Part 2 : Gold Warriors ... Storming the Indies... Hiding The Plunder ... The Eyewitness

GOLD WARRIORS 

HOW AMERICA SECRETLY 

RECOVERED YAMASHITA’S GOLD 

By Sterling & Peggy Seagrave

CHAPTER FOUR 

STORMING THE INDIES 

It was failure in Manchuria that caused the Japanese to invade China, and failure in China that caused them to invade Southeast Asia. In each instance they thought expanding the war zone would solve their problems. How can victory mean failure? The answer is surprisingly simple. Great quantities of treasure came from each victory, but quickly vanished into the usual hiding places, so Japan’s ruling elite became very much richer. Meanwhile, the public treasury was exhausted by military expenditures, and ordinary Japanese were squeezed to make up the deficit. In short, the underlying problem of a corrupt ruling elite was only aggravated by infusions of stolen treasure. 

Disaster lay ahead, but in a culture where conspicuous patriotism is the bottom line, few dared to speak out. Getting bogged down in China removed all restraints on military spending, so both the army and navy gambled on advancing farther south. Tokyo was counting on a sequence of surprise attacks, followed by a quick negotiated settlement, which would allow her to keep Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, while gaining at least the Philippines and Indonesia. Few Japanese officials believed they could win a protracted war with the West. However, in the Autumn of 1941, Hirohito was persuaded that Japan had the advantage of surprise, and if he delayed, the opportunity would be lost. Weeks before Pearl Harbor, he was in contact with Pope Pius XII, hoping the Pope would negotiate a peace settlement at the right moment. To sweeten his bid for the Pope’s favor, Hirohito had his financial advisors move $45-million into the Vatican bank in Rome, and to Vatican controlled banks in Portugal and Spain. 

When it was launched, the Strike South moved with stunning speed. The day after Pearl Harbor, Shanghai’s international settlement was overrun. Japanese troops landed in Siam, the government in Bangkok surrendered and obligingly declared war on the Allies. Two days later, sailing from Singapore to block a landing on the Malay Peninsula, Britain’s Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk by Japanese planes. Japanese troops on folding bikes moved swiftly down the Malay Peninsula, as others invaded Burma and Sumatra. 

By the end of December, Hong Kong, Guam and Wake had fallen, and Japan was invading the Philippines. On March 9, 1942, resistance collapsed in Java. Bataan surrendered on April 9, Corregidor on May 6. Five months after Pearl Harbor, Japan controlled East and Southeast Asia. 

Seen as armed robbery, the twelve months of 1942 were pure hell. Japan was in a hurry, and used terror to force submission. Loot amassed for Golden Lily by the kempeitai and Special Service Units was funneled into Penang or Singapore, then carried by sea through the spice islands to Manila, to be sorted and inventoried by the princes before the next leg north to Japan. 

Tokyo’s policy on looting was set by Hirohito at an Imperial Headquarters Liaison Conference, in a document titled Principles for the Implementation of Military Administration in the Occupied Southern Area. He directed the military to enforce “the acquisition of strategic materials, the establishment of the self-sufficiency of the occupying army, and the restoration of law and order”. In plain language, acquisition meant armed robbery, self-sufficiency meant forcing local populations to bear the full burden of paying for the occupation, and restoration of law-and order meant using terror to suppress all opposition. These orders gave a free hand. At a meeting of the Imperial Liaison Conference in March 1942, Hoshino Naoki, head of the narcotics trade and now Hirohito’s top aide, said: “There are no restrictions on us. These were enemy possessions. We can take them, do anything we want.” 

One part of World War II that receives little attention is the financial treachery – coercion, terror, extortion, and secret betrayal. Little is written about it because prominent citizens chose to betray their own nation, their own families, rather than forfeit personal wealth. Financial collusion with Japan remains one of the world’s most closely guarded secrets even today. While many books have been published about Nazi looting and economic conspiracy, records of Japan’s looting and economic conspiracy have been removed from Western archives and databases, remain under secret classification, and will not be made public for another half-century. There must be a reason for this. Recent efforts in the U.S. Congress led to passage of Public Law 106-567 to assure public access for the first time to classified documents about Japan’s conduct of the war. At the last moment, a loophole was added permitting the CIA director to decide which documents are ‘relevant’ and to withhold for reasons of ‘national security’ any that might reveal what the CIA was doing half a century ago. This permits the CIA to filter out all documents that might reveal unsavory American collusion with Japan in the period immediately following the war. Until those archives are fully opened, we can only see a partial picture. Even that is devastating, as we will see in later chapters. 

As Japan struck south, mundane materials qualified as plunder: copper wire, oil, coal, iron, rice, dried fish, preserved meats, and salt. In Malaya, the Philippines and Dutch East Indies, every kind of real estate was confiscated, from private homes and hotels to granaries, petroleum tank farms, and fish farms. Failure to arrange a quick truce through the Pope left no alternative but more robbery. Despite initial victories, by mid-1942 it was obvious to Prince Chichibu, his brother Prince Takamatsu, and to many others, that the war would be lost militarily. So it was more important than ever not to lose financially. 

After the fall of Singapore, Chichibu established a regional headquarters of Golden Lily there, staffed with clerks, bookkeepers and accountants. He flew north to the banking hub of Kuala Lumpur and the island of Penang, major centers for collection and transshipment of loot. In Ipoh he made deals with Overseas Chinese tin mining factories to melt down and recast confiscated gold jewelry. Ingots in many shapes from Laos, Cambodia, Siam, and Burma were being shipped by rail to Ipoh, or by freighter to Penang or Singapore. Wu Chye-sin was a Hokkien businessman in Ipoh who made a fortune taking a small percentage of precious metals he recast for Golden Lily, stolen from Burma and Siam. Because he spoke Chinese and English, the bars he cast were hallmarked in those languages, using English spelling for Cambodia instead of that country’s Khmer or French names. This added to the variety of hallmarks that Golden Lily dealt with. Half a century later, hundreds of the bars cast at Wu’s factory in Ipoh were found deep in a cavern on Luzon by Igorot tribesmen, who showed them to a camera crew from Asahi Television. The amazed TV crew videotaped the gold bars, and drilled core samples. When these were analyzed in Tokyo, metallurgical ‘fingerprints’ established where the gold originated. (See Chapter 13.) 

Ingots from Burma were in pyramid shapes, 15.5 x 5.5 x 3.8 centimeters, each 20 karats and weighing 6.2 kilos. Gold Buddhas also arrived. Rich Burmans prepared for reincarnation by endowing pagodas, or had solid gold Buddhas cast. Some Buddhist sects accumulated hoards of gold and cast Buddha images weighing up to eight tons. These were disguised by encasing them in plaster, painted white and decorated with painted faces. Only senior members of a sect knew that inside the plaster was solid gold. The first thing Japanese officers did at pagodas was to fracture the plaster Buddhas to see if they were gold inside. 

In July 1942 a gold Buddha over 15 feet tall arrived at Manila’s Pier 15. It weighed so many tons the only solution was to cut it up. But that might cause bad karma. Instead, the Buddha was lowered onto a barge and taken up the Marikina River to an airstrip called Marikina Field. There, two bulldozers pushed and dragged the statue into a pit, covering it with soil to dig up after the war. When those officers were transferred, it was forgotten. Decades later this gold Buddha was rediscovered by accident, when a housing development was built on Marikina Field. (Chapter 13.) 

In Kuala Lumpur, Golden Lily found vaults at Bank Negara packed with 23.97 karat bars of 6.250 kilos each, measuring 1 x 2 x 5.75 inches. Other gold was seized from Hokkien, Hakka and Teochiu communities, rich from tin mining and rubber plantations. More was extorted from rajahs and datos in each Malay state. Tons came by rail from Cambodia, in bars measuring 15.5 x 5 x 3.7 centimeters, rated 92.3 percent pure. 

Through 1942, 1943 and 1944, Prince Chichibu and his staff spent the dry season in the Philippines, then moved to the relative comfort of Singapore when typhoons began battering Manila. Chichibu had contracted tuberculosis in Manchuria in the late 1930s, and had to avoid the rainy season in the Philippines. TB also provided cover for his disappearance from Japan. There it was announced that the prince had left the army for medical reasons, and was recuperating on an estate at the foot of Mount Fuji, nursed by his wife. In a memoir published long after her husband’s death, Princess Chichibu said he spent the war years in such total isolation that he was seen by his own brothers only on two or three occasions. In between, nobody could say where he was. A number of Japanese and Filipinos have attested to the prince being in Manila, adding that they saw him spitting blood into his handkerchief, a telling detail because his tuberculosis was not widely known. 

Despite many warnings, the Japanese assault took governments, bankers and citizens by surprise. Before Japan invaded the Philippines, anxious Americans asked the State Department about sending home wives and children. State refused to give frank advice. Later, it defended this lamely before Congress, saying it did not want to prejudice on-going peace negotiations by sending the wrong message, evacuating women and children. So, many mothers and children spent the next four years in concentration camps. Dutch colonials were especially anxious. By the summer of 1940, they could no longer go home as the Netherlands were occupied by the Nazis. There was safe-haven in Australia, where many British colonials already had fled. But the Dutch government in exile in London declared that Dutch colonials must stay put. In Java and Sumatra, thousands of Dutch men and women were called for military duty or civilian defense throughout the archipelago, whose islands sprawl over 780,000 square miles. They were forbidden to send money out. Yet, in the final months of 1941, the Dutch colonial government covertly moved its remaining official gold reserves (worth 120-million guilders) from Java to Australia, America and South Africa, aboard chartered merchant ships such as the Java and the Phrontis. (Some 250-million guilders’ worth of gold were moved earlier to the U.S. to clear payments for American weapons and aircraft.) These transfers were kept secret to instill false confidence. 

Many colonial government officials were caught napping. Philippine President Manuel Quezon, an intimate friend of General Douglas MacArthur, was vacationing at the mountain resort of Baguio when he received a phone call on December 8 informing him that the Pacific War had started. MacArthur himself was caught with his military aircraft parked in the open at Clark Field, where nearly all were destroyed by Japanese bombers from Taiwan. On December 22, the Japanese landed in Lingayen Gulf. The next day, MacArthur declared Manila an open city and withdrew U.S. and Filipino forces to Bataan and Corregidor. Boats carried munitions, food and medicines to the island. MacArthur ordered his G-2, Colonel Charles Willoughby, also to move the contents of the Philippine National Treasury, the Philippine Central Bank, and private deposits from National City Bank. (Twenty-three big Mosler safes that Willoughby’s teams emptied, were later used by Golden Lily to hide gold bars in ventilation shafts at Fort Santiago, for recovery after the war.) 

The Philippine National Treasury consisted of over 51 metric tons of gold, 32 metric tons of silver bullion, 140 tons of silver coins, and $27-million in U.S. Treasury notes, plus an undisclosed amount in bonds, precious gems, and Treasury certificates. 

The gold alone was worth $40-million at the time. National City Bank held private deposits of two metric tons of gold, along with gems, currency and precious metals in safe deposit boxes. It took four days to move all this from Manila to Corregidor using Navy tugboats and small pleasure yachts. The job was completed on December 27, 1941. Willoughby’s wife helped with the inventory, and was surprised that gold did not glitter. “It was dull and not recognizably gold at all; most of it was dark brown with some chunks of dirty yellow. Some of the variously sized bars were wrapped, some were without wrapping; some had tickets attached, others had figures and weights stamped into them… I had to use both hands to lift a bar about the size of a pound of butter.” (A cube of gold 12 x 12 x 12 inches, weighs 2,000 pounds.) 

This treasure was stored in a Corregidor tunnel complex. Exactly 1,430 tons of silver pesos were placed in the Malinta Tunnels. Two tons of private gold were stored inside the Stockade. The 51 tons of government gold (2,542 ingots of 20 kilos each), along with government securities, were placed in laterals of the Navy Tunnel, on the south side of the Malinta tunnels. At the end of April, 115 tons of silver coins were dumped into San Jose Bay, where they were dispersed by tides. 

On February 3, 1942, the USS Trout, an American Tambor class submarine, arrived at Corregidor with a cargo of anti-aircraft rounds, food and medical supplies. After unloading, the skipper said he needed ballast to replace the cargo. MacArthur decided to put treasure aboard. Two trucks were sent to the Stockade to bring the private gold. Then 16 tons of silver pesos were loaded, along with currency, stocks, bonds, and Treasury certificates. The Trout continued its patrol, sinking two Japanese vessels before heading home to Pearl Harbor, where the gold was turned over to the San Francisco mint. When Corregidor fell, the Japanese navy recovered the remaining treasure and shipped it to Tokyo. It never occurred to the defenders to wall up this treasure in a side passage, to hide it. 

As each country was overrun, tens of thousands of colonials were trapped. They were ordered to take only two small suitcases and go to collection points, for transfer to internment camps. Kempeitai units immediately seized all property. Except for residences chosen for high-ranking officers or civil administrators, special squads arrived in vans to strip these homes bare. Pianos, paintings, light fixtures, kitchen appliances, flush toilets, sinks, clothing, and food-stocks were taken to warehouses. Copper wiring and lead plumbing were ripped from walls. Jewelry, candlesticks, tableware and picture frames were placed in oil drums and taken to sorting centers for melting down. Hardwood floors and doors were torn out. 

In the Philippines, Carlos Romulo (later ambassador to the UN) told how this was done on the island of Leyte: “Their army trucks came to every door, and soldiers entered the houses taking everything that might be of use, and throwing all else out of the windows, or firing it there. All their loot was taken on ships to Japan, leaving the Philippines stripped.” 

In Manila, Japanese soldiers moved through upper class and middle class neighborhoods, kidnapping pretty wives and daughters who were taken to hotels set aside for higher-ranking army and navy officers. Over several weeks mothers and daughters were raped repeatedly until many were in a stupor, servicing up to fifty men a day. The kempeitai offered to return kidnapped family members in exchange for hidden treasure or securities, or information about neighbors and relatives. At hospitals, nurses were sought as mistresses for Japanese officers. In poor families with no assets, wives and daughters were herded into brothels for non-commissioned officers and ordinary soldiers. 

On the eve of the invasion, many Dutch colonials hastily sold homes and emptied bank accounts, buying gold biscuits, or gems that could be tucked in a cheek. Some buried valuables in their gardens. Watchful servants retrieved them, only to have them taken by the Japanese, who paid repeated visits for this very reason. Other Dutch brought tiny hoards to freighters, passenger ships, inter-island ferries, and private yachts, hoping to escape to Australia. Although some vessels reached safety, most were captured or sunk. Few saw their valuables again. 

Like British in Malaya or Burma, some Dutch had holiday homes in mountain towns of Java or Sumatra, where they could escape the heat. Here they fled, hoping to be overlooked. But kempeitai came to the smallest kampong, locking these cottages. To be so methodical over such a vast region required a very large organization and considerable forethought. 

Panic hit bankers and private citizens alike as they sought ways to hide wealth. Banks called in bearer bonds, listed numbers, sent the lists to the home country and destroyed the bonds. Serial numbers of high-denomination banknotes were recorded and the bills burned. When time ran out, smaller denominations were burned without listing the numbers. In Malaya, $104-million in bonds were processed this way. In Singapore, $4-million in privately-owned jewels and small valuables were received by government agents and shipped to Australia. After noting serial numbers, Singapore banks burned $75-million in currency, and shipped another $39million to India. When the Japanese marched in they brought a phalanx of officials from Yokohama Specie Bank and Bank of Taiwan (a Japanese government bank) who were to sequester all bank operations. Those from Yokohama Specie Bank worked in territories under army control, those from Bank of Taiwan in areas under navy control. Taiwanese bankers, who could speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, or Teochiu, were assigned to monitor Chinese owned banks and pawnshops. 

