Prologue

Prologue

Jackdaw : A shiny black bird with a reputation for stealing and hoarding bright objects.
(Oxford English Dictionary.)

“We were the conquerors, the victors. To plunder their resources was considered a natural entitlement. Their 'Golden Lily'. The main portions of the treasure, buried in the Philippines, would today value in excess of $100 billion. It would take decades to recover it all.”
(Shinno (Prince) Higashikuni Naruhiko )


They are all dead now, the original Japanese Jackdaws. Those of the Imperial House, (Koshitsu) the devious, scheming shinno who gathered around the Crysanthemum Throne and whispered into Hirohito’s ear. Princes Chichibu, Takamatsu , Mikasa, Asaka, Takeda and the devious, scheming Higashikuni.
Gone too, the insidious hierarchical cabals of the Japanese Imperial Military : the Gunbatsu cliques of the Tosei-ha ( Control Faction ), and the Kodo-ha, ( Imperial Way Faction ). Those of the Zaibatsu, the great financial and industrial houses. Those of the Genyosha : the Dark Ocean Society, and the Kokuryukai : the Black Dragon Society. Those of the Sanzoku and Yakuza : the outlaw and criminal clans.
All of them Kuromaku : the Men behind the Black Curtains. The puppeteers, manipulating the strings of national government and political policy to further their own personal power and financial aggrandisement.
To set Japan against the world and see her attain her rightful status as a dominant and controlling global power. To establish, by force of arms, their repugnant and self-serving Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. To ensure future Japanese hegemony in Asia : their Manifest Destiny.

All ardent students of the ancient Chinese master military strategist Sun Tzu, who “Wove their Mysterious Threads” through the banners of ultra-nationalism to steer Japan into a decades-long campaign of foreign military adventures and conquests that would ultimately lead to their homeland’s devastation and a humiliating military defeat.

Of the later Jackdaws, the Philippine cabal of President Ferdinand Marcos, they too are now dead: the major participants involved. Some of the lesser players still survive, but are now fallen from grace and politically impotent.
General Fabian Ver, Marcos’ personal henchman, who headed the feared NISA and the Armed Forces, was the last to die. Still hiding in the musty netherworld of false passports and dubious safe havens for international criminals. Secreted in a wilderness of shadows. Never brought to book for his multitudinous sins. A wanted man, dodging extradition orders and still doing dirty deals, up to the time of his death, in Thailand, in 1998.

But the legacy of the Jackdaws remains. Billions of dollars-worth of war-time treasure plundered, by the Japanese Imperial Military and their cohorts, from the conquered nations of Asia, and mainly secreted in numerous sites around the Philippine Islands. Marcos located and successfully retrieved only a minor portion of these vast hoards, the bulk still lie buried and undisturbed in their singular, isolated tombs. Waiting for the light of day to once again shine upon them. To be touched and fondled once more by the immortal hands of avarice. The felonious fingers of materialistic greed.

How many sites Marcos did actually excavate with success remains a matter of conjecture. I was personally involved with recoveries from nine sites, but he had engineering sections of his military forces scouring the archipelago to establish the locations of the multitudinous sites long before my participation in 1976. Too, he recruited separate and segregated specialist groups, concurrent to our own, who were also successful in locating and retrieving stashes from other sites.
Based on personal knowledge of the total project, and the time duration involved with individual sites, a conservative estimate would be no more than thirty-five sites total. We were proclaimed the star team, with the highest rate of success : and located and excavated only nine sites over a period of six years.
Of the two hundred-plus sites at which the Japanese secreted their larcenous plunder, the greater majority still lie undetected; including those where Marcos reburied recovered stashes of the plunder, at fresh sites in his native provincial bastion of Illocos Norte. Re-interred for posterity. Perhaps as insurance against possible adverse future political circumstances, which Karma seems to have a historical habit of presenting peremptory dictators with.

Groups before Marcos’ days of Presidential Power searched for the treasure, as have groups since his Great Fall from Grace in 1986; as do official and unofficial groups continue the searches to this day. Successful finds go unreported and are quickly cloaked in secrecy, the recovered caches spirited away by faceless men; including too those recovered on the uniquely rare occasions when a shallow minor sites have been unearthed by civil development works.

Recovered, to disappear yet again, twix the swift fingers of oriental legerdemain. The only treasure hunts that seem to make the pages of the press are the scams and failures: but Failure is forever the Mother of all Orphans.

This section opened with mention that all the original Japanese Jackdaws are now dead. It is a fact, but their heirs are very much alive. Alive and aware of the existence and locations, and inventories, of the treasure sites their progenitors established between 1941 and 1945.
The shadowy Kuromaku puppeteers, still manipulating the strings of control.

