed in Shanghai’s Whangpoo River, to
guard its commercial interests. Japanese marines poured ashore. Hundreds of yakuza and Black Dragon
thugs joined the fray, armed with Mauser pistols, rifles, swords, and baseball bats.
The fight was joined
by the Chinese 19th Route Army camped outside the city. With Hirohito’s approval, 90,000 additional
Japanese troops were rushed in. Parts of the city were flattened by field artillery and naval guns, while
Japanese aircraft strafed and bombed the crowded streets; some 18,000 civilians were killed, and
240,000 Chinese lost their homes. Amazed Westerners watched from the relative safety of rooftops in the
International Settlement and French Concession. During Japan’s takeover of Korea and Manchuria, only a
handful of Western observers were present, mostly diplomats. In Shanghai, thousands of foreigners were
eyewitnesses to Japan’s overkill.
Among journalists caught in the crossfire, Ernest Hauser reported that
“dogs and rats were celebrating a holiday of their own: there were places where one could no longer
distinguish the corpses beneath the ravenous packs”. In London, Japan’s ambassador Yoshida Shigeru said
the assault on Shanghai had been a “grave miscalculation”. Thomas Lamont of the House of Morgan
lamented that Tokyo’s action would make it “impossible to arrange any [further] credit [for Japan], either
through investment or banking circles”. On March 2, after thirty-four days of fighting, the 19th Route Army
began a general retreat. Next day, Japan declared a unilateral truce, followed by an official armistice. The
Japanese Army would return five years later, in the summer of 1937, to finish the job.
At the time, the image of China was as the sick man of Asia, a country of unparalleled corruption
and vice, on the verge of collapse. Many Westerners thought China was so decadent it had been bled of its
wealth long ago. Nothing could be further from the truth. The wealth that changed hands from one warlord
to another did not evaporate, and was minor compared to what remained deeply hidden. The repeated
plunder of Peking took away quantities of imperial treasure, to be sure, but did not disturb bullion,
artworks, and patrimony belonging to the aristocracy, to merchant families, or to racketeers and gangsters.
Because they had good reason not to trust anyone outside the family or clan, Chinese did not put their
liquid assets in banks; they kept quantities of gems and small gold bars called biscuits, ingeniously
hidden. For three thousand years, the Chinese had been a society of antiquarians, art critics, and
collectors. They acquired ancient bronzes, porcelains, jades, books, scrolls, paintings, and other fine
decorative arts. Shang bronzes in particular were coveted. These collections were catalogued, and the
catalogs themselves became precious records shared by collectors and purveyors of antiquities. Copies
of these catalogs were purchased by Japanese collectors; there was no great mystery about who in China
owned what. At the beginning of the twentieth century, China’s imperial collections alone included over
100,000 pieces of priceless jade, varying in size from several inches to several feet, carved by artists
over many centuries, plus over 1.2-million books and manuscripts, and porcelains in the millions.
For the Japanese, the only challenge was how to find the gold, platinum, jade and gems laid down in
private hoards, because wealthy Chinese were obsessively secret. In Lords of the Rim, we traced China’s
evolving merchant class from ancient times to present global networks of super-rich Overseas Chinese,
who are thought to control over $3-trillion in assets worldwide. Because emperors always had a
monopoly on trade disguised as tribute, all other commerce was illegal in China, punishable by death.
Merchants were targets of repression, and were imprisoned or exiled with their families to ‘barbarian’
lands beyond the frontiers. So in China all business traditionally was done covertly, as an illicit
underworld, bribing magistrates to look the other way. By necessity, the bulk of China’s wealth remained
out of sight, carefully hidden. Only toward the end of the nineteenth century did the crumbling Manchu
regime permit merchants to come above ground, partly as a grudging concession to Western influence, but
mostly for tax revenues. Western banks in the treaty ports were off-limits to Chinese, but native banking
networks existed to serve particular merchant clans, and pawnshops provided loans to farmers. A parallel
situation existed in Japan, historically, because rulers and samurai alike regarded merchants as vermin.
So the Japanese understood that China’s treasure would not be lying around waiting to be confiscated.
