Background
The period between the two world wars (1920-1939) was one of financial speculation, and a geopolitical contest between the British Empire and Wall Street. America and the Rockefeller Empire were determined to take over Asia from the British. They needed markets for their manufactured goods, as well as a source for raw materials. In this, the US was blocked by Britain.
With America victorious in World War 2, Wall Street and Washington did everything possible to crush the British Empire, France and other European colonial nations.
What was once under Rothschild control now fell under the sway of the Rockefellers. What we are going to describe, in the following pages, is a peek into the shadow-world of global geopolitics. This world is real, alive, and growing stronger decade after decade. The shadow world is the inter-face between the over-world and the underworld. But, it is a world that very few people know of. It will give us an idea of how these 2 families operate, and how decisions taken in this world have impacted global politics and economics for the past 75 years.
At the conclusion of World War 2, John D Rockefeller Jnr, divided the world and parceled it out to his 4 sons. Winthrop was left out. To Nelson was given Latin America; to David was given Africa; to Lawrence-Europe, and to the eldest son – John D the 3rd– he was given Asia. It was John the 3rd, who was the brains behind America’s push to take over Asia from European/Rothschild control.
The 1951 US-Japan treaty was John’s idea. In the period just immediately after 1945, Japanese forces quit Vietnam, and that country was given back to France. Between 1948 and 1954, the CIA backed the nationalist forces in Vietnam to defeat France in Vietnam. This was done in 1954. Thereafter, it was then divided into 2 parts – north and south. This enabled the US to increase its military presence in South Vietnam, under the “pretext of fighting communists”. What better way to increase the US military presence in Asia. Between Japan, Korea and Vietnam, the Rockefeller Empire made sure of that no opposition would arise to its increasing aim of “imperial looting of resources”. Remember the family motto: “COMPETITION IS A SIN”.
Much mention is made of the OSS. This was America’s intelligence organization (another Rockefeller idea), created for the war. After war’s end, it was shut down. Two years later, Nelson Rockefeller formed the CIA – whose assets, infrastructure and methods – were drawn largely from the various Rockefeller Group companies around the world – especially the various oil companies in the Group. The costs of running the CIA are paid for by the government, while all its benefits accrue to the Rockefeller Group. In the wake of the Watergate scandal in 1974, President Ford began an investigation of the CIA through appointing a commission for this purpose. It was called the Rockefeller Commission, and was headed by none other than Nelson himself. It is like if someone commits a murder, and the government appoints the murderer to judge the case!
This report is focused on Japan between 1943 and 2011. A similar thing happened in Germany at wars’ end. Besides seizing Nazi war loot, the US also captured Germany’s technological advances, including scientists, patents, and new developments. All of these were taken back to the US. The information gleaned from this enabled many American companies to become bigger, helped reduce their R&D budgets, and gave them a massive boost. An example is Werner von Braun, and advanced rocket technology. Now back to the main topic.
These series of articles show how the world of gold, narcotics, and the role of the US dollar play such an important role in the destinies of nations, and its effect on the geopolitical field. This report includes the role of the CIA in Asia and Europe, names of some of the largest banks in the world, and how they colluded in defrauding nations and individuals in the world’s largest robbery – the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind. The story is astounding, and the quantities of gold mentioned here will boggle the mind. It goes to show how easily many people are lied to, and the perception that “snow is black” is reinforced repeatedly. The world of ‘fake-news’ began decades ago. But, it is all true. We now begin this roller-coaster journey. Hang tight, folks!
Introduction
In 1945, US Intelligence officers in Manila discovered that the Japanese had hidden large quantities of gold bullion and other looted treasures in the Philippines. President Truman decided to recover the gold but to keep its riches secret. These, combined with Japanese treasures recovered during the US occupation, and with recovered Nazi loot, would create a worldwide American political action fund to fight communism. This, “Black Gold” gave Washington virtually limitless, unaccountable funds, providing an asset base to reinforce the treasuries of America’s allies, to bribe political and military leaders, and to manipulate elections for more than 70 years.