Of actual Japanese involvement in the location and recovery of caches of the treasure since 1945, this will be covered in later chapters. But diligent and vigilant eyes are forever cast on developments in the Philippines, and other select Asian countries where their illicit legacy is hidden, that directly concern threats to the continued inviolate security of the treasure caches remaining.

Since the end of the Pacific conflict, in 1945, the legendary treasure of Japanese Imperial Army General Tomoyuki Yamashita has repeatedly caught the imaginations and attentions of the global public and international media.
Innumerable, nay countless, treasure hunts have been inaugurated to seek and retrieve the fabled vast riches contained in these buried sites, at a multitude of locations throughout the Philippine islands. Each occasion heralds forth a fresh wave of media publicity, and adds further to the extensive myths, misconceptions, fallacies, fictions and fabrications surrounding and permeating an already-ambiguous controversy.

However, with each occasion that the media does air the legend yet again, and a fresh series of treasure hunts are initiated, the ubiquitous Japanese experts and lobbyists appear on the scene to vilify and scoff at such ventures and proclaim, once more, with added vehemence, that the treasure does not exist, and never did exist. All hinging upon the particular sites being focused for excavation, whether the hunt’s operators are too close to the proverbial mother lodes or safely, and satisfyingly, well off the mark.

One particular Japanese “expert”, Fukumitsu Minoru, a consultant to the great Japanese Zaibatsu industrial and financial cabals, and too a close personal friend of Ferdinand Marcos, has made an excess of 600 trips to the Philippines since the early 1950’s, mainly to hold press conferences and refute anew the existence of the legendary World War Two treasure. Fukumitsu san’s lobbying normally elicits aggressive responses of co-operative agreement from select prominent political factions of self-interest in the Philippines, who then join his call to halt such wasteful and foolhardy enterprises. But more on Fukumitsu’s origins and loyalties in later chapters.

The Japanese themselves, since Marcos’ political demise in 1986, have established a far superior methodology of laying claim to the remaining treasure sites and, slowly but surely, recovering their larcenous assets. Parties privy to the secrets of the treasure sites invariably form legitimate companies, or utilise the corporate facilities of existing companies, and establish window-dressing joint-venture partnerships with Filipino corporations.
They then proceed to select a site suitable to their requirements, on which to build and develop whatever industry they have preference, and commence excavations and construction. Then, at their timely leisure, they can excavate deeper, under the authentic guise of further expansion and development, and retrieve the plunder buried and concealed long before their mortal origins.

Some of these projects stand out alike a proverbial sore thumb. Flagrant and conspicuous displays of Japanese scheming and bravado. Medium industrial developments established on totally contradictory sites (sic). Without access to secondary highways, and where the ground geology is absolutely unsuitable, requiring extensive and cost-prohibitive primary civil works before actual construction can be initiated.
Outwardly a repetition of irrational and logistical errors, and sound corporate judgement, when alternative sites are readily available within reasonable proximity: with complete facilities, amenities, and utilities already established.
But the Japanese are forever adamant on their selections of sites for such ventures, and pay well above the current market values, when necessary. All a matter of the feng shui of the site chosen, they painstakingly explain to the vendors. The correct balance of the Earth’s etheric forces. Yin and Yang in harmony. Vital to the success of their enterprise. All quite esoteric, very animistic; permeated with the superior theological doctrines of Shinto and Zen. So the land owners and realtors laugh inwardly at this seemingly fallacious logic, and prudently pocket their payments and fees.

At one particular site in north-west Luzon, among the expansive flat plains of rice fields, stands a singular natural geological aberration, resembling a monolithic vertical breast. In the early 1990’s a Japanese group acquired this miniature mountain, and the surrounding lands, at an excessive cost.
There they proceeded to establish a ranch, comprising of a securely fenced-off mango plantation and fish farm, and, utilising the services of their own construction company, excavated and moved thousands of tons of aggregate-embodied earth to form an elevated airstrip at the base of the mountain: while the surrounding countryside is “perfectly flat” for thousands of hectares.
Once completed, resplendent with western-style ranch house, guest bungalows, aircraft hanger and adjoining office facilities, they opened a flying school ! Miles off the beaten track, and from the nearest highway; in an area inhabited by poor tenant farmers who can barely afford the luxury of bus fares to the local market, let alone flying lessons.