Seizing this hidden wealth became a glorious obsession for Japan’s financiers. The zaibatsu vigorously
backed army conquest, hoping to gain control of China’s well-developed mineral resources, industrial
base, and immense consumer market, but the heads of these corporations had their own personal
collections to enlarge.
When we think of looting in the West, we think of banks, museums, palaces, cathedrals and
mansions, and overlook black money sources. In China, all money was black. It could not be stolen
without the use of extortion and terror.
Japan’s rogue samurai had gained practical experience in extortion and terror in Korea and
Manchuria. They left to the kempeitai obvious targets like banks, museums and mansions, and turned their
own attention to finding personal fortunes, and great pools of wealth from drugs, alcohol, prostitution,
gambling, smuggling and other rackets. To make it easy, they reached temporary partnerships with Chinese
racketeers, hard men who felt no remorse about victimizing their own countrymen. It was this unholy
alliance of rogues and racketeers that caused China in the 1930s and 1940s to hemorrhage treasure like
never before.
Haphazard collaboration between the Japanese underworld and the Chinese underworld had been
going on for centuries. For example, Chinese trading networks based in coastal Fukien province had
oceangoing junks voyaging as far west as Africa and Arabia. Each syndicate had its own private navy and
marines, with treasuries of gold biscuits stashed in strongholds along the coast and offshore in island
strongholds. Since their common enemy was China’s imperial government, the natural allies of these
pirate syndicates were the Japanese. Traders from Fukien often sought refuge in Japan’s Goto Islands, on
the southwest coast of Kyushu, where they were protected by the domain lord. His samurai often joined
the pirates to pillage the south bank of the Yangtze, where there were many wealthy estates. So, in the
twentieth century, it was natural for Japanese and Chinese gangsters to renew this profitable random
collaboration.
If there was a single genius behind the underworld alliance, it was General Doihara, the mastermind
of the Manchurian drug trade, whose personal circle included Japan’s top gangsters. He was also on firstname terms with leaders of China’s Green Gang, based in Shanghai. Above ground, Shanghai was
administered by three governments. Biggest was the Chinese municipality, run by the KMT regime of
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Next were two prosperous foreign enclaves, concessions squeezed from
the Manchu throne in the nineteenth century. The smaller was the French Concession with a population of
around 500,000. To say it was French is an exaggeration as there were only about 2,400 French civilians
and 300 French gendarmes. The rest were 14,000 Europeans of various nationalities including White
Russians, and Chinese who preferred French rule to Chinese tyranny. The French Concession was home
to China’s most powerful godfather, Tu Yueh-sheng, boss of the Green Gang. He enjoyed French
protection in return for generous contributions from rackets in drugs, brothels and gambling.
Beyond the French Concession was the International Settlement, dominated by Britain and, to a
lesser extent, America. Its foreign population was less than 40,000. In China as a whole, Britain’s
influence was pre-eminent, and her government and citizens had nearly $1-billion dollars invested there,
most of it in Shanghai. By the 1920s, however, the largest single foreign community in Shanghai was
Japanese, mostly businessmen, bankers, hoteliers, gangsters and secret agents. Hostile toward Westerners
and Chinese, the Japanese inhabited a district called Little Tokyo in the suburb of Hongkew. Many of them were advance agents of invasion. Japan had been preparing feverishly, using industrial cover. All over
East and Southeast Asia, military projects were under way, including airfields, port facilities, and coastal
surveys. Right in the heart of Shanghai’s riverfront, Japanese companies bought three large wharves and
dug a tunnel from those warehouses to a reinforced-concrete Japanese Army headquarters and arsenal on
Jiangwan Road.
Little was done in Shanghai without the knowledge of Boss Tu, who took a bite of every pastry.
Businessmen who refused to pay off Tu risked being kidnapped or shot, or having their houses bombed.
Once Tu abducted May-ling Soong, bride of Chiang Kai-shek, to remind the generalissimo who really
was in charge. By 1932, 44-year-old Boss Tu already had a great fortune. He was a self-made man with a
vengeance, born in desperate poverty across the river in Putung, in a squalid slum called Kaochiao, his
father a coolie in a grain shop. In his teens, Tu became a runner for the drug-lord of the French
Concession, a chief detective known as Pockmarked Huang. At the time there were three gangs — Red,
Green and Blue — competing for control of the drug trade. Tu showed Pockmarked Huang how they could
work together as a cartel. Eventually, the Red and Blue gangs withered, leaving Tu’s Green Gang in
charge of all rackets far up the Yangtze River into China’s interior.
