The Yamashita treasure

Asia’s most-hunted WWII treasure legend; historians doubt it

The story is that Japanese forces looted Southeast Asia through the war and, as the position collapsed, hid the plunder in caves and tunnels across the Philippines under General Tomoyuki Yamashita. Historians are broadly sceptical, since moving that quantity of metal through waters the US Navy controlled is a serious logistical claim. Unlike other buried-treasure stories, a version of this one went to trial and won.

In 1961 a Filipino locksmith named Rogelio Roxas was, he said, given the location by the son of a former Japanese soldier and told about an underground chamber by a man who had served as Yamashita's interpreter. Roxas dug near Baguio and reported finding a chamber, bullion, and a gold Buddha statue weighing around half a ton whose head lifted off to reveal uncut diamonds inside.

What he said happened next is the case. Men acting for Ferdinand Marcos seized the find, and Roxas was imprisoned and tortured. After Marcos was driven out in 1986 and exiled to Hawaii, Roxas sued him and Imelda there, in 1988, for the treasure and for what was done to him.

The jury found for Roxas and awarded a sum reported at twenty two billion dollars, at the time the largest on record. The award was reduced and reshaped on appeal, and the Hawaii Supreme Court addressed the case in 1998 with further proceedings running for years afterwards. The finding that survived is remarkable in itself: a court accepted that Roxas found a treasure and that Marcos's people took it.

Neither Roxas, who died in 1993, nor his heirs have collected. Litigation over the estate has continued into recent years.

Treat this as history and law, not as a map. People still dig for Yamashita's gold in the Philippines, and they are regularly killed doing it in unsupported tunnels.