Equipped with two fixed wing aircraft and one helicopter, and a reasonable excuse for their existence, they proceeded to bulldoze an inclined circular path of access around the thickly-vegetated mid-portion of the mountain, and tunnelled deep into the structure during the ensuing months. What was ever located by this exercise is the fodder of the usual rumour mills. By some local accounts, tens of tons of gold bullion and precious gems; by others yet another of the ubiquitous one-ton solid gold Buddha’s, complete with the prescribed detachable head and hollow belly filled with diamonds. So much is filed under conjecture and speculation, while the remainder falls under the classification of imagination. The veracity remains without provenance.

However, prudence demands the observation that if a cache of the plunder was located and retrieved from this site, the group definitely had the resources and organisational foresight to establish an isolated and private means of flying the treasure out of the country : under schedules and covert conditions formatted to their own designs.
To the initiated, the scent of the Kuromaku, the Genyosha, and the Kokuryukai, seem to permeate the very air where such ventures are concerned. Still weaving Sun Tzu’s Mysterious Threads : his Lord’s Treasure.

Thus, repetitions of these incidents serve to keep the Yamashita legend alive and in pristine condition, embellished a little more with each revelation. To be retold and publicised, and to be debunked and refuted yet again. Perhaps there is method to the madness in keeping the Yamashita’s Treasure myth perpetuated, for it can genuinely be the target of rebuttals.

Denials that General Yamashita buried his treasure, a treasure, or any treasure, in the Philippines, are composed of a semblance of verisimilitude, which provides a solid foundation for contradiction and dismissal of the very existence of the treasure itself.
General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the veritable Tiger of Malaya, conqueror of the British bastion of Singapore and subsequently the popular military hero of the Japanese public, was, to all intents and purposes, when set against the backcloth of Japan’s wartime military hierarchy, a moderate who opposed the Tosei-ha ( Control factions ) of the Japanese ruling military elite.

A soldier of the classical schools of warfare, Yamashita was out of favour with the militarist prime minister, General Hideki Tojo, who presented him with the daunting task of the invasion and conquest of the Malay Peninsula, and the island stronghold of Singapore; believing the campaign would prove difficult and protracted, and Yamashita thus reduced in stature and influence when unable to achieve a swift and decisive victory over his foes.

However, Yamishita’s rapid advance down the peninsula and into Singapore, and the subsequent defeat of the British forces, saw him crowned a popular hero by the enamoured Japanese public: much to the chagrin of Prime Minister Tojo. To avoid any such repetitions of swift and significant military victories on Yamashita’s part, and thus stem the growth of his popular acclaim and power, Tojo assigned him to the backwater military actions in Manchuria; where Yamashita abided until late in 1944.

After suffering repeated devastating defeats at the hands of the Allied armies, the Japanese High Command decided an officer of Yamashita’s experience and ilk was required to reverse the tide of the war, and he was duly recalled from Manchuria and dispatched to the Philippines: with the mandate to defend and maintain control of the archipelago at all costs.

Arriving in Manila in the October of 1944, just prior to the primary Allied invasion of the Philippines through the island of Leyte, Yamashita quickly concluded that his military assets were insufficient to reverse the flow of the war there, should the Allies invade in force. He counselled a rearguard defensive action, and withdrew his troops to the mountainous and heavily- forested areas of north Luzon. Pushed further north by MacArthur’s allied
forces after their invasion of Luzon in January of 1945, Yamashita and his straggling and exhausted forces finally surrendered on the 2nd of September, 1945, after receiving orders to do so from the Emperor.

To be labelled by history as the jackdaw who accumulated an immense hoard of personal treasure during his Asian military campaigns, and buried the same around the Philippine islands, would be insult enough to an innocent party. But Yamashita was targeted for worse accusations, when the vindictive Allied leader, General Douglas MacArthur, pinpointed him as the architect of the Battle of Manila, and responsible for its ensuing destruction, and the death of one hundred thousand innocent and non-combatant civilian inhabitants: even though he had declared Manila an open city, in the December of 1944, and ordered all Japanese troops to abandon the capital.

Tried by an Allied War Crimes court in Manila, in December of 1945, in a trial that is still classified as a complete travesty of justice, Yamashita was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. When sentence was carried out in the February of 1946, the man himself died, and the legend began to grow, at a rate proportionate to the times it was retold, and the emphasis bestowed upon it.
For all intents and purposes, Yamashita was an honourable man, who played the savage game of war by the established rules, up to the very end. All contemporary evidence indicates the veracity of this fact. That he was never afforded the opportunity to amass a personal fortune in war-related plunder, nor the time to secrete it in an excess of two hundred subterranean sites around the Philippines during his short, active, sojourn there, adds testimony to fact he was repeatedly maligned for many crimes he never personally committed, nor ordered, nor was a party to.