By the 1930s, gambling was on a greater scale in Shanghai than anywhere else on earth, with
proceeds of more than $1-million a week. Tu’s three-storey Fushen Casino on Avenue Foch provided
customers with chauffeured limousines. There was dog racing at Tu’s Canidrome. Over 100,000
prostitutes worked in brothels, cabarets and dance halls like Farren’s and Del Monte’s where White
Russian women danced and more with paying clients.
Once they understood each other, Tu became one of Chiang Kai-shek’s chief backers. He shared
drug profits directly with the generalissimo, and in return was licensed by the KMT government. This
allowed Chiang to pretend that he was pursuing an aggressive campaign of opium suppression. But only
Tu’s rivals were suppressed. The Opium Suppression Bureau turned over confiscated opium to the Green
Gang, for conversion to heroin and morphine. The generalissimo received his cut through the Farmers
Bank of China, owned by Tu and referred to sarcastically as the Opium Farmers Bank. Chiang used his cut
to upgrade his army, which annoyed Tokyo.
During the initial Japanese assault on Shanghai in 1932, Boss Tu sent Green Gang toughs to fight the
invaders. Chiang praised him for this gallant display of patriotism, but it was only turf warfare. Tu was
not prepared to let the Japanese undermine his control of gambling, prostitution and narcotics. General
Doihara worked out a compromise by which the Green Gang, the KMT regime, and the Japanese, secretly
divided the spoils, much as the Red, Blue and Green Gangs had done earlier. The deal was implemented
by the Ku brothers, one of whom was the Green Gang boss of the Shanghai waterfront, while the other
was a KMT general.
This enabled the kempeitai to open its first Shanghai brothel in 1932, while Japanese investors
started cotton mills, ironworks, railways, paper mills, power plants and banks. Where once British
shipping dominated, Japanese steamships linked Yangtze River ports deep into the interior, ready to be
converted into troop carriers.
In violation of the deal, Japan began to subvert the KMT opium monopoly by bringing in larger and
larger quantities of drugs. What better way to demoralize China than by flooding it with cheap drugs from
Manchuria, including heroin tablets and cigarettes laced with heroin. This caused dismay and
consternation in KMT and Green Gang circles. The Japanese were growing opium on an unprecedented
scale in Manchuria, supplementing it with opium imported by ship from Iran. The paste was converted
into morphine and heroin at factories in Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan, then smuggled directly across the
strait on motorized junks, to mainland warehouses owned by Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and other conglomerates.
An army factory in Seoul that produced over 2,600 kilos of heroin in 1938-39 was only one of several
hundred factories in Manchuria, Korea, Taiwan, and in Japanese concessions in mainland cities like
Hankow. At its peak, more than a thousand Japanese firms were manufacturing and selling drugs,
including cocaine and amphetamines.
Japan so undercut Green Gang prices that at one point the generalissimo ordered his men to buy
narcotics from the Japanese, and sell them at a mark-up in areas controlled exclusively by the KMT.
By the end of 1936, the Manchurian Experiment had failed and Tokyo was ready to seize the whole
of China. The first step was to stage an incident outside Peking, as an excuse to overrun the northern
capital. On July 8, 1937, a Kwantung Army regimental commander at Fengtai near the Marco Polo Bridge
ordered his men to fire on a Chinese barracks in retaliation for an imaginary insult. Emperor Hirohito was
reluctant to commit too many troops to China when there was growing Soviet pressure along the Siberian
frontier. But advisors reassured him that “war with China … could be finished within two or three
months”.
China also miscalculated. The generalissimo’s brother-in-law, Finance Minister T.V. Soong,
scoffed, “within three months… Japan will be on the verge of bankruptcy and facing revolution”. Both
predictions were wildly off. The Marco Polo Bridge incident escalated into a China War that bogged
down nearly a million Japanese troops for eight years, and then it was China that faced bankruptcy and
revolution.