The reader will walk away from this report astounded and outraged at the immensity of the fraudulent activities that the world’s governments, banks, and spies are engaged in. This is such an explosive story, and its details are spread over so many players and countries, that we split this report up into 5 sections :- Part 1 is “The Looting”; part 2 is “The Recovery”; and part 3 is “Dirty Tricks “ ; and part 4 is “Men in Black”.
In the closing months of World War 2 in the Philippines, while General Yamashita fought a delaying action in Luzon, several of Japan’s highest-ranking imperial princes were preparing for the future. They were busy hiding tons of looted gold bullion and other stolen treasures in nearby caves and tunnels, to be recovered later. This was the property of 12 Asian nations, accumulated over thousands of years. Expert teams accompanying Japan’s armed forces had systematically emptied treasuries, banks, factories, private homes, pawn shops, art galleries, and stripped ordinary people, while Japan’s top gangsters – the yakuza – looted Asia’s underworld and black economy.
Japan’s looting of Asia was overseen by Emperor Hirohito’s brother, Prince Chichubu. His organization was code-named Golden Lily. Lesser princes headed different branches of Golden Lily across the conquered territories. Golden Lily was driven by greed, but also by financial constraints. In 1937, Japan’s gold reserves had shrunk by half, paying for the military machine in China and Manchuria. It was at this bitter moment that Golden Lily was born. While Golden Lily was hard at work plundering China, and later the rest of Asia, so were Japanese tycoons like Sumitomo Kichizaemon, head of Japan’s immense Sumitomo conglomerate. Not to forget two of the largest players in Japan, who also had their share of loot, such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi. These companies used slave labor to work their mines and factories. In plundering Asia, the Japanese were far more thorough than the Nazis. It was as if a giant vacuum cleaner passed across East and South-East Asia. Much of the plunder reached Japan overland through Korea. The rest, moving by sea, got no further than the Philippines, as the US submarine blockade became complete in early 1943. The US Navy had perfected the torpedo, so no more loot could be shipped to Japan. Hiding the treasure there was crucial, so that if Japan lost the war, it would not lose financially.
Overseen by the princes, 175 “imperial“treasure vaults were constructed throughout the islands. Early in June 1945, these 175 chief engineers were given a farewell party at one of these sites, tunnel 4, stacked with gold bars. The place was dynamited, and all these engineers were buried alive. No one could know the secret locations of these vaults, and each was very cleverly booby trapped! The princes escaped to Japan by submarine, and days later, General Yamashita surrendered to US forces.
Because it was not possible to torture General Yamashita, members of his staff were tortured. His driver, Major Kojima, broke under torture. In charge of Kojimas torture was a Filipino-American intelligence officer named Severino Santa Romana, or ‘Santy’, for short. He was also the top spy in the Philippines for the Vatican!
When Truman shut down the OSS, its head, General William Donovan moved some of the dismissed staff to Manila. One of them was Captain Lansdale. He was supervising Santy’s torture of Kojima. Soon, Kojima broke, and took Santy and Landsdale to more than a dozen Golden Lily treasure vaults in the mountains north of Manila, including two that were easily opened. What lay inside astounded everyone. The treasure: gold, platinum, and barrels of loose gems; was in rows stacked 2 meters high.
Lansdale flew to Tokyo to brief General MacArthur, then onto Washington, to brief President Truman. After discussions – first with his cabinet and then Nelson Rockefeller, Truman decided to proceed with the recovery, but to keep it a state secret. It was not Truman’s decision alone. The idea of a global political action fund based on war loot originated with Secretary of Defense Henry Stimson – a Rockefeller man. It is only natural that the Rockefellers wanted someone reliable to head up their war.
Stimson’s special assistants on this matter were his 3 key deputies, who had come from Wall Street. They were John J McCloy, Robert Lovett and Robert Anderson. McCloy later became head of the World Bank, and soon became the “unofficial Prime Minister” of the Rockefeller Empire. Lovett became Secretary of Defense and Anderson became Secretary of the Treasury. They were all rewarded by Nelson Rockefeller over the recovery and use of the recovered loot. What was seen in these 12 vaults was gold that had NOT reached Japan! Far from being bankrupted by the war, Japan had been greatly enriched.
