Yamashita’s gold

Contested by historians, but with a real court record behind one recovery claim

Yamashita's gold is the name for loot said to have been taken across Southeast Asia by Imperial Japanese forces in the Second World War and hidden in caves and tunnels in the Philippines. It is named for General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya, who took Malaya and Singapore from the British in 70 days, commanded in the Philippines from 1944, and was executed at Los Baños on 23 February 1946. In the usual telling the plunder was gathered in Singapore and shipped to the Philippines for Japan, then buried when American submarines and aircraft made the sea lanes impassable.

Sterling and Peggy Seagrave argued in Gold Warriors (2003) that the looting ran to more than 6000 tonnes of gold, organised by a secret body called Golden Lily, and that American intelligence later recovered much of it to fund covert operations. Most historians are unconvinced. Ricardo Trota Jose of the University of the Philippines points out that by 1943 Japan no longer controlled the seas, so sending treasure to the Philippines would have made little sense, and Ambeth Ocampo has noted that in 50 years of maps, testimony and metal detectors nobody has found a thing.

The legend has a court record all the same. Rogelio Roxas, a Baguio locksmith and amateur treasure hunter, testified that in 1961 a man named Fuchugami described his father's map of the treasure, and Eusebio Ocubo, who said he had been Yamashita's interpreter, told him of tunnels full of gold and a golden buddha. With a permit from Judge Pio Marcos, a relative of the president, Roxas organised a crew to search the tunnels. On 24 January 1971, he said, they broke through a concrete enclosure and found a gold-coloured buddha about three feet tall that took ten men to haul out, and stacks of boxes, one holding 24 gold bars. Weeks later armed men with a warrant signed by Judge Marcos took the buddha and the remaining 17 bars, and the judge told him the order came from the prince, Ferdinand Marcos. Roxas was jailed and, by his account, tortured.

He sued Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in Hawaii in 1988 and died in 1993, three years before trial. In 1996 a jury awarded $22 billion, then the largest judgment ever. In 1998 the Hawaii Supreme Court threw out the award for the unopened boxes as too speculative but upheld the claim to the buddha and the 17 bars. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin said it would stay sceptical until they were produced.

The hunting goes on. Treasure hunters have died and been hurt digging for it, and the National Museum of the Philippines issues the permits.