As all northeast China came under Japan’s control, President Franklin Roosevelt threatened trade
embargoes, to stop the ‘epidemic’ of Japanese aggression.
To preserve his own KMT army, which was his only means of staying in power, Generalissimo
Chiang abandoned all of North China, and crossed to the south bank of the Yangtze River. This shifted the
focus of confrontation, exposing Shanghai and other big southern cities to attack. On August 7, 1937,
Chiang decided to stage a pre-emptive strike on the Japanese at Shanghai, hoping to draw America and
Britain into the conflict, to protect their own investments. Three KMT divisions attacked the small
Japanese garrison of 5,000 men in Hongkew. Both sides quickly threw in additional forces. But
indecision and wrong moves by Chiang Kai-shek squandered his numeric advantage, as the Japanese
countered with superior tactics, training and equipment. There was incredible bungling. On August 14,
Chinese air force planes intending to sink the Japanese flagship Izumo in the Whangpoo River dropped
their bombs prematurely into crowded city streets, with gruesome consequences. In one month of fighting,
nearly a quarter million Chinese were killed, many of them women and children. During the confusion (to
Tokyo’s dismay), all Chinese banks, industries, and financiers loaded their wealth onto convoys of trucks,
and hurried into the French Concession or the International Settlement, where they were protected by the
warships of the Western Powers.
The Chinese army fought bravely until early November, when Chiang suddenly and inexplicably
moved his armies and his headquarters 180 miles west along the Yangtze to Nanking. Pursuing the
generalissimo westward, the Imperial Army ravaged the beautiful ancient city of Soochow, giving a
foretaste of what was to come. As the Japanese began to circle Nanking, the generalissimo decided once
more to abandon his civilian population without a fight. First he withdrew upriver to Wuhan, then five
hundred miles farther up the Yangtze to Chungking in the mountains of Szechuan Province, safe from all
but the most determined conqueror. There, he set up his wartime government, and told the world he still
ruled China.
Chiang took with him hundreds of big wood crates filled with art treasures. Anticipating the worst,
he had ordered his secret police chief, General Tai Li, to crate up the contents of the national museum in
Peking, and as many art treasures as could be assembled from other museums. Ultimately, these crates
were sent deep into the western mountains, to Chengtu. But there were limits to what could be crated and
shipped.
Just before the Japanese began their assault on Nanking, Emperor Hirohito sent his uncle, Prince
Asaka Yasuhiko, to take over command from General Matsui Iwane, who was suffering from tuberculosis.
In any aristocracy there are always extreme nationalists and racists with a narrow education, and Japan
was no exception. Men like Prince Asaka regarded themselves as demigods, and felt only contempt for
Chinese, Koreans, and other Asians. In addition, he was an alcoholic, given to wild bouts of drunken
rage. On taking command outside Nanking, he told his aides that it was time to “teach our Chinese
brothers a lesson they will never forget”.
In the Rape of Nanking that followed, some 300,000 defenseless civilians were slain by Japanese
troops, between 20,000 and 80,000 women of all ages were raped repeatedly, including children,
adolescent girls, and grandmothers, many of them disemboweled in the process. Men, women and
children were subjected to acts of such barbarism that the world recoiled in horror. Thousands of men
were roped together and machine-gunned, or doused with gasoline and set afire. Others were used for
bayonet practice, or to practice beheading, in a sporting competition to see which officer could behead
the greatest number that day. Weeks passed while atrocities continued, streets and alleys piled high with
corpses. Unlike previous mass atrocities, done out of sight, these were witnessed by hundreds of
Westerners including diplomats, doctors and missionaries, some of whom smuggled out photographic
evidence.
It was at this bitter moment that Golden Lily came into existence.