Between 1945 and 1947 the gold bullion recovered by Santy and Lansdale was discretely moved by ship to 174 accounts at banks in 42 countries. Secrecy was vital. If the recovery of a large mass of stolen gold became known, thousands of people would come forward to claim it, many of them fraudulently. McCloy warned Truman that the very existence of so much black gold, if it became public knowledge, would cause the fixed price of gold of $35 an ounce, to collapse. So many countries had linked their currencies to the US dollar, and the dollar linked to gold, that currency values throughout the world would plummet, causing financial disaster. So there was benefit of keeping this a secret.
Between 1945 and 1947, very large quantities of gold and platinum were deposited in the world’s biggest banks, including Union Bank and other Swiss banks, which became major repositories of the Black Eagle Trust. Over a period of decades, some of the world’s biggest banks became addicted to playing with the black gold in their hands. Now they will do whatever is necessary to keep the gold, even if it meant defrauding account holders or their heirs.
In retrospect, recovering Golden Lily treasure vaults and setting up the Black Eagle Trust were the easy parts. Making intelligent use of so much underground money during the Cold War was not so easy. Who is to supervise secret funds, except those who benefit by using them? To hide the existence of this treasure, Washington told a number of lies – especially about Japan, which had stolen most of the gold. Japan’s ruling elite were traditional hard-core conservatives, greatly alarmed about communism. America wanted Japan to be its anti-communist bastion in Asia, so the source of Tokyo’s wealth must never be acknowledged. The most ardent anti-communists in Tokyo happened to be indicted war criminals. Washington insisted that Japan never stole anything and was broke. Here, was the beginning of a major lie.
Because the Black Eagle Trust and the political action funds it spawned remained off the books, some of the slush funds fell into the wrong hands. In 1960, then US Vice-president, Nixon gave one of the biggest of these funds, the M-Fund to the leaders of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), in return for kickbacks to Nixon’s presidential campaign. The M-Fund in 1960 was worth some $35 billion. Now, it is worth more than $1 trillion. Similar abuses with other secret funds are to be found all over the world. Secrecy is power. Power corrupts. Secret power corrupts secretly.
A global network of corruption has grown around the slush funds. Bureaucrats, politicians, spooks, and generals, have become addicted to black money. There are indications that a lot of this war-gold has been siphoned off by America’s far right, under the guise of patriotism. The unintended consequences of Truman’s decision have become a poisonous part of the world financial system, putting innocent people at hazard. Those people and institutions benefiting from this corruption will do everything possible to hide it, including murder.
Where did all this treasure come from? Looting as an extension of war is nothing new. But, most of it is haphazard. What Japan did between 1895 and 1945 was qualitatively different. This was not drunken looting and smashing. The Japanese were serious, sober, and deliberate. The first victim was Korea in 1895, followed by Manchuria between 1905 and 1936. This was followed by China proper from 1936 till 1945. And then Japan invaded and captured East and Southeast Asia, beginning in late 1940, till 1944.
Japan invaded 12 Asian countries over these 5 decades, and plundered them on an industrial scale. The haul included cultural artifacts, manuscripts, gold, diamonds, platinum, gems, currency, etc. Most of these were shipped back to Japan. It was only when US submarines began sinking Japanese ships, in early 1943 that a decision was taken to hide the balance in purpose-built caves and vaults in the Philippines. What was buried there was estimated to be worth more than $100 billion (in 1960), according to a cousin of Emperor Hirohito.
At face value, one would be deeply skeptical about the huge dollar values of this loot. Officially, there is about 140,000 tons of refined gold in the world, in jewelry and in gold bars. Official records show that Asia (with 75% of the world’s population holds 5% of this.) This is sheer nonsense. In fact nobody knows how much gold there is. A trillion dollars sounds like a lot, but banking sources confirm that high net-worth individuals hold some $40-50 trillion in tax havens. Nor do we have a way of knowing the wealth of the world’s wealthiest families, like the Rockefellers, Rothschilds and Oppenheimers. We know even less about the gold holdings of the great Asian and Middle Eastern dynastic families, trading networks and underworld syndicates. Western tycoons may own banks and oil companies, and control governments, but wealthy Asians never trusted governments or banks, preferring to keep their wealth in gold, platinum and diamonds. In China, this absolute distrust goes back thousands of years. We can be sure that what was tucked under the rug in Asia over 2,000 years is far more than what was deposited in the Western banking system that came into existence 300 years.
