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| Japanese General Yamashita Tomoyuki is said to have buried a fortune in war loot in the Philippines at the end of World War II. But historians think it probably doesn't exist. |
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| Yamashita's buried hoard of gold and other valuables, if it exists, is reported to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars today. |
Fabled Gold On
Philippines Island
Treasure
hunters search for fabled gold on Philippines island
Hoard may not
even exist
By Tom Metcalfe - Live
Science Contributor
The treasure hunt threatens to cause
landslides.
Excavations by treasure hunters
searching for a hoard of gold in the Philippines, said to have been
hidden by a Japanese World War II general, are threatening to
cause landslides in a remote village.
The search for fabled buried treasure
is inspired by centuries-old Filipino folktales, according to an
anthropologist.
The treasure seems to be just that —
a fable — as historians say it probably doesn't even exist.
"People [are]
spending a lot of money and a lot of time and effort looking
for stuff that is probably not there," said Piers Kelly, a linguistic anthropologist at the
University of New England in Armidale, Australia.
In the latest development, people in
the Igbaras district on the island of Panay have asked officials to put a stop
to excavations that they say could cause landslides, according to the official Philippine News Agency.
The villagers say the excavations by
10 men have gone on for more than a year near their village, in a fenced-off
area that's about 10,800 square feet (1,000 square meters).
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 village where the excavations are
taking place is built on a hillside and faces a "very high risk" of
landslides, according to a previous assessment by the Philippines' Mines and
Geosciences Bureau.
The villagers fear that the
excavations could soon undermine the hillside above them and that up to nine
houses could be buried as a result.
The mayor of the Igbaras district,
Jaime Esmeralda, has assured the villagers that his officials have granted no
permits for treasure hunting, excavations or mining in the area.
He's now asked officials at the
National Museum of the Philippines in Manila to investigate whether the museum
issued a permit for treasure hunting.
Yamashita's gold
The treasure hunters are thought to
be searching for Yamashita's gold, a fabled hoard of bullion and other
valuables said to have been buried somewhere on the islands of the Philippines
at the end of World War II.
Yamashita's gold was named after Gen.
Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Japanese commander in the Philippines at the time.
According to the tale, Yamashita
oversaw the burial of a vast hoard of war loot in the Philippines collected
during the wartime Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia.
Yamashita and his troops held out
against invading American forces for several weeks after the Japanese surrender
in September 1945, but he was captured, tried for war crimes and executed in
1946.
Yamashita's fabled buried hoard,
however, has enticed treasure hunters for more than 50 years, and it's been the
subject of several books. According to some estimates, it could be worth up to
hundreds of millions of dollars today.
In a 1988 court case in the United
States, a Filipino treasure hunter named Rogelio Roxas sued former Philippines
President Ferdinand Marcos for stealing part of Yamashita's hoard that Roxas
had discovered.
In 2005, the judges ruled in favor of
Roxas, awarding the treasure hunter $13 million.
But that hasn't dampened local
enthusiasm for the search for Yamashita's gold, and historians have tried in
vain to quell the rumors.
University of Philippines history
professor Ricardo Jose told a newspaper in 2005 that Japan had lost
control of the seas in 1943 — and so the islands of the Philippines would have
been an extremely inconvenient place to hide any treasure that Japan had left
at the end of the war.
Tales of treasure
Kelly said the oldest folktale of
buried treasure that he's found in the Philippines dates to the 1600s, to a
story about how the Chinese pirate Limahong buried his fabled loot somewhere in
the Pangasinan region of the Philippines, as reported by The Manilla Times.
Stories of buried pirate treasure
were replaced by stories of lost gold from Mexico during the Spanish
colonization of the Philippines, and later by tales of hidden hoards of silver
dollars.
"For some
reason, that is the preferred treasure of Americans, and they are often in
barrels," he said.
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
Philippines are really rich and really interesting in archaeology, but when it comes to treasure
hunting, what people have in mind is almost a cartoon comic
book idea of what treasure is," he said.
"It is very folkloric."
The official permission given to the
treasure hunters to dig on the island of Panay is now being investigated, Panay News reported, and the threat of landslides in
the area has been reported to provincial authorities.
Tom Metcalfe is a journalist based in London who writes mainly
about science, space, archaeology, the earth, and the oceans. He's written for
the BBC, NBC News, Live Science, Scientific American, Air & Space, and
others.
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