When the Japanese Army swarmed down the China Coast in 1937, crossed the Yangtze, and moved
westward to Nanking, so many units were involved across such a broad front that there was danger of
Japan’s ruling elite losing control of the financial side of conquest, as rival commanders competed for
spoils. How could you keep army or navy officers from side-tracking gold bullion and priceless art
works, not to mention smaller scale theft by soldiers? At the same time, groups of yakuza were moving
through newly occupied areas, conducting their own reign of terror. To keep everything under strict
control at the highest level, the Imperial General Headquarters created Golden Lily (kin no yuri), named
after one of Hirohito’s poems. This was to be a palace organization of Japan’s top financial minds and
specialists in all forms of treasure including cultural and religious antiquities, supported by accountants,
bookkeepers, shipping experts, and units of the army and navy, all overseen by princes of the blood.
When
China was milked by Golden Lily, the army would hold the cow, while princes skimmed the cream. This
organization was put directly under the command of the emperor’s brother, Prince Chichibu. We know the
date because the Imperial General Headquarters itself was only set up in the imperial palace in Tokyo in
November 1937, just as the Rape of Nanking was commencing. The purpose of the Imperial Headquarters
was to keep control of the war in the hands of the emperor and his senior advisors, to avoid repeating
what happened in Manchuria, where the Kwantung Army grew recklessly independent in all respects. The
Imperial Army already had a number of Special Service Units, among them intelligence teams
specializing in different kinds of cultural and financial espionage, and secret service agents like General
Doihara, outside the ordinary command structure. These were reassigned to Golden Lily, giving it the
resources needed to find treasure of all kinds, from the sublime to the most prosaic.
In Nanking, the first wave of Golden Lily helpers were kempeitai. Special kempeitai units moved
through the city seizing all government assets, blowing open bank vaults, breaking into and emptying
homes of wealthy families of whatever gold, gemstones, jewelry, artworks, and currency could be found.
Nanking had been rich for over a thousand years. Many wealthy and prominent Chinese had mansions in
town, and estates in the surrounding countryside. This was not the only time Nanking was ransacked by
conquerors, but it was by far the most deliberate, meticulous, and systematic. At least 6,000 metric tons of
gold are reported to have been amassed by the kempeitai during this first pass. Historical research into
looting shows that what is officially reported typically is only a tiny fraction of what is actually stolen.
Also looted were many of the small biscuit bars that individual Chinese prefer to hoard, along with small
platinum ingots, diamonds, rubies and sapphires, small works of art, and antiquities. These were taken
from private homes and from tombs vandalized by the army in the countryside. Remorselessly thorough,
the Japanese hammered the teeth out of corpses to extract gold fillings.
While the kempeitai removed even the furniture, mirrors and rugs for crating and shipment to Japan,
Golden Lily’s Special Service Units — the elite of the secret service — focused on individual Chinese
who owned banks, headed guilds, ran pawn shop networks, or were the elders of clan associations.
Particular attention was paid to heads of triads, and racketeers. Although some escaped from the city,
relatives were tracked down, taken into custody, and used for leverage. In this methodical fashion, Japan
went far beyond the wild pillaging of Mongol hordes, or the drunken rampaging of British and French
troops at the Summer Palace in Peking.
Golden Lily was driven by greed but also by necessity. In 1937 Japan’s gold reserves had shrunk by
half, paying for the military machine. Princes of the first tier personally compiled inventories of
everything stolen, then shipped it to Shanghai in railway carriages and freight cars guarded by special
army units. Military commanders thought twice before offending the princes.
Prince Chichibu was well chosen as Golden Lily’s overseer. Unlike Hirohito, whose education as
crown prince had been narrow and tightly controlled, Chichibu had been permitted a cosmopolitan
education with foreign travel, part of a year at Oxford University, holidays climbing in the Swiss Alps,
and diplomatic assignments including dinner with Adolf Hitler. Of Hirohito’s three brothers, he had the
most evident sense of humor, and indulged in the least likely amusements: roller skating with his young
wife in the upstairs hallways of their Tokyo palace. When we first learned from Japanese sources that
Chichibu headed Golden Lily, we were puzzled, because his independent spirit seemed ill-suited for
extremes of brutality. However, what was at stake was the national treasury, on which depended the
survival of the dynasty. Because of the breadth of his education and foreign experience, Chichibu was the
best choice. His relatively broad mind enabled him to grasp readily the spectrum of possibilities for
plunder put to him by his advisors.