Earnest officials made desperate efforts to hide or destroy government tax ledgers, property ledgers, and internal banking records, but the Japanese tortured or frightened bureaucrats and bank managers to reveal secret account information and business practices, to open safes and vaults, or to turn over hidden safe-deposit keys. Collaborators were discovered among native clerks, disgruntled targets of racist abuse by their colonial masters. They provided tax-rolls and ledgers, and identified wealthy local residents for fleecing. 

In Singapore, all foreign bank holdings were confiscated. On March 8, 1942, managing directors of all commercial banks in the Dutch East Indies were forced to hand over the contents of their vaults. In this first sweep, the Japanese took 52 million guilders in cash from banks in Java alone. Another 12-million guilders were seized from import-export firms in Java and the neighboring island of Madoera. They even sealed pawnshops and small native banks. This was done by staff from the Bank of Japan, Bank of Taiwan, Mitsui Bank and Kanan Bank, led by Yamamoto Hiroshi, a senior Bank of Japan officer who served as controller of the Office of Alien Property. Everything was turned over to Prince Chichibu’s Golden Lily organization for inventory, and shipment to Japan. 

Across Southeast Asia, mid-level bank employees were herded into internment camps, and escorted to work each day. Fearing for their lives, they soon handed over the remaining secrets. Those who refused to cooperate, or were thought to have deceived the Japanese, were turned over to the kempeitai for special treatment. Journalist Jos Hagers of the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, who was born in a Japanese prison camp in Sumatra, has investigated many accounts of Japan’s looting in Indonesia, including that of eyewitness Willemsz Geeroms. As a boy of fifteen, Geeroms watched while a Japanese, said to be a brother of Emperor Hirohito, visited his internment camp. While the prince was there, the father of Geeroms’ best-friend, a director of the Palembang branch of Java Bank, was taken to the commandant’s office for interrogation. Informers had told the Japanese that he had burned a large quantity of guilders and hidden a lot of bullion to prevent its confiscation. When he refused to answer questions, he was brutally beaten in full view of internees including young Geeroms, and later died of his injuries. 

The Japanese recovered far more gold than they thought possible. It became evident that there was more gold and platinum in private hands across Southeast Asia than anyone knew existed. Some had been hoarded for many generations, but some was new. During the 1930s, the Great Depression made people everywhere shy away from paper currency. By the late 1930s, anxiety about the intentions of Germany and Japan made gold a vital asset. Governments hoarded gold against the likelihood of war. Increased demand made it profitable to open new mines, including the Tjikotok mine on Java where gold was extracted by tunneling as deep as 3,000-feet, approaching the depth of the deepest mines in South Africa. In the Philippines also, 1939 was a record year for gold production from Benguet mines northeast of Manila. 

The Japanese quickly reactivated these mines with slave labor. With a limitless supply of slaves, they did not have to worry about cost or risk. When the Japanese 25th Army took control of mines on Benkalis island, off Sumatra, gold production jumped ten-fold to over 400-kilos per year. Similar increases were recorded in all other mines during the occupation. 

Not all Southeast Asia’s wealth was acquired at gunpoint. Wherever possible, it was simpler to purchase it with scrip. By the end of the war, the amount of currency in circulation was seven times normal. First, the army and navy distributed their own scrip in each country, valued at ¥1 to one Straits dollar (doubling the value overnight). Because the scrip was poor quality, with no serial numbers, it was easy to counterfeit. Such large quantities were distributed that it lost more value from over-supply. In an orgy of false sincerity, the Japanese rushed in to fix the unfixable. New scrip was issued by the Southern Development Bank, to replace the military scrip. So, victims were defrauded twice. Each note bore the printed notice ‘Face Value Guaranteed’ and ‘backed by a giant reserve’. 

As Hong Kong was occupied, homes, hotels, businesses, real estate, artworks and antiques were confiscated from wealthy Chinese families, given military scrip or bank scrip in exchange. Half a century later, these families still are pursuing legal action in an attempt to force Japan to redeem millions of dollars’ worth of scrip. Farcically, the Japanese claim the scrip was issued by a former government, so the current government has no responsibility to honor it. Many of Hong Kong’s finest art collections remain in private Japanese hands, paid for with ‘Monopoly money’. 

Ricksha pullers also were paid in scrip. If they did not express gratitude, they were beheaded. POWs (when paid at all), were paid in scrip, then had monthly withholding taken out that would be returned ‘when they were sent home’. There was even a luxury tax. Car owners had to pay the equivalent of US$300 a month for the privilege of having tires on their cars. 

Joseph Grew, the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo from 1932 until he was repatriated in 1942, said: “Even the Japanese militarists could not continue indefinitely a program of outright larcenies and burglaries. The robbery is reduced to a system. They have made that system resemble finance. Like our finance, it deals with money. Like ours it uses the familiar terms of cash, credit, loans, stock companies, government subsidies, traffic, taxes and so on. …There the resemblance ceases…Once new territory was acquired, the Japanese invaders…built up a currency system that rested on the fiat of the Japanese Army and issued bank notes payable only in death to anyone who did not honor them. With this currency, the Japanese military manipulated exchange so as to conduct trade on a ruthlessly unfair basis. They supplemented this with outright confiscation, or capital levies, or simply with the murder of the property owners and the enslavement of the workers. Japanese-run monopolies fixed prices on what they wanted at ridiculously low levels, and Japanese military patrols ‘bought’ at these prices. On this basis, Japan was able to develop a flourishing flow into Japan of goods, until the occupied area was pumped dry. Then some concessions would be made, in an attempt to prime the pump and sink it deeper into the well.” 

To squeeze more, Japan set up lotteries and gambling houses where players had to spend hard currency. Winners took home their jackpots in scrip. 

Periodically, Japanese sold rationed goods like rice, cigarettes, sugar and salt at very high prices. Instead of making these goods available openly, they were channeled to local gangsters and black marketeers, who collaborated in return for narcotics. Ordinary people wanting to buy food, tobacco, salt and medicine on the black market had to dig into secret caches of colonial hard currency, gold, or jewelry. 

When treasure was sorted by Golden Lily, the gold, platinum, gemstones and artworks were crated for shipment first to Manila. Confiscated stocks, bonds, gold bearer certificates, were channeled to Yokohama Specie Bank or Bank of Taiwan, for transfer to Japanese accounts at foreign banks in neutral countries. The single biggest shareholder in the Yokohama Specie Bank was Emperor Hirohito, owning 22 percent. Consequently, the Imperial Household Agency controlled the bank’s shareholder meetings. By the end of the war, it has been established that Hirohito had over $100-million ($1-billion in today’s terms) hidden in gold and foreign currency accounts in Switzerland, South America, Portugal, Spain and the Vatican. 

Near the end of the war, Yokohama Specie Bank discovered that it had not correctly balanced its books, and owed a significant sum to banks in the conquered territories. The overdraft was cleared by paying those banks in worthless scrip. (As the emperor continued to be the biggest shareholder after the war, the argument that management of the bank had changed is particularly absurd.) 

Nazi Germany typically laundered looted gold and non-monetary gold by re-smelting it and casting it into bars that were hallmarked with black eagle swastikas, numbered in keeping with standard practice of the Reichsbank. This gold was moved to banks in Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, or Argentina. Japan used the same techniques, moving gold through Swiss banks in Tokyo, Portuguese banks in Macao, and banks in Chile and Argentina. When gold was physically moved to those countries it was carried by large cargo submarines. 

As a center of the world’s unofficial gold trade, Macao was enriched. When the Allies got together at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 to put a stop to the laundering of Nazi and Japanese war loot through neutral countries, Portugal somehow forgot to include Macao on the list, and nobody drew attention to the oversight. As historian Bertil Lintner noted: “Macao merchants were soon buying gold abroad at $35 an ounce from banks, shipping it back to the enclave and selling it at a premium to whoever wanted to buy it. The syndicate was led by Ho Yin, an Overseas Chinese who had fled from Guangdong to sit out the war.” Macao was a wartime haven for rich Overseas Chinese who enlarged their fortunes by precious metal trading. The only significant source of gold at the time was Japanese plunder. In the China Seas, only Japanese banks were open for business. Macao pawnshops, brokers, and private citizens made fortunes turning hard currencies into gold for the Japanese. At war’s end, when colonial authorities returned, Macao millionaires were able to use the colonial currency they had acquired to buy the most desirable land, buildings, and factories at knock-down prices. 

Some of Hirohito’s personal wealth was laundered through Macao, the rest through Swiss banks in Tokyo. Journalist Paul Manning, who had a chance to review some of Hirohito’s financial records at the end of the war, when they were in the custody of U.S. Occupation authorities, saw that the emperor’s personal assets began to be moved abroad to neutral havens at the end of 1943, preparing for the inevitable defeat. Privy Seal Kido called a meeting of Japan’s leading bankers who were also the emperor’s financial advisor. On their recommendation, funds were transferred from Tokyo to Switzerland, virtually emptying Hirohito’s cash reserves in Tokyo. Nazi gold, which had been moved to the Swiss accounts of Yokohama Specie Bank to pay for purchases from Japan, also were transferred to Hirohito’s accounts in Switzerland. At the same time, Kido moved other imperial gold reserves to Argentina by sub, and to Macao where it was sold for hard currencies, and this money was then moved to Switzerland by bank transfer. Historian James Mackay separately concluded that Hirohito had U.S. $20- million in Swiss accounts, U.S. $35-million in South American banks, and U.S. $45-million in Portugal, Spain and the Vatican. 

Because most of the stolen treasure reaching Japan made its way into private vaults and the vaults of the Imperial Family, Tokyo’s strategy for the economic exploitation of Southeast Asia was a failure. It was also sabotaged by Overseas Chinese, who controlled the region’s raw materials, industries, agriculture, smuggling, and rackets. While they despised the Japanese for the rape of China, they hated them in particular for bombing Amoy, Swatow, and other harbors along the China coast that were the ancestral homes of their dialect groups. In the past, Western companies had been successful in Southeast Asia only when they found ways to work with the Overseas Chinese. As Japan took over and tried to set up equivalent monopolies of oil, sugar, rice, salt, and other commodities, whole sectors of local economies collapsed. Prices shot up, the supply of goods came to a halt, and there was massive unemployment, famine, inflation and hoarding. 

In retaliation, Overseas Chinese became special targets. Experts in terror were sent to punish them. Colonel Watanabe Wataru spent ten years in North China developing techniques, such as kidnapping members of prosperous Chinese families, amputating body parts starting with ears, noses, and fingers, then continuing to breasts and testicles. He was especially effective when he threatened to castrate eldest sons. In this manner, Watanabe was credited with bringing in great quantities of gold, gemstones and artworks. In China, he had headed one of the Special Service Agencies (Tokumu Kikan) whose duties were espionage, counter-espionage, propaganda, and fifth column subversion. Watanabe was then given the job of terrorizing Malaya’s Overseas Chinese. His techniques are well known from speeches he made and papers he drafted: “The Chinese … are prone to maintain a false obedience, and they are as crafty as anything, and hard to control. They ought to be dealt with unsparingly.” To help, he enlisted cronies from his days in Manchuria. One was his old friend Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, a flamboyant leader of the Total War cult, who had helped plan the Strike South and the Malaya campaign of General Yamashita. Another was Takase Toru, who had served in China as an intelligence officer with Special Service Section Eight, and was an expert in ‘the Chinese problem’. Watanabe described Takase as ‘a complicated character, conceited, quarrelsome, aggressive’, but his ruthlessness was exactly what was needed. 

Colonel Tsuji was Japan’s most ruthless Special Service agent, combining traits that made Goebbels, Heydrich, and Skorzeny uniquely feared in the Nazi Party. Prior to the Strike South, Imperial General Headquarters issued to officers a handbook written by Tsuji, which makes repeated references to plundering the wealth of the ‘treasure-house of the Far East’. The methods he recommended were based on terror. Compassion and sympathy were to be avoided. No longer could the Overseas Chinese “indulge themselves in a hedonistic and wasteful way of life…” Japan would force them “to account for their past mistakes and to make them ready to give up their lives and property”. Tsuji got everyone’s attention with a horrific atrocity. By noon on February 21, 1942, all male Chinese on the island of Singapore between age eighteen and fifty were assembled in five locations. Each walked past a row of hooded informers. When a hood nodded, that Chinese was condemned to death, his skin stamped with a triangular ink chop. Others were stamped with squares and released. A total of 70,699 Singapore Chinese were taken off for torture and killing. Mass executions lasted many days, with Tsuji watching closely. Most were shot, bayoneted or beheaded, but 20,000 were roped together on barges and taken into the sealanes off Singapore, where they were forced overboard. Those who did not drown quickly were machine-gunned. This nightmare was called Sook Ching or ethnic cleansing. Tsuji then extended Sook Ching to the whole Malay Peninsula, where another 40,000 were slain, including women, school children, and babies. Similar mass executions of Chinese happened elsewhere. 

Colonel Watanabe declared that Singapore Chinese must atone to Emperor Hirohito to the sum of 50-million yen, as a gift on the emperor’s birthday in April. This was equal to one fourth of the total currency in circulation in Malaya at the time. Takase was to collect the contributions. Since nobody could produce that much cash on short notice, Takase arranged a loan of 22-million yen from the Yokohama Specie Bank so the birthday present did not fall short. Chinese were required to repay the loan (and interest) with gold bullion, hard foreign currency, or other tangible assets. 

While Sumatra had its Royal Dutch Shell oilfields, Malaya was the greatest rubber-producing region in the world. Using scrip, Watanabe bought up all rubber stocks for shipment to Japan. He then ordered all rubber estates and processing facilities sold to Japan’s zaibatsu conglomerates, again for scrip. 

The shock of this anti-Chinese reign of terror brought results for a few weeks, but ultimately backfired as the flow of rice, salt, and other commodities dwindled further. Watanabe offered special discounts and rebates to quislings and collaborators. A few mavericks wanted an abundant supply of narcotics, so Japan’s major collaborators were drug dealers and gangsters. 

Only with slave labor was Japan not frustrated. There were three groups of victims: local people, Overseas Chinese, and Westerners. Each was treated differently. By mid-1942 the Japanese held some 140,000 Allied POWs, about half-a-million Western civilians, and more than a million Overseas Chinese internees. Though camp conditions for Western civilians were Spartan in the extreme, POWs were treated with barbaric cruelty. Many Allied servicemen were really civilians hastily drafted at the last moment. The father of Dutch journalist Jos Hagers was put to work, with thousands of others, building the Pakan Baroe railway in Sumatra. Although he survived the war, his health was broken and he eventually died in the Netherlands of his injuries. Others toiled a thousand feet below ground, working naked in coalmines belonging to Mitsui and Mitsubishi. 

Local populations were treated as garbage. After the war, the government of Indonesia said 4- million of her people were pressed into slave labor battalions, carried away on slave ships and worked to death in distant lands. Some 225,000 of them worked on the Kwai River Death Railway between Siam and Burma. When they died, their bodies were used as fill for railway embankments. In Malaya, by 1944, all males between 15 and 40 not employed in vital jobs, were dragooned into slave labor battalions. Korea maintained she lost 6-million as slave labor, many sent to Southeast Asia on slave ships. The number of Chinese slaves was bigger yet. Each year, Japan dragooned about one million Chinese and one million Koreans as slaves. Some were shipped to Japan. Because all Japanese miners had been drafted for military service, Kishi Nobusuke, former head of Manchuria and now Tojo’s minister of Mines and Industry, imported 750,000 slaves from Korea, and 50,000 from China. Historian Stephen Roberts explains that as subjects of the Japanese empire, Koreans were given ‘preferential handling’ as slaves, while the Chinese, with no rights at all, were “treated worse than draft animals”. Another 50,000 from China, and an unknown number from Taiwan, were taken by slave ships to the Philippines, where most died. Eyewitnesses told us that thousands of Chinese and Taiwanese dug tunnels and treasure vaults for Golden Lily, then were buried alive when the vaults were sealed. As they were only fed rice gruel or seaweed soup, many starved to death on the job. 