So, if the treasure does exist, who gathered up this vast hoard from the rich enclaves and expanses of Greater East Asia ? Who organised the shipping of the treasures to the Philippines, and the selection and preparation of the burial sites there? Who committed the crimes for which Yamashita, and his innocent contemporaries, were wrongly blamed, tried for, and punished. But, more importantly, why was the Philippines chosen as the central storage point for this priceless collection of treasure trove ?

To address the above questions in reverse order : why was the Philippines selected as the main burial site for the treasure? To answer this we must later reflect on the ultra-nationalistic and expansionist policies of Japan during the mid-19th Century, where they had their genesis, after the Meiji Restoration ; and were cultivated and nurtured for decades until their fruits became ripe for harvest with the invasions of Korea and Manchuria, and the establishment of the powerful and autonomous Kwantung Army : in the early decades of the 20th Century.

With the invasion and partial occupation of mainland China, followed by the mass invasions and conquests of East Asia in 1941, the Japanese Gunbatsu and their brotherhood of the Kuromaku gazed upon the splendid tapestry of their grand objective design finally gaining a defined pattern.
Hitler’s Nazi German armies would eventually defeat and conquer the despised European powers, and Russia too. Then the Japanese could march west from Manchuria and lay claim to the resource-rich eastern Sibera. With England defeated by Hitler too, then they could concentrate their military energies on the final, and total, conquest of China, and push
westward to annex India to their Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere.
By this time the Nazis would have control of the Middle East and Africa, and these too would be divided between the two greater Axis powers. The vast potentials and resources, of the oil reserves of Greater Arabia, and of the African continent combined. Without Allied assistance, Australia and New Zealand would soon fall, and then their vast mineral wealth would be under Japan’s singular control.

The Nazis too were weaving the Mysterious Threads of Sun Tzu throughout the political structures of South and Central America. Fifth Columnist and great financial influences were being brought to bear in this arena also. Germany would control the Western hemisphere, Japan the Eastern. The United States of America would be unable to sustain a protracted war against both Germany and Japan, and would capitulate. She would be isolated, between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Germany controlling one, Japan the other. The third Axis partner, Mussolini’s Italy, was given small shrift. She would be in no position to dictate terms to anyone : especially the vast militarist Empire of Japan.

In the middle of it all, strategically covering the mid-latitude section of the western Pacific approaches, and dominating the South China Sea, lay the Philippine Islands. The Pearl of the Orient. This would be their bastion of administration and control. The Chrysanthemum Throne might be the symbolic heart of power in Japan, but the Philippines would be the nucleus
of the administrative power and commerce of the new and expanded empire. Dai Nippon. To be restructured and maintained to the architecture of their own design. For the singular, primary benefit of the Kuromaku. The success of their planned 1941 Bakashin ( Great Dash Forward ) was assured. Optimism personified, beyond the bounds of logic and reality.

A worse-case scenario for the outcome of the proposed conflict was grudgingly considered by the elite Army Research Unit, under the questionable logic and auspices of their vile and ubiquitous, yet indestructible, God of Strategy : the Japanese High Command’s Chief of Planning and Operations. A singular malefic Lt. Colonel who caused, or directly contributed, to the final woes of Yamashita and his innocent contemporaries.

This study, carried out in 1940, concluded that should Germany be defeated and the Allies concentrate their military strength on the Far East campaign, their resources would be limited and they would strive for a halt to hostilities and a negotiated peace.
Japan may have to surrender control of Australia, and perhaps New Guinea, but would demand the retention of Manchuria, Korea, Formosa, the Dutch East Indies, Indochina, and the Philippines. After all, had they not freed these nations, amongst others, from the colonial bonds of their Western oppressors, and installed them, as equal partners, in their Great East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere? Were they not their Asian brothers, and their Saviours?

This opinion was held, and maintained, even as the war in Europe was lost by their Axis partners, and the conflict in Asia turned in the Allies favour. It was held and maintained up until the nuclear destruction of the home island’s cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then even beyond that point by a select cadre of the Gunbatsu’s die-hard Kodo-ha fanatics.
Unconditional surrender was not in their vocabulary. There was still a chance the war could be turned back in their favour, even after the catastrophic events of the 6th and 9th of August, 1945. At worse, a negotiated surrender on their parts. Their ultimate secret weapon would be ready within days. The first Genzai Bakudan had been completed and assembled in the vast underground Noguchi military-industrial complexes at Konan, in North Korea. But Allied intelligence knew of this fact too, which is why the final devastating blows, to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were delivered at that time and not delayed.