Extraordinary pains were taken by Prince Chichibu to see that only princes carried out final inventories,
or sealed the containers of treasure being sent home. From Shanghai, the plunder was shipped by sea
directly to the Home Islands, or was carried by freight train or truck convoy to Manchuria, where
precious metals were graded, jewelry and irregular pieces were melted and recast in uniform ingots,
before onward shipment through Korea to Japan.
A number of other princes joined Golden Lily at this stage, spending the war enriching Japan, rather
than participating in less glamorous and dangerous combat assignments. Aside from Prince Asaka, we
know Prince Chichibu and Prince Takeda were at Nanking because both later confided to friends that they
had horrific nightmares from witnessing atrocities. Some sources insist that Hirohito’s youngest brother,
Prince Mikasa, also was physically present at Nanking; this has not been confirmed, although he was
positively identified later at Golden Lily sites in the Philippines.
A prime example of Japan’s extraordinary attention to detail was a handpicked Special Service Unit
of antiquarians with special knowledge of rare books and manuscripts. Some were militant monks from
the Nichiren sect. Their job was to pick through the contents of China’s libraries, museums and private
collections, or the libraries of Buddhist orders, and send these treasures back to Tokyo. Before the
campaign began, they traveled widely in China, befriending private collectors, compiling lists of the most
valuable items.
In spring 1938, after the rape, more than a thousand of these experts arrived in Nanking to begin
picking through collections of rare books and manuscripts. While much of the city was in ruins, buildings
housing these collections had been put under tight security. The Imperial Palace Library would have first
choice of this plunder, and the very best items were set aside for the emperor’s personal review. Each
item was carefully numbered, wrapped and placed in a waterproof crate. Multiple copies of inventories
were made to ensure that nothing vanished on the way home. Some 2,300 Chinese conscript laborers did
the physical toil of packing, watched closely by 400 soldiers. Over 300 trucks were needed to move the
crates to Shanghai, for loading on ships.
In Tokyo, some of these stolen books were used to set up the Institute of East Asian Studies, Institute of
Oriental Culture, Institute of East Asian Economy, Institute of Endemic Disease in East Asia, Great East
Asia Library, and others.
After the war, Chinese scholars began demanding the return of these treasures. America was aware
of the theft, having conducted a survey that identified seventeen locations in Japan where looted books
were kept, among them the Imperial Palace, the Imperial Household Ministry, Yasukuni Shrine, Tokyo
Science Museum, Tokyo Art College, Waseda University, Tokyo Imperial University, and Keio
University. U.S. occupation authorities concluded that Japan was holding nearly 3-million precious books
and manuscripts taken from Chinese libraries. Today, scholars call Japan’s libraries the finest in Asia,
because Japan has returned very little of what she stole. China recovered fewer than 160,000 volumes,
less than six percent.
While Golden Lily teams were hard at work plundering China, so were Japanese tycoons like
Sumitomo Kichizaemon, head of Japan’s immense Sumitomo conglomerate. He specialized in looting
Shang bronzes. Sumitomo began his collection with trophies stolen during the 1900 Siege of the Legations
in Peking, and continued during the takeover of Manchuria and North China. But it was only during the
eight year China Incident from 1937-1945, that he amassed the bulk of his collection, which ranks with
that of Avery Brundage as one of the world’s finest. How he acquired it would make interesting reading.
Six months before the rape of Nanking, General Doihara called in the one man who could take full
charge of looting China’s underworld — Kodama Yoshio, Japan’s top gangster. Normally based in Tokyo,
Kodama moved to Shanghai, where he became Doihara’s chief liaison with Boss Tu and the Green Gang.
Before the war ended, Kodama was Golden Lily’s most effective negotiator with gangsters in Indochina,
Siam, Malaya, Burma, the Philippines and Indonesia, holding their feet to the fire or, when necessary,
shooting them.
Kodama was short, burly, squat, and had the meaty face of a professional fighter, with thick lips and
heavy scar tissue. His fingers were knobby from karate, and could crush a larynx. The son of a failed
businessman in Nihonmatsu, at age nine he was sent off to his aunt in Korea, where he worked in a steel
mill. At twelve he fled back to Japan, where he was adopted by yakuza who put him to work beating up
labor organizers. By 1931 he was a favorite of Black Dragon boss Toyama, implicated in the attempted
murder of cabinet ministers. Sentenced to prison, Kodama wrote a memoir that became a handbook for
fanatics. After his release, Toyama sent him to Manchuria to do wet work for General Doihara. In Tokyo a
few months later, he was jailed for plotting to bomb imperial advisors, staying in jail until 1937.