Japan’s biggest corporations used slaves to work mines, to build roads, railways, airfields and harbors. The biggest single employer of slaves was Mitsui, and many of the slave ships were Mitsui vessels. But records show that POWs also slaved for Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Mitsubishi, Nippon Steel, Showa Denko, and other corporations. Mitsubishi’s market position at the war’s end in 1945 was described by a Western economist as being equivalent to the merger of U.S. Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil, Alcoa, Douglas Aircraft, Dupont, Westinghouse, AT&T, National City Bank, Woolworth Stores and Hilton Hotels. As for Mitsui, it boasted 1.8-million workers at home and abroad, and owned at least 356 major companies. Today, these conglomerates deny any obligation to compensate those who survived, on the argument that their management changed at the end of the war, so today’s corporations are not the same. Strangely, their corporate banks escaped any punishment during the U.S. occupation. 

The death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30 percent, compared to 4 percent for those held by the Nazis. It would take thousands of pages to recount the brutalities they suffered. Japanese camp administrators and medical staff deliberately allowed POWs to suffer horrible deaths from beriberi, a disease resulting from deficiency of vitamin B1. Author Gavin Daws makes clear that camp doctors knew these men were dying because their diet of polished white rice was deficient in B1. Unpolished brown rice contains B1, but the vitamin is removed in the polishing process. Simply feeding prisoners cheaper brown unpolished rice would have cured the problem. At a POW camp on Hainan Island, Captain Kikuchi Ichiro, withheld Vitamin B tablets while calculating absolute minimum food needed to keep POWs barely alive. The men developed puffy chests, distended bellies, testicles like balloons. Fluid filled their lungs and they suffocated. Everyone knew the choking sound of men gagging to death from beriberi. 

Thousands of POWs were taken to Japan on Hell Ships, sealed in cargo holds. Conditions were so grim that of 1500 prisoners, 100 to 200 were dead when they reached Japan. Ships carrying POWs were supposed to be marked a certain way, to avoid being attacked. Japan did not mark its Hell Ships, so when they were attacked by Allied subs or aircraft the ships went down with all prisoners sealed in the holds. Albert Kelder’s research shows that submarines unwittingly torpedoed 16 Hell Ships crowded with British, Australian, American and Dutch POWs, plus thousands of Indonesian coolies called Romushas. Kelder told us that a total of 17,036 men died when these 16 iron coffins went down. Most were mistakenly sunk by U.S. subs; three (Pampanito, Paddle and Sea Lion II) unintentionally set the awful record with 2,776 drowned POWs. 

Chinese shipping lines were forced to lease ships to Japan for scrip, so kidnapped Comfort Women and slaves could be sent to Japan or to Southeast Asia. Investigators have found records establishing beyond question that the Hell Ships, slave ships, and fake hospital ships were operated by top Japanese corporations, including three of the world’s biggest shipping lines, their predecessors, or companies that merged with them during or after the war. Among them is NYK Line (Nippon Yusen Kabushiki), the successor to Tokyo Yusen Kabushiki, which acquired one of the slave ship operators, Chosen Yusen Kabushiki. Another is KKK Line (Kisen Kabushiki Kaisha), part of the Kokusai Kereitsu, parent of Hitachi Corporation and owner of some of Japan’s biggest banks. Another is Mitsui’s OSK Line (Osaka Shosen Kabushiki). Their biggest shareholders include global giants Mitsubishi and Sumitomo. These corporations never were obliged to pay a penny to redeem the scrip they passed around, or to compensate their slaves. All efforts to bring them to trial have been blocked by Tokyo or by Washington, in a perverse collusion we examine later in this book. 

Many POWs who reached Japan were used as slaves by Nippon Steel or Mitsui Mines, working ten-hour days, seven days a week. Malnutrition led to dysentery, jaundice, beriberi, scurvy and pellagra. Guards beat them with pick handles or shovels. Few survived. Those who did bore scars inside and out. Frank Bigelow’s experience was harrowing but typical. A 20-year-old seaman second class from North Dakota, he was taken to Japan in a Hell Ship belonging to Mitsui, and worked as a slave in a Mitsui coalmine. At six foot four, he weighed only 95 pounds, living on seaweed soup. He ate charcoal to stay alive. As he worked at a coalface deep in the mine one night, a large rock fell on his leg and snapped the brittle bones. 

“There was another American POW, Dr. Thomas Hewlett,” he recalled. “He improvised with two sharpened bicycle spokes, one to my knee and one to my ankle. It didn’t work. Eventually I got gangrene. …Since we had no medical supplies, much less surgical supplies, we had to do what was called a guillotine operation. He had a hacksaw blade and a razor blade, some knives and four guys holding me. He resorted to a primitive method to battle the growing infection. He put maggots inside the bandage and when he took them out and pulled out the infection, that man saved my life and my leg. The rest of my leg, I should say.” 

When the war ended, Bigelow and other POWs were taken to Guam, where they were harangued and browbeaten by U.S. military intelligence officers and forced to sign papers promising not to tell anyone about their terrible experiences. “We were told to read and sign and keep our mouths shut,” Bigelow said, “and I’m just putting that politely.” For some reason both Washington and Tokyo wanted total silence on the abuse of POWs. 

Worst of Japan’s slave programs was that of the Comfort Women. Young girls, many not even 13 years old, were shanghaied into sexual slavery. After the war, Tokyo insisted all Comfort Women were merely prostitutes who volunteered, and that the entire operation was run by private enterprise. Both statements are demonstrably false. Beginning in 1904 in Korea, the kempeitai took full charge of organized prostitution for the Japanese armed forces. One reason was the possibility that military secrets might be passed along in bed, so its agents could ferret out careless soldiers or spies. At first, the brothels were subcontracted. By 1932, the kempeitai resumed full control. A typical military brothel had ten barracks, each divided into ten rooms, plus a supervisor’s hut, all enclosed in barbed wire to keep the women inside. Rural brothels were tents, while railway cars were fitted out as mobile brothels. Korean and Japanese yakuza provided brutal security. Fees were based on a woman’s ethnic origin. Japanese girls were top-rated, followed by Koreans, Okinawans, Chinese, Southeast Asians. Later, Caucasian internees were added. Commissioned officers paid ¥3, non-commissioned ¥2.50, privates ¥2. Bookkeeping was thorough, with forms for each woman listing daily earnings and number of clients. Up to 200,000 young women and adolescent girls were forced into this sexual slavery, to serve more than 3.5- million Japanese soldiers. Each was expected to have fifteen partners a day. Theoretically, they received ¥800 a month, minus cost of food, clothing, medical care, soap and water. As many girls were illiterate, they were easily cheated. Most made zero, and were destitute at the end of the war. 

Because of the extreme secrecy to this day surrounding Japan’s treatment of POWs, civilian slaves, and Comfort Women, we are prevented from knowing important details. However, among files captured by Britain’s Royal Marines in 1945 is a revealing document, written by the commander of a camp for POWs at Taihoku, in Taiwan. The commander had just received instructions dated August 1, 1944, from the chief of staff, 11th Unit of Formosa POW Security No. 10 (kempeitai). In any emergency, he is instructed to deal with his prisoners in the following way: “Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, drowning, decapitation, or what ... it is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all and not to leave any traces.”

CHAPTER FIVE 

HIDING THE PLUNDER 

By May 1942, cargoes of plunder were piling up at Pier 15 in Manila. All treasure from Southeast Asia had to move by sea, because the Japanese did not control a ground route from Southeast Asia through China until late in 1944. Manila was the logical place to bring it together for final sorting and inventory before sending it on to Japan aboard returning freighters or damaged warships limping home for repairs. It was still Japan’s hope that it could hold on to the Philippines and Indonesia, whatever negotiated settlement brought the war to an end. But these expectations collapsed a month later in June 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor and three months after the fall of Singapore, when Japan lost the Battle of Midway and never regained the upper hand. The sea route to Japan remained open, because U.S. submarines were armed with defective torpedoes that went astray or bounced off Japanese hulls. This was not corrected until early 1943. To protect the precious cargoes from being attacked by Allied planes, Emperor Hirohito provided Prince Chichibu initially with four 10,000-ton fast passenger ships, painted white with huge green crosses to indicate that they were hospital ships (Japan refused to use the international red cross). Each ship’s identity was hidden with false superstructure and extra funnels. To confuse sightings further, each was given the name of a legitimate Japanese hospital ship. The phony hospital ships took on cargoes of treasure at Singapore or Batavia, and also boarded hundreds of VIP passengers. Japanese diplomats or senior officers and their families felt safer traveling aboard hospital ships protected from attack by international law. As many people can personally attest, the Japanese never hesitated to bomb and strafe hospitals or hospital ships, later excusing this action by saying they had never consented to the Geneva conventions on warfare. But they were certain that Allied planes and subs would not intentionally attack a Japanese hospital ship. Setting sail, the fake hospital ships avoided main sealanes, steamed east through the Java Sea to the Celebes, followed the coast of Borneo north to Mindanao, then threaded their way through the Philippine islands to Manila Bay. 

Other ships were added when suitable foreign vessels were captured. A prime example was the Dutch passenger liner Op ten Noort, named after a famous pioneer of the age of steamships. Her capture off Java in February 1942 began an extraordinary odyssey. She made many voyages carrying treasure to the Philippines and Japan, then at war’s end was filled with gold bullion and scuttled off Maisaru Naval Base, to be recovered by the Japanese in 1990. Our photos of her recovery, obtained from one of the participants, reveal the continuing involvement of senior government officials and major Japanese corporations in profiteering from Golden Lily plunder half a century after the end of the Pacific War. (See CDs.) 

Built in Amsterdam in 1927, the Op ten Noort entered service as a passenger liner for the Royal Packet Navigation Company in the East Indies. Based in Java, she plied a regular course known as the Great Express Service between Surabaya, Semarang, Batavia, Belawan-Deli, and Singapore. She was a pretty ship with a plumb bow, single tall funnel and graceful cruiser stern, very popular with Dutch in the archipelago. Just over 6,000 tons, her Lentz steam engine gave her a cruising speed of 15 knots, and she could accommodate two hundred passengers in first and second classes, carrying another 1,200 native deck passengers. With the outbreak of the Pacific War she was refitted as a hospital ship for the Dutch Navy, with Red Cross hull numbers clearly displayed. Through diplomatic channels Japan was notified, and Tokyo sent a reply officially recognizing her as a hospital ship. Nevertheless, on February 21, 1942, when the Op ten Noort was in the western entrance to Surabaya, being degaussed to protect her from magnetic mines, she was attacked by two Japanese aircraft. Their bombs damaged the ship and killed one doctor and two nurses. Captain G. Tuizinga took her slowly into Surabaya harbor for repairs. Six days later the Battle of the Java Sea began. It was less a battle than a massacre. The Japanese fleet was armed with new torpedoes that had an astounding range of 30,000 yards, with an oxygen propulsion system that left no revealing trail of bubbles. The British cruiser Exeter was damaged by one of these, the Dutch cruisers De Ruyter and Java were sunk along with three destroyers, gutting the Allied fleet. 

Hurrying out of the repair yard in Surabaya to look for survivors, the Op ten Noort came upon the battle scene and was immediately intercepted by two Japanese destroyers, whose boarding parties crippled her radio room. She was forbidden to assist any wounded, and told to remain where she was. At noon the next day, Captain Tuizinga decided to make a run for Australia, and headed down the Java coast at top speed. Three hours later they were intercepted by a Japanese plane that dropped bombs and ordered them to turn back. Following orders, they proceeded to Bandjarmasin, where they took aboard 970 Allied POWs for transport under guard to Makassar, including 800 survivors from the cruiser Exeter, many of them naked. There the ship remained for eight months as a hospital facility for the POW camps. When he tried to stop a Japanese guard from contaminating sterilized surgical instruments, one of the medical staff, S. J. Wiemans, was badly beaten in front of the entire ship’s complement. On October 16, 1942, the Op ten Noort sailed for Yokohama, wearing a Japanese flag. Arriving on December 5, 1942, Captain Tuizinga asked to speak to the Swiss representative of the International Red Cross but was refused. Instead, the full ship’s crew and medical staff — 29 men and 15 nurses — were put in a prison camp at a former American missionary school in Myoshi, 75 kilometers from Hiroshima where, as members of the Red Cross, they were treated better than POWs. 

At Yokohama, meanwhile, the Op ten Noort was fitted out with a false profile, a second funnel, painted white with huge green crosses, and given the name Tenno Maru. Three months later, in March 1943, she was again renamed, this time posing as the Hikawa Maru, a much bigger 11,000-ton Japanese fast liner built for the NYK line in 1929, and officially registered as a hospital ship. The real Hikawa Maru remained berthed in Yokohama, serving as a hotel and tourist attraction. The disguised Op ten Noort then sailed for Singapore carrying armaments and VIP families. For the remainder of the war she sailed between Singapore and Manila, carrying treasure for Golden Lily. On October 7, 1944, she was sighted in the Java Sea by the Dutch submarine Zwaardvisch (Swordfish), but the sub’s skipper let her pass because he thought she was a legitimate Japanese hospital ship. On November 1 of that year, her name was changed back to Tenno Maru. Just weeks before the war ended, she reached Yokohama again loaded with treasure. Instead of offloading, she was taken to Maizaru Naval Base on the west coast of Japan, where more gold and platinum bars were put aboard, along with large quantities of diamonds and rubies. Two days before Japan’s surrender was announced, she was taken out into Maizaru Bay late at night, her Japanese captain and small crew were shot dead, and the ship was scuttled by opening her Kingston valve. The Japanese government informed the Dutch government that what had once been the Op ten Noort had been sunk by a mine during the war. (When it was recovered in 1990, Japanese sources valued the cargo at three trillion yen, or US$30-billion; we return to the story of her recovery in Chapter 13.) 

The Op ten Noort was just one of Japan’s many fake hospital ships. What became of all the treasure moved around on them is a fascinating and complex riddle that has remained secret to this day. Pieces of the puzzle lie scattered around the Pacific Rim, only requiring patience to assemble. Here is what we have pieced together: Once plunder reached Japan, strategic materials like bauxite and tungsten went to war production or were concealed in underground bunkers on military installations, from which they surfaced years later. There were many such bunkers around Maizaru Naval Base, for example. 

As for hard currencies, Japan was confronted by a logistical problem coping with coinage stolen from so many countries. Gold and silver coins were kept intact, while brass, bronze and copper coins were melted down for war industries. In the Dutch East Indies, Japan later admitted seizing over 196- million guilders worth of coins. Many of these had just been minted in the United States. When Holland was overrun by the Nazis in 1940, the Dutch colonial government in Java was unable to obtain coinage from home and had to have new coins made at mints in San Francisco, Denver and Washington, D.C. These coins had just been distributed throughout the islands when Japan invaded and seized them. In 1946, American sources told the Dutch military mission that 110 cases of these coins were known to have been transferred from Yokosuka Naval Base to the Bank of Japan. 