Step 1 – The Looting
Between 1895 and late 1942, most of the plunder was sorted out, packed, and shipped off to Japan. In Japan itself, banks were beefed up, the big zaibatsu conglomerates expanded, and the Imperial treasury was built up. During the war years, much of this was used in the war, and a lot of it was hidden away in caves and warehouses throughout Japan. In addition, ships with loot were sunk in Tokyo’s harbor.
Since it was now not possible to ship the remaining loot back to Japan, due to the sinking of Japanese ships by US submarines, it was decided to hide them in the Philippines, in specially constructed caves and hidden vaults, and other places. The Golden Lily loot was stored in 175 such ‘vaults’. 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 up in Mindanao, in Mindoro, and other islands in the archipelago. And in the mountains north of Manila, Golden Lily was hard at work enlarging natural caverns to create the biggest treasure vaults of the war outside Japan.
As we shall see, when Santa Romana died in 1974, some of his biggest black gold accounts were quickly transferred to the name of Major General Edward G. Lansdale, the man who participated with Santy in the torture of Major Kojima thirty years earlier, in 1945. By 1974, Lansdale had been retired from the CIA for over a decade, raising puzzling questions that are only answered by recognizing the role of Lansdale and other former spooks and generals in America’s new network of private military and intelligence firms. There are many other famous names tied to this.
Other lawsuits prove that Golden Lily war loot was indeed hidden in the Philippines. Rogelio Roxas, a Filipino locksmith, found a one-ton solid gold Buddha and thousands of small gold bars hidden in a tunnel behind a hospital in the mountain resort of Baguio, which had served as a headquarters for General Yamashita. The moment he heard what Roxas had found, President Marcos sent thugs to confiscate the Gold Buddha. When Roxas protested, he was arrested, tortured and ultimately poisoned. In 1996, a U.S. court in the state of Hawaii awarded his heirs a judgment of $43- billion against the Marcos estate, the largest civil award in history. Documents discovered in Malacanang Palace show that in 1968, President Marcos sent a team of army officers to Japan to make a deal for joint recoveries. According to a member of the team, they met with a prince, “a high-ranking Japanese officer… a cousin of Emperor Hirohito”, who told them that Japan had hidden over $100-billion worth of treasure in the Philippines and it would take “more than a century” to recover it all.
At the time (1910-1946), the image of China was as the sick man of Asia, a country of unparalleled corruption and vice, on the verge of collapse. Many Westerners thought China was so decadent it had been bled of its wealth long ago. Nothing could be further from the truth. The wealth that changed hands from one warlord to another did not evaporate, and was minor compared to what remained deeply hidden. The repeated plunder of Peking took away quantities of imperial treasure, to be sure, but did not disturb bullion, artworks, and patrimony belonging to the aristocracy, to merchant families, or to racketeers and gangsters. Because they had good reason not to trust anyone outside the family or clan, Chinese did not put their liquid assets in banks; they kept quantities of gems and small gold bars called biscuits, ingeniously hidden. For the Japanese, the only challenge was how to find the gold, platinum, jade and gems laid down in private hoards, because wealthy Chinese were obsessively secret. China’s evolving merchant class from ancient times to present global networks of super-rich Overseas Chinese, control over $5-trillion in assets worldwide. Because emperors always had a monopoly on trade disguised as tribute, all other commerce was illegal in China, punishable by death. Merchants were targets of repression, and were imprisoned or exiled with their families to ‘barbarian’ lands beyond the frontiers. So in China all business traditionally was done covertly, as an illicit underworld, often times bribing magistrates to look the other way.