He was sprung from jail by Doihara in April 1937, on the condition that he devoted his violent
energies to looting China’s underworld. This epiphany, the transformation of Kodama from thug to superpatriot, was suggested by Black Dragon’s Toyama, whose own stature as a patriot was affirmed in 1924
when he was a guest at Emperor Hirohito’s wedding.
In November 1937, after six months of briefings in the Foreign Ministry, Kodama arrived in
Shanghai to deal with the problem of carelessness. In a postwar memoir, he denounced “the wanton
spending of secret funds, on wine, women and debauchery… in every city under Japanese occupation”.
And the careless destruction of valuable objects: “…in every temple and shrine…in the occupied areas, I
found the heads of Buddhas…broken or cut off”. If soldiers, mostly uneducated farm boys, were too
stupid to steal the whole Buddha, they must be shot. While Kodama’s lieutenants put these orders into
effect, he spent his days taking control of alcohol, drugs, and other prime commodities. All proceeds were
diverted from Chinese racketeers to Golden Lily, minus a handling charge for Kodama himself.
Ultimately, Kodama was responsible to Prince Chichibu, and to the throne.
Princes were not equipped to deal with gangsters. Kodama saved them from soiling their hands. He
converted narcotics into bullion by the simple method of trading heroin to gangsters for gold ingots. How
brokers got the ingots was not his concern. He closed a deal with waterfront boss Ku Tsu-chuan to swap
heroin for gold throughout the Yangtze Valley. Thanks to Ku’s brother, KMT senior general Ku Chu-tung,
Japan also gained access to U.S. Lend-Lease supplies reaching western China by way of the Burma Road,
or on aircraft flying over the Hump from India. Once in warehouses in Kunming or Chungking, the LendLease was re-sold to the Japanese Army, with Kodama as purchasing agent.
One of Kodama’s most important converts was drug broker Ye Ching-ho. At the end of 1937, Ye
dropped all pretense of patriotism and transferred his loyalty to Kodama and Japan, in return for honorary
Japanese citizenship under the name Nakamura Taro, and his own drug domain on the island of Taiwan,
where he enjoyed the prerogatives of a warlord, and was kept supplied with Japanese mistresses. From
Taiwan, Ye shipped narcotics directly across the strait to China’s mainland.
When he was not otherwise busy, Kodama and his flying squad of yakuza thugs roved the Yangtze
Valley, stopping in every town and village. Summoning local notables, Kodama immediately shot the
mayor or headman in the face. This ensured immediate cooperation in donating all valuables to Emperor
Hirohito. Kodama was careful to turn over to Golden Lily all artworks, gold bullion, and general
treasure, but set aside the platinum, which fascinated him. The story is told that he once loaded so much
platinum on a military aircraft bound for Japan that the landing gear collapsed. Thereafter, he kept only the
biggest and best rubies, sapphires, and diamonds, which could be shipped home unobtrusively.
Officially, Kodama was in Shanghai as a buyer for the Imperial Navy Air Force, under the rubric of
the Kodama Kikan, or Kodama Agency. (Special Service Units were named after the officer in charge and
then called an agency.) On paper, his mission was to locate and acquire supplies of copper, cobalt, nickel
and mica. In most cases he bought these directly from KMT secret police chief General Tai Li, who was
paid in heroin. According to U.S. intelligence, the Kodama Agency took over the salt monopoly,
molybdenum mines, farms, fisheries and munitions plants. He also ran a huge shoe factory. Drugs paid for
the construction of Kodama’s splendid new home and garden in Tokyo. He was generous, sent gifts to the
right people, and was a favorite of Hirohito’s aging uncle, Prince Higashikuni. His personal circle
included Vice Admiral Onishi, General Ishihara, Lieutenant Colonel Tsuji, and Hirohito’s cousin Prince
Takeda, a key figure in Golden Lily’s movement of treasure.