Lieutenant General Schilling of the Dutch military mission reported to his government in September 1947 that thirty tons of Dutch silver (5,637 ingots), had been recovered from Tokyo Bay. This had been confiscated by the Japanese 16th Army on Java and shipped aboard fake hospital ships to the Osaka Mint. Other Dutch ingots were recovered from Etchugina Bay. Thanks to postwar detective work by Dutch Navy Lieutenant A. A. Looijen, 187 tons of stolen Dutch silver bullion from Java, traced to the Bank of Japan, was later returned to the Netherlands mint. Lt. Looijen, who spent the war in Japan as a POW slave laborer, said Dutch, Indian, British, Filipino, Chinese and Indo-Chinese coinage was brought in oil drums to a company named Kokusho, housed in the former Standard Oil refinery at Asundori, just south of Tokyo between Kawasaki and Yokohama. The manager of the facility was army Captain Yamasaki. One of the Dutch POWs there, C. H. L. Broekhuizen, helped sort the coins. His Japanese foreman told him it was the government’s intention to conceal the gold and silver coins until after the war, then melt down and re-cast the metal as ingots, to launder it. Other POWs saw re-smelting of copper coins at a factory in Hitachi, a hundred miles north of Tokyo. 

American POW Ed Jackfert, interned at Tokyo Area POW Camp #2 in Kawasaki, told us, “I had the occasion of working on a slave labor detail known to us as Kokusho. It was an oil refinery that was owned prior to WWII by the Standard Oil Co – we saw Standard Oil signs everywhere on the property. They had huge warehouses there. On many occasions we were assigned duties of working in these warehouses. Much to our surprise, we discovered that much of the loot brought by Japanese ships from Southeast Asia was stored in these warehouses. We examined hundreds of bags of silver coins of almost every Southeast Asian nation. There had to be tons of these coins warehoused there. There were other types of stolen booty there to which we paid little attention.” 

Among these were great quantities of loose diamonds, also kept in oil drums. Ultimately, the diamonds and colored gems were sorted and graded, the finest set aside, while the smallest were consigned to industrial use. The rest were poured back into the barrels for storage in warehouses and private vaults of the elite. 

Admiral Kodama and other Japanese officers and gangsters in Southeast Asia kept the biggest and best diamonds, sapphires and rubies. Kodama was able to ship his back to Japan aboard military aircraft, but most officers hid their collections of jewels in officer stashes, to be recovered and sold after the war. In our CDs we reproduce documents describing several very large stones recovered from officer stashes in the Philippines and offered for private sale. 

Gold and platinum ingots reaching Japan overland from China or by sea were placed either in private vaults or in tunnels and underground bunkers in the Japan Alps, massively built to withstand bombs and earthquakes. All indications are that relatively little of the treasure was put directly into Japanese banks because the ruling elite had no intention of sharing this treasure with the lower orders. It was for this very reason that Golden Lily had been created in the first place, to secure the bulk of the treasure for the imperial family, Japan’s most powerful clique, and the tycoons who were its most important supporters. 

The biggest underground bunker complex is at Matsushiro, in the mountains near Nagano, site of the 1998 Winter Olympics. The Matsushiro bunker is a honeycomb of reinforced concrete tunnels 10- kilometers long, with more than 60,000 cubic feet of underground space originally intended to house the imperial family, leading members of the aristocracy, and all government agencies, if Japan was invaded by the Allies. Japanese sources told us some of its branch tunnels were used to house enough gold and platinum bars to underwrite Japan’s postwar recovery. Matsushiro was dug by 10,000 Korean slave laborers, most of whom never were seen again, said to have been buried alive when the branch tunnels were sealed. 

Tragically, this was not a rare occurrence. After the war, Allied investigators learned that 387 American, British, Australian and Dutch POWs had suffered a similar fate on the Japanese island called Sado, off the northwest coast of Honshu. This beautiful but remote island was traditionally used as a place of exile for deposed emperors, aristocrats, poets, priests, and convicted criminals. It had a gold mine, owned and operated by Mitsubishi, notorious for brutal treatment of slave laborers. These Allied POWs were working in one of the shafts of the mine, near the island town of Aikawa. Normally, fifty men worked on the surface, transferring coal from wheeled ore bins into hoppers. But, on August 2, 1945, just before Japan’s surrender, all the prisoners were herded into the deepest part of the mine, 400 feet below the surface, where they were put to work hewing out a seam of gold. Guards discreetly withdrew to the surface, where they were ordered to push all the wheeled ore bins into the mineshaft. The night before, Japanese demolition experts had concealed explosive charges in the mineshaft at depths of 200 and 300 feet. At 9:10 a.m., while all the Allied slave laborers were deep below, orders were given to blow the mine. Lieutenant Tsuda Yoshiro, second in command of the forced labor camp, described the event to war crime investigators: “I was watching from a distance of 100 yards and witnessed a rush of smoke and dust from the mine’s entrance. While waiting for the smoke and dust to clear, every available guard was set to work dismantling the narrow-gauge steel track and then carrying portions of it into the mine entrance. By 10:30 a.m. …all traces of the steel track had been removed. [Then] the demolition detail entered the mine to set more explosive charges just inside the entrance. It was while returning to the prison camp that I heard a loud explosion. Looking back, I saw an avalanche of rock and earth completely cover where the mine entrance had been.” Tsuda did not mention seeing treasure put into the mine before it was blown, but what other reason would there have been for so completely removing all traces of track and obscuring the entrance? If Mitsubishi had nothing to hide, the 387 Allied POWs on Sado could have been repatriated without complications, like many others. 

More than a thousand Korean slave laborers working another Mitsubishi gold mine on Sado Island also vanished without a trace at war’s end. Their existence only became known in 1991 when official records were released of Mitsubishi Corporation’s distribution of cigarette rations to its wartime slave laborers. It is perverse to be remembered as a victim of mass murder only by a tally of cigarette butts. 

It is a matter of public record that American forces reported finding immense hoards of war loot in Japan before all information of this type was obliterated from archives in the United States. (The document is titled, Reports of General MacArthur: MacArthur in Japan: The Occupation Military Phase, Volume 1 Supplement, prepared by his General Staff, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 66-60006, Facsimile Reprint, 1994, Center for Military History, Pub 13-4.) Here are troves of “Japanese owned gold and silver”…“property that was acquired by Japan under duress, wrongful acts of confiscation, dispossession or spoliation”…“property found in Japan and identified as having been located in an Allied country [China] and removed to Japan by fraud or coercion by the Japanese or their agents”…“great hoards of gold, silver, precious stones, foreign postage stamps, engraving plates”…“precious metals and diamond stockpiles owned or controlled by the Japanese”; 30,000 carats of diamonds in one stash, and a single find of “52.5 pounds of hoarded platinum” with a value at the time of 54-million yen (over US$13-million in 1945 values). The document says, “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.” … “Eighth Army was directed to seize and maintain custody of precious metals and diamond stockpiles, owned or controlled by the Japanese or Axis governments in Japan during the war. Eighth Army agencies were also authorized to confiscate and deposit precious metals and gems in United States vaults in Tokyo or Osaka whenever such items were …found.” 

From this it is abundantly clear that America knew Japan looted treasure from countries it occupied. What happened to the treasure thereafter remains a state secret to this day. 

In 1947, General MacArthur brought a number of American gemologists to Tokyo. One of these was Edward P. Henderson. According to an oral history interview conducted by the Smithsonian Institution, MacArthur invited Henderson to Japan to appraise some $50-million in gems that the U.S. Army had recovered in Tokyo. Some were found in the ashes of buildings that had burned to the ground. Henderson recalled: “We got buckets full of sand and gravel with a lot of diamonds in it. So one of our big problems was getting the dirt and smoke and stuff off… We were working in the Bank of Japan, down in their vaults where they keep all their gold.” According to journalist Robert Whiting, some 800,000 karats of diamonds were later transferred from the Bank of Japan to the custody of MacArthur’s command, and these diamonds were never seen again. All attempts to trace any documentary record of them in U.S. archives have failed. It would be interesting to know how 800,000 karats of diamonds, looted by Japan during World War II, now qualify in Washington as “top secret for reasons of national security”. Whose national security? 

Five tons of silver bullion found in a Mitsui warehouse, illustrate the problem Japan had keeping war loot from falling into Allied hands. Because warehouses were insecure, caves, tunnels and mine shafts were a far better solution. Even Admiral Kodama, Japan’s top gangster, was stymied when he ran out of hiding places for his personal loot, and had to avail himself of a privileged hiding place: the vaults of the Imperial Palace. According to the Tokyo Journal, “Kodama had a good portion of these valuables transported to the vault of the Imperial Family in the Imperial Palace. Eventually the Minister of the Imperial Household told him to remove them before they were discovered by the Occupation authorities. The rumor was that the official’s action was at the direct request of the Emperor.” What about all the treasure still in the Philippines? 

By early 1943, America had solved its torpedo problems, and the submarine blockade just north of the Philippines became nearly impenetrable. Thereafter, much of the plunder would have to remain in the Philippines. This posed a new challenge to Prince Chichibu and his advisors. The solution was obvious, for gold is a curious commodity. It does not have to change hands. Once you take physical possession of gold bullion, you can put it in any secure place and leave it there for decades or centuries, providing no one else can remove it. Golden Lily could hide all the gold and platinum in deep vaults in the Philippines or Indonesia. It could remain asleep there as secure as if it were in the Matsushiro bunker. Even if Japan were invaded and occupied by the enemy, the location of this bullion would remain secret. When the world lost interest, individual vaults could be recovered discreetly. This was the argument put forth by Prince Chichibu’s advisors, including Japan’s best financial brains at the time, known as the Four Heavenly Kings. 

Engineering deep vaults was not a problem. In Japan, tunneling had been done for a thousand years. Every domain lord had earthworks, tunnels, and bunkers. In the late nineteenth century, railway tunnels had been dug, and mining for coal and other minerals had become a major industry in Japan, so the zaibatsu had employed tens of thousands of Japanese men and women as miners. They were now in the army, so Japanese soldiers were inveterate tunnelers. Give them a gun and they dug a hole. America developed flame-throwers primarily to burn them out of these holes, which often continued for miles. No better example exists than the island of Okinawa, where tunnels dug during the war connected natural caverns to blockhouses and gun emplacements. Chinese tombs dotting Okinawa were transformed into pillboxes connected by side tunnels to this underground defensive labyrinth. 

The geology of the Philippines provided many natural caverns, and Manila was full of hiding places. During four centuries of Spanish colonial rule, elaborate tunnels had been dug under the city by prisoners, and under American rule these were expanded and reinforced by the U.S. Army. The tunnels were linked, in some cases, to churches, cathedrals and monasteries with catacombs, or to Spanish forts with elaborate dungeons. In 1571, the Spaniards had moved their headquarters to Manila from Cebu, taking over the fortress of the local Moslem ruler, Dato Suliman. Renaming it Fort Santiago, the Spaniards enclosed it in a massive wall of earthworks, encompassing sixty hectares of adjoining land. They called the whole complex Intramuros (‘Within the Walls’), and soon added two great cathedrals and numerous government buildings. At the time, Intramuros lay on the south bank of the Pasig River estuary where the river flowed into Manila Bay, so they dug a broad moat around the walls and turned Intramuros into a man-made island. Since then, the water’s edge had withdrawn, and the moat became a park. Spanish soldiers, traders, and priests all lived inside the walls of Intramuros with their Filipino servants. Slaves and prisoners alike were put to work digging tunnels beneath Intramuros to store wine, brandy, manchego cheese, chorizo, serrano ham, olives, grain, silver, gold, and gunpowder. Churches and monastic orders dug catacombs for storage, or for burial crypts. 

This underground maze offered Prince Chichibu a ready-made hiding place for war loot. The kempeitai had made Ft. Santiago their headquarters, so security in Intramuros was tight. It would be a simple matter to wall off an existing tunnel, or to dig side tunnels, which could be sealed and cleverly camouflaged so nobody would ever guess treasure was hidden inside. The most pressing problem facing Chichibu was how to move the treasure discreetly to Intramuros from bayfront warehouses. Convoys of army trucks would arouse local curiosity. Manila was crowded with homeless refugees, peddlers, prostitutes, street urchins, gangsters, hustlers, and riffraff. There was too big an audience. 

The solution was to dig a new tunnel directly from Pier 15 to Fort Santiago, where it could join the existing Spanish-era tunnels under Intramuros. Work began in early May 1942. Great quantities of excavated rock and soil were dumped into Manila Bay as landfill in the Ermita district just south of Pier 15. The digging was done by thousands of POWs, plus slave labor from Korea, China, and the Philippines. Mel Gutierrez was only eight years old when he was taken there to dig, with all other able bodied males from a barrio in Batangas City. Little Mel was forced to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for two years. Kempeitai officers in plain clothes made sure he filled his daily quota. On slim rations, many diggers keeled over dead. By May 1943, 35 miles of primary tunnels were completed, wide enough for two army trucks to pass in opposite directions, all of it lined with steel-reinforced concrete. 

One end of the tunnel was at Santa Lucia Gate in the Spanish wall around Intramuros, ten miles as the crow flies from General MacArthur’s pre-war headquarters at Fort McKinley. Most of the tunnel was relatively shallow, dug in the clay immediately beneath Intramuros, remaining just above the water table and basaltic bedrock. But Chichibu’s engineers made an exception at the Pasig River, where they dug down through the bedrock, creating a watertight tunnel under the river. All in all, this was an exceptional feat of engineering, unknown to the outside world. In 1975, it was still possible to drive from one end of the 35-mile-long tunnel network to the other, as Robert Curtis learned when he discovered the tunnel, while reverse-engineering Japanese treasure-site maps. But today its existence is unknown to most Filipinos. All but two of the entrances have been blocked by more recent construction. 

Through the summer of 1942, while the tunnel was being dug, Chichibu and other princes toured potential treasure vault sites around Manila. They traveled in a convoy of heavy six-wheeled Model 93 staff cars accompanied by motorcycle outriders. These limousines drew a lot of attention. Developed originally from a prewar Studebaker or Hudson chassis, they were open touring cars, with canvas tops folding back behind the rear seat. They had two rear axles providing two rear wheels on each side. The white sidewall tires were mounted on chromed spoke wheels. Behind each front wheel the fender dipped to nestle a spare tire. On the right front fender was a stubby flagstaff with a red 14-petal chrysanthemum on a white field, the crest of first-tier imperial princes (the crest of the emperor has 16-petals). The Model 93 came in gasoline and diesel versions, rated respectively at 68 and 70 horsepower, but given its 7,500 pound weight, the beast could only do a top speed of 60 mph. 

Behind the princes came Chichibu’s military staff and engineers in six ordinary Nissan sedans, which looked like all the ugly black sedans made everywhere in the world in the 1930s. Following them were three truckloads of heavily armed Imperial Guards. 

The princes were especially interested in Manila Cathedral, San Augustin Church, Ft. Santiago, Ft. McKinley and Santo Tomas University. They hoped to find a way to create a treasure vault at each of these historic monuments, and to do this invisibly by connecting the vault with a branch shaft to the new main tunnel. Chichibu’s engineers had prepared a large-scale map of Manila on which every potential site was marked. The map showed the route of the main tunnel and indicated where it would be necessary to construct smaller access tunnels to each future vault. 