When we think of looting in the West, we think of banks, museums, palaces, cathedrals and mansions, and overlook black money sources. In China, all money was black. It could not be stolen without the use of extortion and terror. Japan’s rogue samurai had gained practical experience in extortion and terror in Korea and Manchuria. They left to the kempeitai obvious targets like banks, museums and mansions, and turned their own attention to finding personal fortunes, and great pools of wealth from drugs, alcohol, prostitution, gambling, smuggling and other rackets. To make it easy, they reached temporary partnerships with Chinese racketeers, hard men who felt no remorse about victimizing their own countrymen. It was this unholy alliance of rogues and racketeers that caused China in the 1930s and 1940s to hemorrhage treasure like never before.
Haphazard collaboration between the Japanese underworld and the Chinese underworld had been going on for centuries. For example, Chinese trading networks based in coastal Fukien province had oceangoing junks voyaging as far west as Africa and Arabia. Each syndicate had its own private navy and marines, with treasuries of gold biscuits stashed in strongholds along the coast and offshore in island strongholds. Since their common enemy was China’s imperial government, the natural allies of these pirate syndicates were the Japanese. China’s most powerful godfather was Tu Yueh-sheng, boss of the Green Gang. He enjoyed French protection in return for generous contributions from rackets in drugs, brothels and gambling.
When the Japanese Army swarmed down the China Coast in 1937, crossed the Yangtze, and moved westward to Nanking, so many units were involved across such a broad front that there was danger of Japan’s ruling elite losing control of the financial side of conquest, as rival commanders competed for spoils. How could you keep army or navy officers from side-tracking gold bullion and priceless art works, not to mention smaller scale theft by soldiers? At the same time, groups of yakuza were moving through newly occupied areas, conducting their own reign of terror.
To keep everything under strict control at the highest level, the Imperial General Headquarters created Golden Lily (kin no yuri), named after one of Hirohito’s poems. This was to be a palace organization of Japan’s top financial minds and specialists in all forms of treasure including cultural and religious antiquities, supported by accountants, bookkeepers, shipping experts, and units of the army and navy, all overseen by princes of the blood. When China was milked by Golden Lily, the army would hold the cow, while princes skimmed the cream. This organization was put directly under the command of the emperor’s brother, Prince Chichibu. We know the date because the Imperial General Headquarters itself was only set up in the imperial palace in Tokyo in November 1937, just as the Rape of Nanking was commencing. The purpose of the Imperial Headquarters was to keep control of the war in the hands of the emperor and his senior advisors, to avoid repeating what happened in Manchuria, where the Kwantung Army grew recklessly independent in all respects. The Imperial Army already had a number of Special Service Units, among them intelligence teams specializing in different kinds of cultural and financial espionage, and secret service agents like General Doihara, outside the ordinary command structure. These were reassigned to Golden Lily, giving it the resources needed to find treasure of all kinds, from the sublime to the most prosaic.
In Nanking, the first wave of Golden Lily helpers were kempeitai. Special kempeitai units moved through the city seizing all government assets, blowing open bank vaults, breaking into and emptying homes of wealthy families of whatever gold, gemstones, jewelry, artworks, and currency could be found. Nanking had been rich for over a thousand years. Many wealthy and prominent Chinese had mansions in town, and estates in the surrounding countryside. This was not the only time Nanking was ransacked by conquerors, but it was by far the most deliberate, meticulous, and systematic. At least 6,000 metric tons of gold are reported to have been amassed by the kempeitai during this first pass.
Historical research into looting shows that what is officially reported typically is only a tiny fraction of what is actually stolen. Also looted were many of the small biscuit bars that individual Chinese prefer to hoard, along with small platinum ingots, diamonds, rubies and sapphires, small works of art, and antiquities. These were taken from private homes and from tombs vandalized by the army in the countryside. Remorselessly thorough, the Japanese hammered the teeth out of corpses to extract gold fillings. While the kempeitai removed even the furniture, mirrors and rugs for crating and shipment to Japan, Golden Lily’s Special Service Units — the elite of the secret service — focused on individual Chinese who owned banks, headed guilds, ran pawn shop networks, or were the elders of clan associations. Particular attention was paid to heads of triads, and racketeers. Although some escaped from the city, relatives were tracked down, taken into custody, and used for leverage. In this methodical fashion, Japan went far beyond the wild pillaging of Mongol hordes, or the drunken rampaging of British and French troops at the Summer Palace in Peking.