Just before Pearl Harbor and the Strike South, Kodama accompanied Prince Takeda to Japan’s
southern military headquarters in Saigon to confer with Field Marshal Terauchi, son of the general who
had looted and brutalized Korea. Because the Strike South would involve Japan’s navy, and the navy
would administer the Malay Archipelago through which treasure ships must pass, Kodama was
transferred overnight from the army to the navy, and given the rank of rear admiral. This was like making
Al Capone a U.S. Navy admiral. Kodama’s rank enabled him to commandeer ships, and gave him
leverage with Chinese smugglers who roved the archipelago. As Jonathan Marshall explains, “because
the Japanese lacked a coastal navy, they granted Chinese ‘pirates’ a monopoly on smuggling in return for
information…The Japanese sold them narcotics for $1,600 an ounce, which the pirates in turn could sell
along the coast for $6,000.”
Kodama returned to Shanghai just in time for Pearl Harbor. The attack made little difference to
millions of Asians who had been under Japanese assault for years, but it altered circumstances for
Westerners. Immediately, Japan seized all their business assets, and emptied Western banks. In the
countryside, how you were treated depended on the local commander. Myra and Fred Scovel were
relatively fortunate. They were American missionaries running a hospital at Tsining, in Shantung
province. The day Pearl Harbor was attacked, Japanese soldiers arrested them and an officer said: “You
are not to leave the house. Everything you formerly owned is now the property of the Imperial Japanese
Government…You are to make lists in triplicate of everything in the house. Your money is to be counted,
the house searched in the presence of this officer.”
The Scovels were interned in prison camps before
being repatriated. Each time they were moved, their meager possessions were searched for American
money. “Hems of dresses were felt carefully, shoulder pads ripped open, shoe soles torn off, and long
hair thoroughly combed out.” Returning to China after the war, they found their hospital stripped even of
the window frames, doors, and plumbing. A box of silverware buried under their back porch was gone.
A few weeks before Pearl Harbor, paleontologists in Peking devised a plan to rescue one of the
world’s great anthropological treasures, the 500,000-year-old bones and teeth of Peking Man. They had
been discovered in the Dragon Bone Hills about 30 miles from Peking in the 1920s. The staff at Peking
Union Medical College, where the bones were stored, decided to move them to the Smithsonian
Institution in America, to be returned after the war. They were padded and wrapped, and placed inside
nine steel ammunition boxes. These were turned over to U.S. Navy Lieutenant William T. Foley, a
legation doctor now headed home with his assistant, Navy Pharmacist’s Mate Herman Davis. With luck,
they and their baggage would be protected by diplomatic immunity. But when Pearl Harbor occurred
before they left Peking, they became prisoners of war. Two and a half weeks later, Foley, Davis, their
boxes, and eleven U.S. Marines from the legation were taken to a railhead outside Peking and put in a
boxcar, bound for prison camps in Japan. After a two-week journey, the train reached an industrial harbor.
A squad of Japanese soldiers led by a gruff officer put Foley and his group in a shed and searched their
baggage outside. A Marine who had served in Japan and spoke some Japanese, heard the officer say:
“Here they are.” When Foley and the others were taken out of the shed later, the nine steel crates were
gone. The men were taken by sea to Hokkaido where they spent three and a half years as slave labor in
Mitsubishi mines.
In 1986, after hearing Dr. Foley tell this story many times in New York City, journalist Joseph
Coggins flew to Tokyo to talk with a Japanese cardiologist who had studied under Foley. Over supper at a
restaurant facing the Imperial Palace, the cardiologist told Coggins some fossils associated with Peking
Man had been reported in Tokyo after the war. He gestured toward the palace and added, “Peking Man
probably ended up not far from where we are sitting.” Dr. Foley had always told Coggins: “I would
swear on a stack of Bibles that those bones are in the basement of the Imperial Palace.”
next-43s
STORMING THE INDIES
FAIR USE NOTICE
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. As a journalist, I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of artistic, cultural, historic, religious and political issues. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Copyrighted material can be removed on the request of the owner.
No comments:
Post a Comment