A main consideration was to avoid having vaults discovered accidentally, by a direct hit from artillery or aerial bomb, or by future construction on the same site. As the Geneva Convention forbade the bombing of hospitals, schools, prisoner of war camps, churches, and historic monuments, creating treasure vaults in those places provided the best insurance. As a further precaution, each vault would be built at a depth of around 90 feet — too deep for a bomb to penetrate. These vaults might be discovered during future construction, involving excavation, pile-driving, or drilling for water. So they chose sites under historic monuments that would be off limits to future building projects, and other sites near existing water supplies, figuring no one drills a well next to another well. Some choices seem oddly poetic, such as those near large acacia trees. Chichibu’s brother, Prince Mikasa, was the family expert on Middle Eastern affairs. Acacia wood was said to have been used to build the Ark of the Covenant, and was mentioned in the Bible as a sign of Messianic resurgence. In practical terms, acacias have deep roots, and thus are unlikely to be killed by drought or uprooted by typhoon. 

One of the first sites the princes visited was General MacArthur’s headquarters at Ft. McKinley. A close inspection was made of MacArthur’s air raid shelter, sixty feet below a grass-covered quadrangle in front of the headquarters building. Two flights of concrete steps led down to three large reinforced concrete rooms. The Officers’ Club at Ft. McKinley was built on one end of a gently sloping ridge where you could enjoy cooling breezes from the distant sea. On one side of this ridge were tennis courts, on the other side a parade ground. It was decided to dig Golden Lily’s main tunnel beneath the parade ground, then into the hill below the Officers’ Club. At the bottom of the concrete stairs leading down to MacArthur’s bomb shelter, the new tunnel would take a jog to the left for 100 feet, to a point directly under the Officers’ Club swimming pool. There, at a depth of ninety feet below the pool, Chichibu ordered excavation of a small treasure room. Because the hill was solid rock, there was no need for shoring. 

Inside Intramuros, it was decided to place several treasure vaults at San Augustin Church and the monastery next door. Both were built in the sixteenth century during the reign of King Philip II, who had sent the ill-fated Spanish Armada to Elizabethan England. The church was built of cut stone, quarried east of Manila. Beneath the church were catacombs holding remains of priests, nobles, and wealthy commoners. In the courtyard of the cloister, a garden of tropical plants surrounded a fountain shaped like a huge stone flower. In arched passageways on each side, the walls were hung with twenty-six large oil paintings, six feet wide and eight feet tall, portraying priests tending their Filipino flock. 

Beside the church was the monastery. When the princes visited it in 1942 the monastery was crowded with religious relics, statues of saints, and displays of ornate priestly vestments. Its Recibidor, or main reception room, was 150 feet long by 50 wide, with a grand staircase at the far end. In one wall, a narrow staircase led down to the catacombs. 

Chichibu’s plan for San Augustin quickly took shape. The stone fountain in the cloister of the Church was four hundred meters from the Santa Lucia Gate, where the main Golden Lily tunnel began. It was decided to dig a branch tunnel from the gate to a treasure chamber directly beneath this fountain. The vault would be only thirty feet square, packed tight with gold and artworks. Like the vault under MacArthur’s swimming pool, this under the fountain at San Augustin would be secure long into the future. 

From under the fountain, another spur tunnel would be dug under the church catacombs, directly below the crypt of Padre Juan de Macias. A vault would be created there, measuring twenty feet by thirty, lined with reinforced concrete. When these two vaults were filled with treasure, the entrances to their access tunnels would be sealed with a super-hard ceramic-concrete compound, and made invisible. Golden Lily employed Japanese ceramics experts who were able to produce concrete of extraordinary hardness. By molding a cement plug to resemble a normal section of tunnel wall, tinting the composite with pigments and local soil, the entrances blended perfectly with their surroundings. Nobody would ever guess that an entrance to a branch tunnel existed. Robert Curtis found them because he had the original maps. 

The Recibidor in the monastery adjoining San Augustin Church also became a treasure repository. When Spaniards first built the huge room, to support the ceiling and the weight of additional floors and roof above, their masons installed a massive cut-stone arch two-thirds of the way back. Chichibu found a pile of the same pale grey cut-stones in the grounds behind the Church. Using these stones, and a similar mortar, Golden Lily masons filled in the arch so that it became a solid wall. This closed off one-third of the Recibidor, creating a treasure room measuring twenty feet by fifty feet. The Recibidor was not a public space; it was meant only for inhabitants of the monastery. As such, not many people knew what it looked like. However, current occupants of the monastery would notice that the room had been changed, so the kempeitai was given the job of killing all the priests and church laborers who were familiar with the Recibidor. Meanwhile, church archives and records were searched for all related documents and drawings. These were burned, and the archivists stabbed to death. (When American forces retook Manila, forty five bodies dressed in clerical garb were found in shallow graves in the basement of the monastery; most had their hands tied behind their backs and had been killed with bayonets to avoid attracting attention with gunshots.) 

In a flash of good humor, Chichibu led the other princes out to the cloister passage hung with huge oil paintings, stopping before one titled, Saint Augustin Blessing a Native. The saint had his right hand raised, as if he was gesturing in the direction of the new Recibidor treasure vault. Chichibu ordered his aides to have an extra finger painted on the hand, pointing directly at the disguised entrance. The engineer who prepared the construction drawing for this site used the saint’s sixth finger as the fulcrum point. (This became known as the ‘Six-Finger Site’.) 

Next, the princes turned their attention to nearby Manila Cathedral, where they selected two sites. One vault was dug beneath a huge acacia tree in front of the cathedral, a second directly beneath the altar. The princes were certain that in the future nobody would excavate beneath the altar. Both vaults were excavated by way of a branch tunnel coming from under the stone fountain at San Augustin Church. 

At Santo Tomas University on Rizal Avenue, they found a large basement room and decided to close off one end to make a substantial treasure chamber. This building was safe from bombs, for it was an internment camp for American civilians including women and children. The Red Cross notified the U.S. military, so the university was off limits to bombers. 

In subsequent days, the princes toured all the buildings and grounds comprising Ft. Santiago. As kempeitai headquarters, work could be done anywhere. Several hiding places were chosen. One would be under the big fountain in Ft. Santiago’s front park. It would be approached by a branch tunnel from the acacia tree vault at Manila Cathedral. (In the 1980s, when treasure hunters drilled an exploratory 3 inch hole beneath this fountain, the gas of decomposed corpses sickened them. Allied POWs had been buried alive in that end of the 35-mile tunnel in 1943. Ft. Santiago had to be closed for a week while the smell dissipated.) 

The second hiding place at Ft. Santiago was under an acacia tree in the Spanish officers’ courtyard, beside a monument to the martyred nineteenth century poet and novelist Jose Rizal, wrongly executed by the Spaniards for sedition. (This vault was recovered in 1985 by a military unit loyal to Imelda Marcos.) A spur led to a third vault beneath the Bastion de San Miguel. 

Back in 1942, more than four thousand American and Filipino prisoners were confined in the dungeons of Ft. Santiago, where they were interrogated before being put to death. The smell of thousands of unwashed prisoners and moldering corpses gave the fort its characteristic aroma. A mass grave by the Pasig River was already full in 1942, so the kempeitai trucked most bodies to the bay front, loaded them on a barge, and dumped them in Manila Bay. Tides carried the corpses past Corregidor and into the South China Sea. The main structure of the fort had three dungeons, each on a lower level. The deepest, Basement Three, was below the surface of the Pasig River. Each day two hundred men at a time were herded into this dungeon, and valves opened to let water in. It was a terrible way to die, starving men drowning in panic, but it saved ammunition. When they were dead, other prisoners using old bilge pumps cleared the water. 

Basement Two on the north side was much larger — 60 feet by 120 feet — and known as the Execution Chamber. Most prisoners at Ft. Santiago were murdered individually by the kempeitai here, in the course of interrogation. Imperial war loot had priority, so Prince Chichibu ordered the dungeon emptied and hosed down to remove the smell. When this was done he returned for an inspection. Here, Chichibu ordered a pit made below water level. While the pit was dug, it took several hundred POWs to maintain a wall of sandbags and to operate hand-pumps against the influx of river water. The bottom of the pit then was covered with old railway ties, and slabs of a red-hued marble laid on top of the wood. Wood crates were placed on the marble slabs, and the crates were filled with gold bars. The POWs who had dug the pit were then murdered, the dirt they had removed was piled over their bodies, and a concrete slab was poured, filling it to the usual level of the basement floor. 

Basement Three was next. When Dato Suliman’s fort was first modified, the Spaniards had created four airshafts. The largest led down to the deepest dungeon. It was now enlarged by Golden Lily engineers, and reinforced. This became the resting place for Mosler safes taken from various Manila banks and the Intendencia, the pre-war central bank of the Philippines, the same safes emptied by Colonel Willoughby in early 1942 when government and private gold was taken to Corregidor. While still empty, twenty-two of these big safes were lowered down the biggest airshaft to its dirt floor. There the safes were filled with rough gold chunks cut off 75-kilo bars. The safes were then locked. As in Basement Two, a one-foot thick slab of concrete was poured over the whole assembly. POWs began filling in the vent with loose rock and dirt when another Mosler safe was delivered. Hurriedly, this one was lowered onto the backfill, more dirt and rocks were added, and another slab of concrete was poured. On the flat roof of the fort, the top of the biggest airshaft was rebuilt and sealed with some of the original stones quarried in the Spanish era, so nobody would guess it was there. (In the late 1970s these Mosler safes were recovered for President Marcos by a team headed by his protégé, Dr. Gil Gadi.) 

One of the remaining small air shafts had boxes of gold bars lowered into it, followed by oil drums of gold and silver coins. This shaft was then filled with superfine sand, packed down hard, and the shaft capped just below roof-level with a five-foot-thick slab of reinforced concrete. If anybody dug his way into the air-shaft from the sides, the superfine sand would cave in and bury him alive. Small glass bottles of cyanide, easily broken, were mixed into the sand. 

Two other stashes completed the Ft. Santiago hiding places. One was in an underground room that once had been used to store provisions for the Spanish garrison. Another was a rainwater cistern, in the foundations of Suliman’s palace. 

All this planning by Prince Chichibu and his engineers took many weeks to evolve into ‘blue series’ engineering drawings for the construction phase. Eventually, coded recovery maps were drawn by Japanese cartographers. At some future date, these ‘red series’ recovery maps would guide Japanese teams back to each site, give them the fulcrum point by which to judge depths, and other data essential to avoid booby-traps and make a recovery. Stylistically, these red series maps were uniquely Japanese, done in a form of caricature familiar to anyone who had served in Japan’s armed forces. Terrain features such as mountains, rivers, trees and roads were represented as if they were drawn on a chalkboard. Each map was marked prominently with what appeared to be the overall value of the treasure contained in that particular vault; for example ¥111-billion, ¥777-billion, or ¥888-billion (always with the yen mark). In fact, like all the other map markings, this is only a code. To know how much actually was hidden there, you had to have the key. For example, it might be necessary to remove six zeros. All other signs and symbols in the maps are similarly confusing. All you could assume was that a 777 site was bigger than a 111 site. These maps bore notes written in different scripts including Kana (syllabic alphabet) and Kanji (Chinese ideograms). Some also bore English inscriptions, written by Japanese engineers trained at universities in Britain and the United States. One encryption key was a flag flying to the left or right, indicating whether the map needed to be looked at straight on, or reversed in a mirror; a clock face indicating depths and bearings, and a fulcrum point indicating where all measurements for that site began. Without one of these maps showing the fulcrum point, you would never know where to dig. (Thirty years later, for example, President Marcos assigned 2,000 soldiers to search the 35 miles of tunnels under Manila for over two years before giving up empty-handed, except for one 75-kilo gold bar found in the back of an army truck abandoned in a tunnel; Marcos never understood the maps.) 

Such technical details obscure the tragic human cost. Allied POWs working under the grimmest conditions dug these tunnels and vaults. For special jobs, Korean and Chinese slave laborers were used, because they could not communicate directly with Allied POWs working in the same place. Without exception, eyewitnesses told us that each time a treasure vault was filled and sealed, the POWs and slave laborers were buried alive inside, to guarantee their silence. Shinto priests gave each site their blessing, waving wands of tree branches, making sure the spirits of the dead would guard the site. The real purpose of this mass murder was tight security. Thousands of Dutch, British, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and American POWs vanished below ground in Manila, never again to see the light of day. At one site alone, in Teresa, southeast of Manila, eyewitnesses attest to 1,200 Allied POWs being buried alive (see Chapter 11). When Teresa was opened by Robert Curtis in October 1975, his efforts to collect hundreds of dog-tags among human remains in the tunnel, to identify the victims, were thwarted by security men who forced him at gunpoint to leave the site. 

By August 1942, the rains had come and Chichibu had been in Manila for six months, living in the Manila Hotel penthouse of General MacArthur. Many of the general’s personal belongings remained in place, including his books. The windows overlooked Pier 15, and the splendid sunsets over Bataan across the great bay. But Chichibu fled to Singapore, where he was less bothered by his tuberculosis. One measure of Japan’s total plunder is that all these treasure vaults being created in Manila, plus the tunnels at Corregidor, were not enough. Other vaults were being dug in Mindanao, in Mindoro, and other islands in the archipelago. And in the mountains north of Manila, another imperial prince was hard at work enlarging natural caverns to create the biggest treasure vaults of the war outside Japan.

CHAPTER SIX 

THE EYEWITNESS 

In the highlands far to the north of Manila was another world, where rugged mountains hid quiet villages in cool green valleys, remote from the war. Climbing by smoke-belching bus out of the lowlands of Luzon, zigzagging up a pockmarked road into the 3,000-foot Caraballo Mountains to the town of Santa Fe, you entered Nueva Viscaya, a region named after Spain’s Basque country on the Bay of Biscay. Once over this initial mountain range, you descended into the fertile Cagayan Valley around the town of Bambang. The Cagayan, dotted here and there with what look like mini-volcanoes, was a well-watered region with rice paddy fields, plowed by carabao water buffaloes guided by little boys. To the west was the Cordillera range, to the east the taller Sierra Madre. You were completely surrounded by impenetrable mountains covered with rainforest, populated by hill-tribes wearing only G-strings. From Bambang the Cagayan Valley opened out to the north, widening as it descended to the northern tip of Luzon, the coastal town of Aparri, and a big offshore island called Camiguin. 

This tranquil upland setting around Bambang became a primary base of Golden Lily operations from 1942 to 1945, because the region had many natural caverns. Some held Stone-Age tools and charcoal drawings. Although the underlying basement rock was very hard, upper layers of sandstone and limestone or sediment were washed away by torrential rains and subterranean springs, creating natural passages and vaults. Much of this crust was easy to tunnel, often without shoring. The Japanese appreciated the advantages this offered for military purposes and for safe storage of treasure. From the Cagayan, aircraft could fly easily to Formosa and then to Japan, refueling at Okinawa. As early as the 1920s, Japanese strategists planned to take over the Philippines and absorb it into their new empire. 

So in the early 1920s thousands of Japanese began to trickle into Luzon as settlers, businessmen, or geologists, while Japanese fishing boats appeared along the coast in increasing numbers. These were scouts and intelligence agents. They settled near the South China Sea coast and in the mountains around Bambang, Baguio and Aparri. 

They learned to speak Tagalog and Ilocano, took notes about who was prosperous and influential, and gathered details about local infrastructure, roads, and utilities. Harbors were charted, coastline mapped. In the mountains, Japanese hikers were a common sight. With help from farmers, caves were found and explored. 

At the time, Bambang had less than two thousand inhabitants. Rural Filipinos live close to their land in barrios or villages separated by a kilometer or two. One of the tiny barrios outside Bambang was called Dulao. Its headman was Lino Valmores, who worked in the rice fields with his teenage nephew Ben, a handsome boy who had about him an air of innocence and sincerity. 