Golden Lily was driven by greed but also by necessity. In 1937 Japan’s gold reserves had shrunk by half, paying for the military machine. Princes of the first tier personally compiled inventories of everything stolen, then shipped it to Shanghai in railway carriages and freight cars guarded by special army units. Military commanders thought twice before offending the princes. Prince Chichibu was well chosen as Golden Lily’s overseer. All proceeds were diverted from Chinese racketeers to Golden Lily, minus a handling charge for Kodama himself. Kodama was put in charge as a deputy to Prince Chichibu. Ultimately, Kodama was responsible to Prince Chichibu, and to the throne.
Princes were not equipped to deal with gangsters. Kodama saved them from soiling their hands. He converted narcotics into bullion by the simple method of trading heroin to gangsters for gold ingots. How brokers got the ingots was not his concern. He closed a deal with waterfront boss Ku Tsu-chuan to swap heroin for gold throughout the Yangtze Valley. Thanks to Ku’s brother, KMT senior general Ku Chu-tung, Japan also gained access to U.S. Lend-Lease supplies reaching western China by way of the Burma Road, or on aircraft flying over the Hump from India. Once in warehouses in Kunming or Chungking, the Lend-Lease was re-sold to the Japanese Army, with Kodama as purchasing agent.
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 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. 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.
Ingots from Burma were in pyramid shapes, 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.
In Kuala Lumpur, Golden Lily found vaults at Bank Negara packed with 23.97 karat bars of 6.250 kilos each. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
An important point to note here is that when the Americans occupied Japan, its largest conglomerates, like Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, etc., gave a substantial equity share in their companies to the Rockefellers, with the result that the Rockefeller Empire came to dominate Japan Inc.
Step 2 – 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. This was the date 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). 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 Maizuru Naval Base, to be recovered by the Japanese in 1990. Just weeks before the war ended, she reached Yokohama again loaded with treasure. Instead of offloading, she was taken to Maizuru 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 Maizuru 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.) The Op ten Noort was just one of Japan’s many fake hospital ships.
What became of all the treasure is a fascinating and complex riddle that has remained secret to this day. 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 Maizuru Naval Base.
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. 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.
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. 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.
Five tons of silver bullion found in a Mitsui warehouse, illustrate the problem Japan had been 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. 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. 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 Imperial cousins.
All this planning by Prince Chichibu and his engineers took many weeks to evolve. 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. 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.
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. 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. From the Cagayan, aircraft could fly easily to Taiwan 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.
Prince Takeda was a cousin of Hirohito – 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.
At the age of 18, young Ben was a farmer, and Prince Takeda took him on as a personal valet – in 1942. 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. 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 underneath Bambang cemetery. Tunnel-8 and Tunnel-9 were about a kilometer apart.
By the summer of 1944 it was evident that an Allied invasion of the Philippines or Taiwan was imminent. A great fleet of American ships was assembling in New Guinea. Japan would have to fight hard to hold on even to Luzon. In the days and weeks that followed, there was frenzied burying of remaining treasure. 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.
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. 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.
By wars end, Prince Takeda and the other Japanese princes left the Philippines, and returned to Japan. Then, it was time for Prince Takeda to leave. Over the 3 years, the Prince had grown very fond of Ben. His relationship with Prince Takeda went through a subtle change. Kimsu insisted that Ben go through a blood-oath ritual with him. 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. They were completely filled with chunks of gold cut off 75-kilo bars.
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, and then he took the sword, the satchel, and the tunic, and went into the house. Ben never met Kimsu again.
This fascinating story continues in Part 2, https://behindthenews.co.za/yamashitas-gold-part-2-of-a-5-part-series/
Very interesting read. Tokyo Sexwale once said there’s trillions of dollars worth of gold ready to be used for humanitarian purposes maybe he was right, maybe he was on to something. Just two questions what is your opinion on the current Ukraine-Russia war.? And do you think NERSARA will ever be implemented? Ow and if you could also write something on the JFK assassinations’ i think that will also be quite informative.