Yamashita treasure trivia

For Roxas, the road to justice was long, winding and often bloody, as he related in his pre-trial deposition. In 1961, he said, he’d met a man whose father served in the Japanese Army and had drawn a map showing where the so-called Yamashita Treasure was hidden. Soon another man, who claimed to have been Yamashita’s interpreter, told Roxas he’d visited tunnels filled with boxes of gold and silver during the war. He’d also seen a golden Buddha.



Roxas escaped his captors, who seem to have forgotten he was a locksmith, by picking a window lock. But Marcos and his henchmen weren’t done with him. In July 1972, he was arrested again and subjected to more beatings and interrogations. He wouldn’t be freed until November 1974.

But according to local officials, the treasure hunters say that national authorities in Manila gave them permission to dig, and that they will continue their excavations, Panay News reported. The treasure hunters also turned away local police from the excavation site.

The perpetual search for Yamashita's buried gold has often come at a cost for real scientific treasures in the Philippines, Kelly said. Treasure hunting has badly damaged several important archaeological sites, including the ancient jar burial site at Ayub Cave on the island of Mindanao, researchers wrote in the journal Archaeology Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia.

The jury award wasn’t Roxas’ only vindication. During the trial, an American mining expert testified that Ferdinand Marcos had shown him a solid gold Buddha statue with a removable head, which matched the statue photographed with Roxas in 1971. Other credible witnesses testified they had seen the Buddha in one of Marcos’ homes or that he or his representatives had offered to sell it to them. Still another witness said that when he’d visited Ferdinand and Imelda in Hawaii, one of them admitted that they’d taken a golden Buddha from the person who discovered it and replaced it with a brass stand-in. Virtually every witness claimed to have seen enormous stacks of gold bars in Marcos’ possession. If they were to be believed, it was hard to dispute Roxas’ claim that he’d discovered the Yamashita Treasure.

To that end, Takeda allegedly ordered the construction of the so-called ‘Golden Lilly’ tunnels – a vast network of underground tunnels dug into the mountains of the Philippines where the stolen loot was to be stored. Yamashita, so the story goes, was charged with constructing one such tunnel known as ‘number eight’ somewhere in the Cagayan Valley in the northeast of the island of Luzon.