Ben had been born in March 1925, when his parents were still living in the steamy lowlands of Pangasinan, north of Manila, where his father found work as a day laborer. But Ben spent much of his childhood at his uncle’s home in Dulao, attending the Catholic church school in Bambang. He remained in school there through the sixth grade, taught by Father Disney to read and write, and to speak some English, but the rest of his days were spent working in the paddies with his uncle, plowing in the Spring behind a grunting carabao, in the Autumn cutting clumps of rice stalks with a sickle. Being Ilocano set them apart, for while most Filipinos speak Tagalog, they spoke the Ilocano dialect of the parched Ilocos region along the northwest coast of Luzon. There are pockets of Ilocanos everywhere, in Bambang, in the resort of Baguio, and especially in Manila, where they have their own political organizations and their own underworld gangs. 

Ben was turning seventeen when the Japanese invaded the Philippines. His family was in Pangasinan at the time, directly in the path of the invaders. His father, Esteban, was blind in one eye from a shooting accident as a U.S. Army recruit. Because most people are right-handed, rifles are made to eject spent cartridges to the right, away from the eyes. On the shooting range for the first time, being left handed, Esteban put the rifle up to his left shoulder to fire it. The cartridge ejected directly into his left eye, blinding it. When the American forces surrendered, he ended up in a prison camp with thousands of other POWs. Unlike the Americans, the Filipino troops were interrogated and, after a short time, sent home. 

In Esteban’s absence, looters torched their house in Pangasinan and the family fled into the mountains, hoping to reach Dulao safely. As the eldest child, Ben led the way on foot, followed by his mother and grandmother, brothers and sisters. Like all refugees, each one carried a load of family possessions. Penniless, all they had to eat for weeks was rice with bagoong, a fermented fish paste. Japanese soldiers were everywhere, and Ben had to answer a lot of questions. He was afraid, because he saw many Filipino men working as slaves, cruelly beaten by the soldiers. By mid-February they reached San Jose where it took four days to get passes from the Japanese garrison. When they got to Dulao after midnight they were overcome with relief and happiness. Ben’s uncle Lino immediately killed and cooked a pig, and stood over them saying, “Go ahead, my children, just keep on eating till you get very full.” A few days later Ben’s father was released, joining them, and they all hugged and cried again. 

Uncle Lino gave Ben’s father a parcel of land to farm in Dulao, so he could support his family through the war. Ten months later, in January 1943, they were cutting sugarcane to make sugar, rum, and hard candy for their own use. Ben was told to go cut dry bamboo so they could make a fire to cook the cane juice. He took two buffalo carts and went up a nearby hill where there were stands of giant bamboo. While he was hacking the cane with his bolo, he heard the leaves rustle and was astonished and frightened to see Japanese soldiers appear out of nowhere around him, sprigs of bamboo in their helmets, pointing their guns at him. He froze with fear, expecting to be killed instantly. 

A soldier jerked his gun at him, so Ben dropped his bolo and crouched with his back to a cartwheel. An officer, Colonel Adachi, spoke to Ben first in Tagalog, then in Ilocano. What was Ben doing there? 

“Cutting firewood.” 

“Where is the road to San Antonio barrio?” Ben pointed. Adachi insisted that Ben guide them there. Ben said he could not go without his father’s permission. 

“Then take us to your father,” the colonel said. So far Ben had not heard a word from their leader, a young man with a shaved head, dressed all in white, who smiled at Ben in a friendly way. He looked to be only in his mid-twenties, yet Colonel Adachi and other officers in the group treated him with great deference. At his side he had a large samurai sword in a wood and leather sheath, and a short sword opposite. On the left breast pocket of his tunic was a bright red circular emblem, five or six inches across, trimmed in gold thread. Colonel Adachi addressed him respectfully as ‘Kimsu’. 

When they reached the modest Valmores house in Dulao, Ben’s father was impatient for him to get back to work, but his uncle said it was wiser for Ben to guide the Japanese to San Antonio. 

On the way to San Antonio, the officers riding in the carabao cart with him, Ben was certain he was going to be killed. Tears began rolling down his cheeks. Colonel Adachi asked why was he crying. He smiled kindly and told Ben not to be afraid; they would not hurt him. They stopped by a coconut palm, and Ben climbed up nimbly to get some nuts, opening them with his bolo. They asked his name. He said “Benha-MEEN”, the way the name is pronounced by Tagalog and Ilocano speakers. Kimsu said something in Japanese, and Adachi told Ben they no longer wanted to go to San Antonio but back to San Fernando, which was their main camp, in the opposite direction. Ben said he must ask his father’s permission again. This seemed to impress the young man in white, so they returned to Ben’s home. Once more his father protested, but the Japanese promised they would ‘borrow’ Ben for no more than a week. They told Ben to wrap some extra clothes in a banana leaf and bring them. 

On their way to San Fernando, a distance of a kilometer and a half, they heard a woman screaming in the undergrowth. Kimsu and Ben jumped down from the cart and hurried to investigate. They found two Japanese soldiers ripping the clothes off a village woman, trying to rape her. Kimsu drew his samurai sword and whacked the two soldiers with the flat of the blade. The two men fell on their faces, pressing their foreheads in the dirt, begging forgiveness. Kimsu turned to his own men and shouted at them. They froze at attention, faces shocked. Each of the officers said only, “Hai!” Kimsu had them arrest the two soldiers. He covered the naked woman with his own tunic, and ordered his men to escort her to her house. Later, when the group reached the army camp in San Fernando, Ben was amazed to see all the Japanese there bow down as they entered. Colonel Adachi called the whole camp together. Kimsu gave the two rapists a severe reprimand, and ordered the soldiers never to have sex with Filipinas on pain of death. Everyone in the camp was absolutely silent, foreheads pressed in the dirt. Later Ben asked Adachi who the man in white was. The colonel just said, “Kimsu”. 

Kimsu was in charge of a very large team of officers, hundreds of men, including mining engineers, geologists, architects, chemists, specialists in ceramics, electricians, demolitions experts, and a battalion of soldiers. There were well over a thousand men in the San Fernando camp, whose only job was to move and hide war loot. Ben saw thousands of boxes made of bronze, and some of wood, which were extremely heavy. It took four, five, six or even eight men to carry each box, using slings made of webbing. He also saw hundreds of completely naked Korean, Chinese, and Filipino slave laborers moving the boxes, sometimes blindfolded, sometimes not. He knew they were slaves because they had ankle chains, and ropes binding their wrists together, with just enough play to wield a pick or shovel. Trucks arrived continually at the San Fernando camp loaded with these heavy boxes, and after they were unloaded the men in the trucks were sent away. Then the slaves or Kimsu’s own soldiers put the boxes into tunnels, deep pits, or caverns scattered around the Cagayan Valley. Once Ben saw Filipinos bring boxes in trucks and stack them beside a road. After the Filipinos left, Japanese soldiers moved the boxes into a cave. Then the soldiers were ordered to leave, and Chinese slaves carried the boxes out of the cave and put them in a deep pit where they were covered with soil, which was then scattered with the flat cobbles typical of this region, and fast-growing papaya plants and bamboo were planted to complete the disguise. Some tunnels Ben saw led into big caverns that were enlarged by Kimsu’s Japanese engineers. In the beginning Ben had no idea what was happening; he saw little violence, so his life with the Japanese was neither scary nor ominous. 

He learned that he was to be Kimsu’s water boy, cook, servant and valet, bringing him food, shining his shoes, doing his laundry, looking after his clothes, and keeping his living quarters spotless. Kimsu lived in a proper house in the midst of the camp, not in a tent. All Filipino residents of San Fernando barrio had been sent away. In Kimsu’s house there was a bedroom with a single large bed, and a table holding a magnificent Shang bronze urn, looted somewhere in Southeast Asia. Ben thought it was a vase and supposed that Kimsu used it as a wash basin. But it was there only as an art object, to be admired. At night, Kimsu put a pillow in the middle of the bed and insisted that Ben sleep on one side, instead of on the floor. Kimsu slept on the opposite side. He warned Ben not to touch the pillow or — he drew his fingernail across his throat. Ben spent some restless nights at first, afraid to move at all, but later he got used to it. He was a handsome boy of 18, and Kimsu was a cultivated man in his early thirties, who looked even younger. As a Japanese aristocrat it would not have been unusual for him to have bisexual tastes. That cannot be ruled out, but there is no evidence whatever that there was any sexual side to his master-servant relationship with Ben. It was normal in Japan for aristocrats to have personal servants who slept nearby, to answer any command. 

Kimsu obviously liked Ben, appreciated his sincerity and innocence, his loyalty to his parents and family. In the middle of an army camp with over a thousand soldiers, and nearly as many slave laborers, Kimsu was completely alone, a nobleman among serfs, most of whom did not dare raise their eyes to his face for fear of being blinded. In his complete solitude, Kimsu welcomed Ben’s presence as if he were a younger brother, and was extremely kind. Both Kimsu and Colonel Adachi protected the boy from other Japanese, and when they traveled in convoy to other parts of Luzon, or to other islands in the Philippines, they looked after him attentively. Ben said he saw many Japanese officers and soldiers who behaved angrily and cruelly toward Filipinos, in particular toward POWs and slave laborers. But Kimsu avoided violence. 

“Kimsu was always giving me his food,” Ben said. “Chicken, pork, beef, sardines in tins.” In manners, Kimsu was elegant, and gentle. He spoke in a soft voice, so one had to listen closely. When nobody else was around, he spoke to Ben in English. Once when a lone Filipino guerrilla was captured and dragged into the San Fernando camp, Kimsu’s top aides Brigadier General Kawabata and Colonel Kaburagi wanted to shoot him, but Kimsu said let him go. The guerrilla ran away screaming at the top of his lungs — afraid he would be hit by bullets in the back. All the Japanese laughed at his antics. 

After Ben had been there one month, and felt braver, he asked Colonel Adachi why Kimsu was different. Adachi replied simply: “He’s a prince.” Kimsu heard this exchange and came in from the other room. Smiling, he put his two index fingers together and said in English, “Hirohito and I are like that.” Ben said, “Are you a brother of the emperor?” Kimsu said, “No, that’s Chichibu. I’m a cousin.” 

During one of many private conversations later, Kimsu told Ben that his secret name was Prince Takeda, but in the war he used the codename Kimsu Murakusi. He swore Ben to silence on these and many other matters. 

Prince Takeda Tsuneyoshi (for that was his full name) was a grandson of Japan’s Meiji Emperor, who had lived from 1852 to 1912. Meiji had four surviving daughters by imperial concubines, whom he married to four princes. These four princes were extraordinary characters, lifelong cronies — Prince Kitashirakawa Naruhisa and his brother Prince Takeda Tsunehisa, and Prince Asaka Yasuhiko and his half-brother Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko. These princes of the blood went to school together as boys, attended the same university, served in the army together, shared the same Geisha, went overseas together, and partied together as playboys. Two died young: Prince Takeda in 1919 when his only son was ten years old, and his brother Prince Kitashirakawa in 1923 when he wrapped his hand-made Bugatti touring car around a giant sycamore tree on the road from Paris to Deauville, following a liquid lunch. Thereafter, the two surviving playboy princes, Prince Asaka and Prince Higashikuni, took a special interest in raising young Prince Takeda. He also became a favorite of his first cousin, Crown Prince Hirohito, who was nine years older. 

All male members of the imperial family received a military education. Young Takeda was educated first at the Gakushuin, or Peers’ School, graduated from the Military Academy in 1930, and became a sublieutenant in the Cavalry, quickly rising to lieutenant. He studied at Army Staff College, became a captain in August 1936, a major in 1940. In 1942, he went to Saigon as Hirohito’s personal liaison to Count Terauchi, commander-in-chief of Japanese armies in Southeast Asia (son of General Terauchi, the Japanese viceroy in Korea who had looted tombs and terrorized civilians). Like other princes, Takeda was part of the military elite, whose presence in the field was a constant reminder of the emperor’s supreme command. In his capacity as special emissary of the emperor, Takeda became second-incommand to Prince Chichibu in directing the operations of Golden Lily throughout Asia. Promoted to lieutenant colonel, he was listed as a staff officer in the Strategic Section of the Operations Division, under the alias ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Miyata’. Although still officially posted to Saigon, he moved to the Philippines where he took charge of Golden Lily’s field operations outside Manila. Prince Chichibu remained in overall command in Manila, and personally oversaw the most important treasure sites in and around the city, but he was often away on trips to Tokyo, Singapore or Jakarta. Ben saw Chichibu twice in Manila during 1943, when all the princes held a strategy conference. Chichibu, he said, was always referred to by other princes as ‘Chako’, as Prince Takeda always was called ‘Kimsu’. 

Prince Takeda based himself in the highlands at San Fernando to construct several very big cavern sites, the most important being immediately next to his camp. He also directed the work of chief engineers at each of 174 other imperial treasure sites throughout the islands. So he did not remain constantly in San Fernando. He traveled around the Philippines, flew to Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon and Jakarta to shepherd war loot on its way, and made frequent trips back to Tokyo. We know he was in Japan at least once a year because his wife bore him children in 1940, 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1945. 

Whenever Kimsu walked around the camp at San Fernando, guards called out warnings to the next guard that a prince was coming. Everyone stared at the ground, avoiding looking him in the eyes. In previous centuries, Japanese commoners always threw themselves down and pressed their foreheads in the dirt. Ben observed all this, but he was not Japanese and did not know the rules. For some reason Kimsu was delighted to have Ben act toward him as he acted toward his own father, Esteban. 

One evening, when Colonel Adachi sent him to fetch salt in the bomb shelter next to the house, Ben saw nothing resembling salt and wandered into the wrong tunnel, where he found boxes filled with gold bars, and many jars. Thinking one of the jars might be full of salt he opened it and found it packed with coins: gold sovereigns, silver dollars, all the hard currencies in circulation across Southeast Asia. He had never seen such coins. He opened other jars to see if they contained salt, and found more coins. Amazed to see so much money in one place, he stuck his hand in a jar and picked up a coin. Just then a Japanese soldier came in and asked Ben angrily what he was doing. He dragged Ben outside and Colonel Adachi took him to Kimsu. The prince questioned him, and Ben explained he was only looking for salt. Kimsu was amused and warned Ben mildly never to go into places where he was not supposed to go, and never to touch coins or other valuables. 

Early the next morning, Ben awakened to find himself alone in the bed, lying in the midst of a lot of coins. He was afraid to move. He feared that he would be killed if he touched the coins. When he heard his name called, Ben called back that he was stuck in bed. Kimsu came in laughing and told Ben to pick up the coins and put them in a sack, then to harness a carabao to a wagon, get a cow and a horse, and put a new sewing machine in the cart with the coins. Kimsu said, “We’re going to see your father.” He had been thinking about Ben’s fascination with the coins in the tunnel, and realized that the boy’s family was completely impoverished. Along the way to Dulao barrio they passed a group of Japanese soldiers by a river, some digging a deep pit while others played with quantities of coins taken from earthenware jars standing all around the pit. Kimsu talked with them, examined some paperwork, and returned to the cart satisfied. They continued toward Dulao and came upon a barbed-wire compound where Ben saw prisoners chopping wood. He recognized one nearly naked and emaciated prisoner as Father Disney, the priest who had taught him to read and write at the church school in Bambang. He felt very sad and sorry for the priest, knowing he would die. 

