General Yamashita was tasked with organizing a plan to dig underground tunnels and find caves to hide all the gold and silver treasures looted from Asian countries, gathered in the Philippines.
The gold vaults of the Aztecs or Incas are already well-known, but the general Yamashita’s gold vault is said to be worth billions of dollars, many people may not have heard of it.
Japanese fascist general Yamashita (left)
It is a clear fact that the Japanese army used to plunder a lot in the colonial countries of Asia in the years before and during the Second World War. There is information that they set up a special task force for looting.
Bringing plundered goods across the sea back to Japan required great effort, especially during the war years with the Allies. The Philippines was chosen as a place to gather the looted treasures before being loaded onto ships on the sea journey back to Japan.
However, American forces became a major threat when they began to sink a series of Japanese ships at sea. The Japanese imperial family decided to be forced to hide the remaining treasure in the Philippines, and that is where General Yamashita was sent.
General Yamashita surrenders to US troops in the Philippines.
Yamashita is tasked with organizing and implementing plans to dig underground tunnels and find caves to hide all the gold and silver treasures. Japanese soldiers and prisoners of war as well as local workers were mobilized to dig tunnels and transport treasures into caves.
In this treasure hiding system there is a large tunnel in the Cagayan valley, Philippines. Labeled tunnel number 8, it is one of 175 tunnels dug across the Philippine islands occupied by the Japanese army. Those tunnels are said to contain treasures amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars including gold, jewels and priceless statues.
Prince Takeda of the Imperial Family personally helped advise and build tunnels to hide the treasure. They called the campaign “Golden Lily,” after a poem by Emperor Hirohito.
There is a rumor that, on a night in early June 1945, when the war between Japan and the United States had reached its final stages, Prince Takeda led all 175 of his men down to the bunker in tunnel 8 to eat. Congratulations on your latest win. After a few hours of drinking and singing, Takeda and Yamashita left quietly.
Japanese Prince Takeda.
The hatch was then knocked down and sealed with explosives. Those inside, including entourage and slave labor, were left behind with no survivors. Takeda returned to Japan on a submarine, and Yamashita led his army north to the Philippines to fight the Americans before surrendering on September 2, 1945.
There are many theories about what happened to Yamashita’s gold over the years.
One theory is that former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos found the treasure and kept it as his own. He exercised very tight control over the search and excavation of treasures during his travels. One such trip was led by Rogelio Roxas.
In 1971, Roxas himself claimed to have discovered a large gold deposit in a cave. He filed a lawsuit against Marcos and his wife in court alleging that only Marcos knew of his discovery. Roxas assumed he was captured, and the gold was confiscated by Marcos’ men. The court in the state of Hawaii, where Roxas filed the lawsuit, ultimately ruled in Roxas’ favor, declaring that there was sufficient evidence that he had indeed discovered the stolen gold, and ordered Marcos to pay $6 million in compensation USD.
Rogelio Roxas poses for a photo with a golden Buddha image he believes to have been found in a cave.
Other researchers and historians argue that the United States was given the location of most of the treasures in exchange for not prosecuting members of the Japanese Imperial Family for war crimes.
There is also the ambiguous story of how a young captain of the US Strategic Intelligence Service (OSS) Edward Lansdale and a Filipino-American torture expert exploited General Yamashita’s driver and Reach the 12 treasures north of Manilla.
What they found inside was truly stunning. Row after row of gold bars lined up higher than a person’s head; tons of platinum and porcelain vases containing jewels and diamonds… Over the next two years, the Americans are said to have taken the treasures out of underground vaults in the Philippines and secretly deposited in over 170 banks. all over the world.
The room filled with gold is said to have been discovered by the US military in the Philippines, although it has not been verified.
However, even with the evidence of Roxas, the story of the discovery by the US military, there are still many doubts about the existence of the Yamashita treasure, or its scale. These people argue that, if such a large amount of gold were hidden, there would be many more stories of its discovery. But in reality, there is almost no evidence of any gold being found other than the contradictory claims of gold hunters or Filipino natives.
As such, Yamashita’s treasures have become increasingly legendary, like the lost golden city of El Dorado of the Incas or the Oak Island Money Vault, where Captain Kidd’s treasure was buried.
Even so, there are still many treasure hunters who spend their lives searching for the Yamashita gold in the hopes of uncovering only a fraction of the treasure that has been hidden for so long.
Src: kenhthoisu.net