When they reached Ben’s home, Kimsu told Ben’s father through Col. Adachi that Ben had worked out so well as his valet that he wanted to keep Ben on and to give his father in trade the sewing machine, the cow, horse, carabao and wagon, and the big bag of coins. At first Ben and his parents thought he was being purchased as a slave, so Ben began to weep. His mother, looking at Ben, also cried openly. But Adachi explained that they just wanted to employ Ben. He told them that Kimsu was a prince of Japan, who liked Ben, protected him, and swore that when the war was over he would personally bring Ben back to his parents. They asked Ben what he thought. He told his mother she need not worry, because Kimsu treated him like a little brother. All of Kimsu’s retinue were kind to him, he explained. The senior officers, Brigadier General Kawabata, Col. Adachi, Col. Kaburagi, Col. Kasabuchi, Navy Captain Honda and Navy Captain Takahashi, all were teaching Ben Japanese words and phrases. (By the war’s end, Ben was modestly fluent, and could even read a few simpler ideographs.) 

That settled, Ben and Kimsu got back in their cart and returned to the San Fernando camp. The sight of a grandson of Emperor Meiji riding around in a carabao cart was all the more remarkable because Kimsu always wore an immaculate white uniform, different from the army and navy officers in his retinue. Above the red disk on the left breast of his tunic, he wore a row of medals, and on his epaulets were insignias that meant nothing whatever to Ben. However, the red patch did have special significance. It was finely embroidered in bright red silk thread. Around the perimeter was a border of 18-karat gold thread worked in a scalloped pattern, creating a stylized 14-petal chrysanthemum, the emblem of princes of the blood. Once when Ben brushed the embroidery too hard and pulled out some gold threads, he was beaten by one of the other officers. This beating, and the scolding he got for messing with the coins in the bomb shelter, were the only times he was handled roughly. (Half a century later, when Ben first saw the British edition of our book The Yamato Dynasty with a gold chrysanthemum embossed on the dustjacket, he exclaimed: “That is what Kimsu had on his tunic!”) A similar emblem on a pennant flew from a staff on the front fender of Kimsu’s car, so wherever he went Japanese checkpoints and military guards realized that a prince was approaching. 

Ben guessed that Kimsu was 24 or 25 years old (in 1943 he was 34, but looked younger). He was taller than Ben, about 5 feet 10 inches. His face was very smooth, his head shaved. He did have small quirks: a curious way of smoking a cigarette, holding it between his little finger and ring finger, as he blew smoke rings. As an aristocrat, his manner was languid, and he never hurried. He always carried a clean white handkerchief to pat the sweat off his face. His glasses were hinged so the lenses could be flipped up, unlike anything Ben had ever seen. Often he hummed Japanese folk songs like ‘Sakura’ (‘Cherry Blossoms’), and he taught Ben the Japanese version of ‘Lili Marlene’, a song popular everywhere in the world during the war. Kimsu spoke elegant English, but only to Ben when they were alone. When officers were around, he spoke Japanese even to Ben, and this was translated into Ilocano by Col. Adachi. 

The house where they lived at San Fernando was heavily guarded. Senior officers brought papers every day. Ben overheard them talking about ships full of treasure, which they had scuttled in places where recovery would be easy. For an office, Kimsu had a separate tent with a desk and a large blackboard, where he gave instructions to chief engineers who came to report from other sites throughout the Philippines. Eventually, Ben learned there were 175 imperial sites specially built for treasure belonging exclusively to Emperor Hirohito and the imperial family. Hiding it was Kimsu’s main responsibility. Each site had a chief engineer, architect, mining expert, experts in mixing and molding ceramics, demolition experts for booby traps, and chemists for seeding each site with toxic chemicals and glass bottles of cyanide. They reported to Kimsu, he reviewed their progress, and when each site was ready, the prince came to inspect, inventory, and close it. Ben traveled everywhere with him, as far as the big southern island of Mindanao. 

In addition to his personal retinue, on these journeys Kimsu was guarded by three platoons of heavily armed soldiers who traveled in a convoy of trucks behind the staff cars. These common soldiers never spoke to the prince, and avoided looking in his direction. Beside him in the sedan, Kimsu kept a leather satchel packed with architectural drawings, inventories, maps and instruments, including drawing tools, a compass and a magnifying glass. Beside it lay his sword. Arriving at each site, Kimsu carried out a final inspection, scrutinizing maps and drawings prepared by the chief engineer, walking around above and below ground. When he was satisfied, the vault was sealed with all Allied POWs and slave laborers inside. Kimsu told Ben that Emperor Hirohito directly ordered him to seal each site with all the slave laborers and POWs inside, to guarantee that its location would remain secret till the treasure was recovered later by members of the imperial family. Kimsu said he had no choice but to obey. Ben believed him because he often saw the prince weeping as a tunnel was closed with men inside. (Ben did not like talking to us about this. Tears welled in his eyes as he described how even groups of Japanese soldiers were buried alive “so their spirits would guard the treasure”. He was scared of being buried alive with them. Half a century later it still worried him that the Japanese might return to punish him.) 

According to Ben, Kimsu was diligent and meticulous in all his duties. Once a Chinese slave escaped from a work crew just as a vault was about to be sealed. After it became evident that the Japanese could not catch him, Kimsu ordered the vault emptied, and all 270 bronze boxes full of gold bars were taken out and moved elsewhere. On another occasion, after inspecting a site, the prince concluded that the drawings and maps given him were not accurate, that the chief engineer had made crafty alterations to reserve the treasure for himself. Kimsu ordered the officer beheaded on the spot, and the order was carried out instantly. 

Over three years, Ben accompanied him by plane and ship to islands as small as Lubang, where there were treasure vaults of different sizes in progress. At a small island off the north coast of Mindanao, Ben saw a ship strangely camouflaged with live trees that grew in big planters on its deck. Heavy boxes were stacked on deck, guarded by German soldiers. Kimsu’s officers told Ben it was a German ship. They watched as all the boxes were unloaded and taken into a cave on the island. Ben was not sure what was in the boxes, but it was very heavy. During that period of the war, Japanese cargo submarines were taking gold bullion to the Nazi sub base at Lorient, France, to pay for purchases of uranium. This was part of Japan’s secret project to develop its own atomic bomb. German U-boats and fast surface raiders delivered the uranium to rendezvous points in Indonesia and the Philippines, where the cargo was offloaded, then the uranium was taken by Japanese submarines to Tokyo. Ben may have witnessed one such exchange, in which uranium was offloaded in lead-shielded boxes, to await transfer to Japanese subs. 

While Kimsu was the only one who did final inventories at any of the 175 imperial sites, Ben said there were other teams involved in earlier stages. One, he said, was headed by Hirohito’s youngest brother Prince Mikasa. Ben insisted that Prince Mikasa was in Luzon for three years, which coincides with the period Mikasa was officially attached to Japanese headquarters in Nanking. So his presence in Luzon is certainly possible. (Similarly, Prince Takeda was officially assigned to Hanoi, but was actually in Luzon.) Another team, he said, was headed by young Prince Asaka Takahito, son of the Prince Asaka who ordered the rape of Nanking in 1937. We were surprised that Ben knew the correct names of these princes. In the 1990s, we conducted blind tests using photos taken seventy or eighty years earlier, in the 1930s, and he identified the princes correctly. He only failed to identify faces we inserted who were not princes. We prepared these blind tests using rare photographs provided to us by a curator of the Oriental Collection at the British Library, and we were scrupulous about removing all identification. Ben’s ability to identify princes who were virtually unknown outside Japan, from period photos rarely seen outside Japan, is all the more significant when you realize that he never learned how to dial a telephone. 

He assured us that ‘many men’ in white tunics with red emblems came to visit Kimsu at San Fernando. Some were considerably older, including Prince Higashikuni and the older Prince Asaka, who came to Luzon by plane on inspection tours. Soldiers and officers, Ben said, were extremely careful when these senior princes visited. On two occasions, when he went with Kimsu to meetings in Manila, Ben observed Prince Chichibu at close range, and noticed that he spat blood into his handkerchief, a detail that made a deep impression on Ben then and later, when he saw Chichibu again near Bambang in the closing months of the war. 

Ben had no way of knowing that Chichibu had tuberculosis, aside from his own direct observation. During the intervening months, Ben said Chichibu returned to Japan for treatment because he was increasingly sick. He told us that during this period Prince Mikasa visited Kimsu several times at San Fernando. Independent witnesses, including Japanese who served with Golden Lily, told us they saw Ben in the company of Prince Mikasa when groups of princes were inspecting major sites. One Japanese source even assumed that Ben was Prince Mikasa’s valet. 

It was unusual for Ben to be allowed inside any of these vaults, whether they were deep pits, natural caves, or man-made tunnels. Around each entrance there was an area of ten meters or so that he was forbidden to enter, so he seldom got close enough to see exactly what was going on below ground. He remained nearby, ready to fetch food or water or cigarettes, but all he could see was the opening to a tunnel or cave, a hole in the ground full of hoisting gear, the convoys of trucks that came with treasure, or the boxes being lowered into a shaft, or carried into a tunnel. What happened inside was unknown to him till later. This is of particular significance because many Golden Lily tunnels went straight into a hill or mountain, and then twenty meters or so inside a deep pit often was dug in the floor of the tunnel. This pit was then lined with concrete, and filled with treasure, in certain cases solid gold Buddhas (what Ben thought of as ‘the Japanese god’). Then a concrete slab one or two meters thick was poured, and disguised to look like the floor of the tunnel. Treasure hunters have searched such caves or tunnels fruitlessly, only to discover by chance that the vault was beneath their feet, or in a perfectly hidden branch tunnel off to one side. 

One of these was at a mountain Filipinos call Bantay Lakay. Another, at Cayapa, had a very large solid gold Buddha placed in a pit just inside the tunnel mouth. Ben watched as the Japanese rolled an enormous boulder into the mouth of this tunnel, packed three smaller boulders in the remaining openings, then covered everything with extra-hard ceramic cement, colored to look like local stone. At Montalban, east of Manila, were several Japanese military camps where a number of tunnels were dug into gently rolling terrain. Before these were sealed by Kimsu, Ben saw truckloads of treasure arrive all day every day for two weeks. During the Pacific War there were tall trees with dense foliage that hid the excavations. Today, Montalban has been deforested and much of it is covered with paddy fields. Recent efforts to recover treasure there have been stymied not only by thousand-pound bombs, but by ingenious water traps devised by the Japanese that can flood tunnels in a matter of seconds. 

Unusual though it was, there were several occasions when Kimsu did take Ben into a tunnel or cave, including the Many Monkeys site in Aritao, south of Bambang. This was a curious place, a hillside covered with dozens of giant boulders weighing ten to twenty tons apiece. These cobbles, each several meters across, had been washed down the hillsides by typhoons and flash floods over the ages, especially severe in November each year. At Aritao, the jumble of boulders covered with vines and forest canopy, created natural vaults between the rocks, occupied by troupes of rhesus monkeys. The monkeys were scared away, and Kimsu’s engineers burned the foliage and chose two large chambers about 46 meters deep in the hillside. These they reinforced with concrete. Each about twenty feet wide by thirty feet long, the chambers were filled with platinum and gold bars stacked in neat rows, plus five large urns filled with loose gems, which had been pried out of jewelry. Ben was surprised to see urns filled with thousands of watches, confiscated because they were gold studded with gems. The urns were carried down to the chambers by soldiers. A small quarter-ton solid gold Buddha was carefully encased in a concrete egg, then was dragged by a group of Korean slave laborers into the chambers, using a canvas sling. The whole operation of stocking and inventorying the site took a week, and Ben saw more than a hundred trucks come with treasure. It was then ready for Kimsu to make a final inspection. Ben watched in fascination as the prince admired a last urn filled with gems of all colors, dipping his hands into the stones and watching them cascade through his fingers. He then ordered a soldier to take the urn into the labyrinth, while he and Ben followed trailing a stout red cord in case they got lost. Once this urn was put beside the others, the passage leading to the chambers was blocked with a thick wall of concrete mixed with coloring agents so it looked like the local stone. Kimsu and Ben then followed the soldiers and engineers down the rest of the way through the boulders to the bottom of the valley, where they emerged from the hill beside a fast-flowing river. (We visited the Many Monkeys site with Ben, but made no attempt to enter because of an infestation of cobras; we include photos of the hillside in our CDs.) 

One of the biggest treasure vault complexes in the Philippines was immediately adjacent to the San Fernando army camp where Kimsu was based. He had men working underground there for three full years, expanding three natural caverns, lining them with steel reinforced concrete, linking them with connecting tunnels. The large vault beneath San Fernando was called Tunnel-8, and was said to be the size of a football field. This was connected to two other caverns the size of gymnasiums. One, called Tunnel-9, was directly beneath another Japanese Army camp nearby. The third, called the Graveyard Site, was almost underneath Bambang cemetery. Tunnel-8 and Tunnel-9 were about a kilometer apart, while the Graveyard cavern was more than a kilometer and a half distant. This complex was one of the last to be inventoried and sealed before the war ended. 

Standing by Prince Takeda’s house in San Fernando, looking due east, the bucolic view was dominated by two cone-shaped mountains resembling a stout 1940s brassiere reinforced with whalebone. The right breast was 4,774-foot Mount Sehal, its near-twin on the left was 5,594-foot Mount Palau. Ilocanos called Mount Sehal by the name Nagkumbintuan, but the Japanese called it Kisad. That was where the sun rose each morning, so Kimsu always emerged then to bow at the mountain. A dirt secondary road passed by the San Fernando camp, heading east toward the cleavage between the two giant breasts. On the left side of this road was a spur of Mount Palau, and Tunnel-8 was beneath this spur. (The original red-series map is reproduced on our CDs.) On the north flank of this spur, about a kilometer distant, was another army camp with a separate entrance to Tunnel-9. Late in the war, during the winter and early spring of 1945, this became the headquarters of General Yamashita before he moved into the Kiangan Pocket for his final defense. Ben never learned about the separate ‘Yamashita’ entrance. 

At Kimsu’s headquarters in San Fernando, the only sign of Tunnel-8 was a hole in the ground with a crude open elevator like those that take miners into deep coal pits. This elevator carried Ben and Kimsu down 220 feet to the mouth of a lateral tunnel. Once below ground, Ben was unable to tell which way they walked. First they came to a circular chamber called the Conference Room, filled with bags. Ben did not know what was in the bags, and did not ask. Around its perimeter were six tunnels radiating in all directions like the spokes of a wheel. When they walked into one of these tunnels, Ben saw that it was stacked floor to ceiling with boxes well above Kimsu’s head. After descending another thirty feet, they reached a much bigger chamber with concrete walls and ceiling, which Ben thought was as big as a football field. This was the main part of Tunnel-8, called the Commodity Room, already filled with gold bars. Originally a natural cavern, Ben said it took two years for the Japanese to enlarge and reinforce it, and more personnel and trucks were involved at this site than any other he ever visited. Here the ingots were not stacked in rows but in large islands, with aisles between them. When they reached the third chamber, it was sealed with steel doors, and he was not allowed to enter. This was Tunnel-9, or the Command Center. Kimsu and Ben walked on through another very long tunnel that brought them eventually to another vault the size of a gymnasium, adjacent to Bambang cemetery, which was stacked wall to wall with gold bars. 

“What I saw,” Ben told us, “was plenty of gold. There was a big statue of a boy, like a Buddha. There were two other large Buddhas, and maybe twenty-five smaller ones.” All, he said, were solid gold, or they would not have been there. 

By the summer of 1944 it was evident that an Allied invasion of the Philippines or Formosa was imminent. A great fleet of American ships was assembling at Hollandia in New Guinea. Japan would have to fight hard to hold on even to Luzon. General Shigenori Kuroda was relieved of his command in the Philippines, and replaced by Japan’s finest fighting general, Yamashita Tomoyuki. He was to defend the northern Philippines at all cost, as part of an effort to block attacks on Guam and Okinawa, the loss of which would threaten the Home Islands. 

Yamashita was a complex and interesting man. On the surface he seemed to be the ideal product of Japan’s fascination with Prussian militarism. He was a big man, bull-necked, barrel-chested, head shaved, his face an expressionless mask so he seemed brutal and insensitive. In fact, he was a moderate who had opposed the explosive growth of fanatical militarism in Japan. In 1935, when one of the most dangerous fanatics, General Nagata Tetsuzan, was stabbed to death at Tokyo headquarters by Lt. Col. Aizawa Saburo, Yamashita stopped the assassin in the hallway, shook his hand vigorously and thanked him for his courageous act. 

Because of his extraordinary victory at Singapore early in the war, Yamashita became such a public hero in Japan that he was feared and resented by Prime Minister Tojo, who recalled him and salted him away in Manchuria for the bulk of the war. By mid-1944, however, Tojo had been forced out of office, and the high command sent General Yamashita directly from Manchuria to Luzon, hoping that this military genius could produce another miracle. He arrived in Manila on October 6, 1944, too late to alter the outcome significantly. Thus Yamashita became involved with Golden Lily only during the final ten months of the war, when the princes and their helpers were hastily moving the last truckloads and freight cars of gold bullion and other treasure into the mountains north of Manila, where Yamashita planned to hold out as long as he could. As it happened, Yamashita was a personal friend of Prince Chichibu who, as a young officer in the early 1930s, had served in his regiment in Tokyo, so there was immediate rapport between them when they were brought together by circumstance in Manila. Ben saw them greet each other once and told us Yamashita was the only Japanese he ever saw who did not bow first to Chichibu, but instead welcomed him like a long lost brother. 

That October, Ben accompanied Kimsu north of Bambang to Bagabag, where there was a Japanese airfield. They flew to Manila in a twin-engine army plane with twelve other passengers. First they went to Ft. Santiago, where POWs were hard at work lowering the Mosler safes into the old Spanish air-vent shafts. Next morning they visited the Six-Finger Site at San Augustin Church, and Manila Cathedral, where they watched bronze boxes of gold lowered into the treasure vaults one by one, followed by a solid gold statue. This was done by attaching a horse to one end of the ropes around the statue. While scores of men helped, the horse was slowly backed toward the pit as the statue gradually descended. At that moment, General Yamashita appeared. Unlike Yamashita’s friendly greeting of Prince Chichibu, he and Kimsu seemed aloof. 

During those last ten months, Yamashita had his driver, Major Kojima Kashii, take him to observe progress at more than a dozen Golden Lily sites between Baguio in the west, Bambang in the center, and Aparri at the northern tip of Luzon. There was no time to lose. In the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, the biggest sea battle in history, Japan suffered disastrous losses. Both sides blundered, but America less. U.S. forces then landed on Leyte. General MacArthur was still smarting from the way he had been taken by surprise in December 1941, humiliated in the months that followed, and forced to flee ignominiously from Corregidor, abandoning his troops in Bataan. He was taking no chances now. At Leyte his forces outnumbered the Japanese nearly ten to one. Victorious there, MacArthur prepared to invade Luzon. 

Yamashita had more than 275,000 men on Luzon, including one armored division and six of infantry. But they were a mixed bag of convalescents, survivors, and service troops. The best he could do was to fight a holding action in the mountains, and drag it out as long as he could. It was impossible to defend Manila. He decided to withdraw from the city, and to declare it open, so it would not be destroyed pointlessly. 

Unfortunately, Manila was actually controlled by the Japanese Navy, so Yamashita had no influence over 16,000 marines and naval forces there. When he ordered all Japanese to withdraw into the countryside, Rear Admiral Iwabuchi Sanji rejected the order without informing Yamashita. Iwabuchi had instructions to destroy all port facilities and naval warehouses. He also had his own plans. He had been involved personally in the hiding of large quantities of war loot on the island of Corregidor, also navy controlled, and he knew all about the masses of treasure hidden in Manila by Prince Chichibu. With U.S. aircraft controlling the skies, there was no escape by sea. Iwabuchi could have withdrawn into the mountains, but he chose instead to play the cornered rat, and set his marines loose on a rampage against the civilian population of Manila. 

Assuming that Manila was undefended, MacArthur ordered his forces to hurry south from their beachhead in the Lingayen Gulf, hoping to enter the capital on his birthday, January 26, 1945. 

Iwabuchi commanded his 16,000 men to fight to the death. They panicked and turned Manila into a charnel house, fighting house-to-house, disemboweling thousands of non-combatants in the streets, including women and children – the worst such atrocity since the Rape of Nanking. One hundred thousand Filipinos were slaughtered, and a thousand Americans, and 80 percent of the city’s houses were flattened. In the chaos, Iwabuchi himself slipped away through the tunnel network beneath Intramuros and was never seen again in public. Declared officially dead, his remains were never found. There are indications that he escaped from Luzon by submarine and lived to a ripe old age in Japan under a pseudonym, because he was posthumously promoted to vice admiral by Emperor Hirohito. 

In the mountains to the north, Yamashita’s defensive perimeter was built on a triangle with its points at Baguio, Bambang and Bontoc. These three points could be reached only by narrow roads through ravines and gorges, where his forces were dug in. 

Ben had no idea what was happening. One day Kimsu and his staff crowded with him into a hut as many planes flew over. Ben thought the planes were Japanese, but Col. Adachi told him they were American. Ben said, “No, the Japanese are strong.” Adachi and the others laughed, and said, “The Americans are coming, Benhameen.” A few days later, the aircraft returned to bomb and strafe, and Ben saw Kimsu and his staff officers praying. 

His relationship with Prince Takeda then went through a subtle change. Kimsu insisted that Ben go through a blood-oath ritual with him. This involved cutting the tips of their little fingers on the right hand, letting the blood drip together on a battle flag. (Indeed, we saw that the tip of Ben’s right little finger was missing.) First, Ben was forbidden ever to talk about Prince Chichibu. Second, he must never reveal Prince Takeda’s secret name. Finally, he must never reveal locations of any treasure sites, “not to Americans, to Filipinos, to guerrillas, to Chinese, even to Japanese”. These sites, Kimsu told him, were reserved only for members of the imperial family. 

To provide for Ben in the future, Kimsu said he was hiding two steel trunks full of gold. So that Ben would not forget, he had one of his men tattoo two blue dots on Ben’s hand, one for each box. The next day they went to the Pingkian Bridge, on the road leading from Aritao toward Baguio. On a high bank a few meters from the river, stood a huge mango tree. Soldiers already had dug a deep pit beneath the tree. Two large steel boxes were dragged into the pit by harnessed carabao. Five carabao were needed to pull each box, even though the Japanese put steel pipes on the ground for the box to roll over. When both trunks were in the pit, the lids were opened and Kimsu called Ben over, to show what was inside. They were completely filled with chunks of gold cut off 75- kilo bars. 

Speaking Japanese, Kimsu told Ben: Kurene sabisu dayo taksan taksan goruda, Neh? Freely translated, this means: “Here’s what I’m giving you for your service — lots and lots of gold, Okay?” (The Japanese word for gold is kin, but when the English word ‘gold’ is used, Japanese pronounce it goruda. Half a century later, we had Ben write down what Kimsu said, and with his limited knowledge of Japanese he wrote: “Kurene sabis sayo kurei taksan taksan gorne.”) 

They would now sprinkle the boxes with poison, Kimsu told him, and close them. After the war, Ben was to come here by himself and recover the boxes. When he opened the pit, he must pour kerosene over the boxes and burn the powder off. When he opened the lids he should pour in more kerosene to burn off the powder inside each box. Then he could recover the gold safely. He was given small pieces of ingots, instead of whole ingots, because they would be easier to sell without attracting too much attention. Kimsu told him to buy land for a very big ranch, and to marry the pretty girl they had often watched in the village, and have lots of children to help him run the ranch. Ben was speechless. 

While they finished filling the pit, they were surprised to see another Golden Lily team drive up at the other end of the Pingkian Bridge. The leader was Prince Chichibu himself, dressed like Kimsu in a white tunic with the red badge. Kimsu and Chichibu did not bow to each other, and showed no emotion. Chichibu looked very thin, coughing, and Ben said his handkerchief was red “like the battle flag”. 

In the days and weeks that followed, there was frenzied burying of remaining treasure. Yamashita had to abandon Baguio to the advancing Americans, and moved his Shobu Group headquarters to Bambang. But he never came to Kimsu’s camp at San Fernando. Yamashita had his own separate entrance to the underground command bunker of Tunnel-9. He and his staff spent a lot of time below ground there, in the weeks before they withdrew to the Kiangan Pocket. In the meantime, at Kiangan, another big cavern was prepared as a hard base for Yamashita and his staff, to use during the ‘fight to the death’ that lay ahead. The Kiangan Pocket was a naturally formed geological rift, like the Rift Valley in Kenya, well watered and full of caves, a natural fortress perfectly suited to the defensive purpose General Yamashita had chosen for it. Ben said most of this work was done by slave labor, supervised by disabled soldiers and service personnel unsuited to combat. 

By May 5, 1945, American forces were advancing into the mountains so quickly that Yamashita also had to abandon Bontoc, giving up two of the three corners of his defensive triangle. He pulled his forces back between Bambang and Bagabag, and began to funnel them along the Asin River into the Kiangan Pocket. Although this terrain is extremely rugged, Bagabag is actually only 25 miles north of Bambang, and the edge of the Kiangan Pocket was only five miles west of Bambang. Supplies of food were in place there, including herds of carabao. Yamashita’s troops also had gathered the early rice harvest throughout the Cagayan Valley. A new crop would be ready in September, but by then the fighting would be over. Meanwhile, the rains would come, bringing typhoon deluges that would make life difficult for the Americans. Yamashita was counting on the rains and typhoons to discourage air attacks. 

At the end of May, 1945, Kimsu took Ben on a secret trip north. They went first to Bagabag, where Prince Mikasa was awaiting them. The two princes and Ben were then driven north through the Cagayan Valley toward Aparri, then turned right along the coast to a small bay. There they boarded a fast patrol boat and made the crossing to the north side of Camiguin Island, where a Japanese submarine was lying low in the water. Kimsu went aboard to make arrangements with the skipper for a rendezvous at the same place the next week. Ben and Prince Mikasa remained in the patrol boat. Ben said it was the only time he was completely alone in the company of Prince Mikasa. He thought Kimsu took him along to be sure nothing bad happened to Ben in his absence. 

In the first four days of June, Yamashita’s anti tank units south of Aritao (location of the ManyMonkeys site) fought a running battle with the U.S. 775th Tank Battalion, and from that moment pressure was acute to speed up withdrawal into the Pocket. 

On the evening of June 1, all 175 Golden Lily chief engineers were summoned to a farewell party in the underground conference room of Tunnel-8. All remaining treasure had now been hidden. Tunnel-8, Tunnel-9 and the Cemetery Site were packed with gold bars. According to Ben, who was with Kimsu that evening, the engineers were drinking large quantities of sake, with many toasts and shouts of “Banzai!” Meanwhile, two hundred remaining slave laborers were herded into the Cemetery Site chamber, where they were kept under guard by Japanese soldiers with heavy machine guns on tripods. 

Kimsu, who had built this place, spent an hour with the chief engineers, then took Ben for a final tour of the whole complex. They walked through the connecting tunnels for more than an hour, admiring stacked gold bars and other treasure. Kimsu repeatedly told Ben, “Be careful, do not step on the wires, we might be blown up.” The wires led to bundles of dynamite here and there through all the tunnels. When they returned to the farewell party, Kimsu gave a rousing speech to the engineers, praising them for what they had achieved, thanking them in the name of the emperor. The red-faced men kept shouting, “Banzai!” 

When the speech ended, it was near midnight. General Yamashita arrived. He said it was time for Kimsu to come out of the tunnel. Ben, he said, must remain inside. 

“No!” Kimsu said. “I gave my oath that I would bring him home personally.” He turned to Ben. “You go!” He pointed toward the exit tunnel with the crude elevator. Yamashita was angry, but unprepared to argue with the Meiji Emperor’s grandson. We asked Ben why Yamashita wanted him inside. “Maybe so nobody will know about this one,” Ben replied. With Yamashita leading, they walked to the pit elevator, and rose to the surface. Without a word, Yamashita stalked away into the night. As Kimsu and Ben walked quickly away from the pit, Ben heard what he thought was a bomb from a plane, and dived to the ground. Huge explosions shook the ground. (When the sun rose the next day, there would be a big sinkhole on the west side of the dirt road, fifteen feet deep, where connecting tunnels had collapsed.) We asked Ben if at that moment he knew all the engineers and slaves were trapped belowground? Ben looked at the ground. “I was very happy that Kimsu did not allow Yamashita to… I would be left here.” A moment later he added: “I was afraid of Yamashita.” 

When the ground stopped shaking, Ben saw that Kimsu was weeping. “He did this,” Ben said, “because the emperor gave him a direct order.” Many members of Kimsu’s staff, including Navy Captain Honda, had been buried alive with the engineers. Only when they reached Ben’s house did Kimsu say it was time for him and Col. Adachi to leave. They would go that night to Camiguin Island, where the submarine would be waiting to take them back to Japan. Although it was dark, Ben could see tears in Kimsu’s eyes. Ben also wept. “You must go in to your papa, Benhameen. He has only one eye and needs you on the farm. Don’t join the guerrillas, or the Americans. Just stay with your papa and help him plant rice.”

Kimsu put down his leather satchel and his sword, and took off his white tunic. He handed Ben the tunic, then handed his sword to Ben as well. He started to walk away, then made up his mind about something and came back to hand Ben the satchel, which held a full set of maps. Perhaps in his mind was the possibility that the submarine taking him back to Japan might not get there. 

“Keep these for me. Put it in a wooden box and bury it in the ground, behind your house.” Then he repeated the mantra: “Never forget your oath: You will not give the maps to anyone, no American, no Chinese, no Japanese, no Filipino, no guerrillas, just wait for me. Asha, Asha, Asha.” (Repeating this, Ben counts on his fingers as he says the word Asha ten times.) “Wait, until I come back and get these from you. Wait thirty years. If I have not come back by then, take the maps to Japan. If I am dead, give the maps to my family.” 

Kimsu walked away a hundred yards, then came back. Again he repeated the mantra: “Benhameen, don’t join the guerrillas or the Americans. If you do the Japanese will shoot you. Remember, no guerrillas, no Americans, no Chinese, no Japanese, wait for me.” 

This time, when he walked away, Kimsu did not come back. Ben stared after him for a long time, then he took the sword, the satchel, and the tunic, and went into the house. 

At sunrise, Yamashita withdrew up the Asin River into the Kiangan Pocket, for the last three months of the war. 

The sword Prince Takeda gave Ben had a blade of manmade steel folded and forged with darker metal from a meteorite, and a sheath of wood and leather. Made by one of Japan’s ‘living treasures’ it was a gift from Kimsu’s grandfather, Emperor Meiji, who collected fine swords. 

Not knowing its great value, Ben used it in the paddy fields to cut rice stalks at harvest that November and for many years that followed. When he plowed the fields the next Spring, he wore the white tunic with the red and gold chrysanthemum patch on the left breast. His father warned him not to wear it again in public, or he might be killed as a collaborator. Both the tunic and the sword lasted many years. While all those years passed, Ben kept his oath.

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DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

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