But that is the end of the adventure. What about the beginning? Who directed the gathering and shipping of the treasure trove, and organised its burial in the Philippines?
By the outbreak of hostilities, in the early December of 1941, there were tens of thousands of Japanese infiltrated into the Asian countries marked for conquest. From diplomatic staff to cultural attachés, from drivers to gardeners to houseboys to plantation managers to technical consultants.
In the Philippines alone, on the eve of war in 1941, there were close to 30,000 Japanese civilians, or military agents posing as such; most of whom had only arrived during the 1930’s. Hundreds of geodetic surveyors and tunnelling specialists, of the Matagumi Kaisha ( Japanese Civilian Construction Corp. ) and the 14th Area Army’s 4th Combat Engineering Regiment, were foot-slogging their way around the archipelago, identifying and assessing suitable geological anomalies and sites where the anticipated plunder of conquest could be interred and hidden.

All agents gathered information for appraisal and analysis by the military’s intelligence and planning departments. On all matters, from troop and ordnance deployments and strengths, to whom controlled the local governments and was considered to have attained any degree of wealth.
Information of every significant aspect was garnered for evaluation and later action.
No crumb of information considered too insignificant. Their agents even carried out clandestine inventories of museums and temples, of the names and locations of banks, money changers and lenders, gambling, opium and prostitution dens, gold dealers and jewellers. A Who’s Who of Everything. Who controlled what and possessed what, until they had a virtual walk-in blueprint for instant take-over occupational control. A heinous mastery and intellectual brilliance regarding organisational detail.
The main Kokuryukai master of this fine art, Yoshio Kodama, was firmly ensconced in Shanghai by the end of 1941, and directed operations for the requisition and shipping of war-related materials, from whichever recently-conquered nation, back to Japan to fuel her industrial needs, or to wherever in the Asian sphere such were required. Being a civilian, he initially encountered problems
with requisitioning the necessary means of transport from the army, or navy, or air force. A truck, or ship, or plane. So vital was his position and participation in the overall scheme of things, that a Prince-General of the Royal household, Chichibu, bestowed on him the rank of Admiral, so he could requisition whatever he required, whenever he required it.
Fascinating, on Day One of being inducted into the Japanese Imperial Navy, he became an Admiral.
The ranking hierarchy of all branches of the military machine soon learned that this was not an individual to trifle with, and were henceforth most receptive to his transport requirements. Rubber and tin were shipped from Malaya back to Japan. So too oil from Kalimantan. Industrial complexes were stripped of their equipment and repatriated to the home islands. Vital industrial metals, such as tungsten and titanium, were seized and transhipped to support the voracious war machine. And the contents of the museums and temples and banks, and private collections of fine and precious artworks of the Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere were requisitioned, confiscated, borrowed, commandeered, expropriated, seized, impounded, sequestered, forfeited, taken over, and on occasions, stolen outright. But the man in Shanghai , the scheming Admiral Kodama, had his orders, and a pressing agenda to attend to.

A very pressing agenda, and schedule too. Ships were in constant transit from the major Asian ports to the Philippines from the beginning of 1942 until early in the January of 1945. Right up until the time of the Allied invasion of Luzon.
Gold, silver, and platinum bullion. Statues of precious metals, jade, and ivory, some centuries old. Shipments of opium . Countless cases of purloined jewelleries. Artworks of every description. Cases of coins and currencies. Barrels and huge earthenware jars, filled with precious gems : cut and uncut. Cases of priceless Oriental ceramics. If it held value of any likely
significance, Prince Chichibu, the principal Jackdaw, had sanctioned its theft. They methodically looted anything and everything, as Jackdaws are apt to do.

When the Allied forces began their drive south towards Manila, in January of 1945, from their northern invasion points on the Lingayen Gulf, the old walled city portion of Manila’s Intramuros, in the citadel of Fort Santiago, was crammed with treasure trove waiting to be secreted in the deep tunnels below the fort and the adjacent Baluarte de San Diego. The naval officer in command of securing the in-coming treasures at this crucial point in history was Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi.
He was given direct orders by the Admiral in Shanghai not to let any portion of the treasure fall into the Allies hands. To remain in Manila and fight to the bitter end, until all the plunder still exposed to the light of day could be safely hidden in the tunnels below the fort, and then collapse and seal them via the medium of high explosive charges.

Iwabuchi obeyed to the letter of the word, and, in doing so, caused the ensuing carnage that destroyed the Philippine capital and caused the slaughter of a hundred thousand of its civilian inhabitants, and earned himself the due title of the Butcher of Manila. It was for Iwabuchi’s crime that Yamashita was charged and tried. But Iwabuchi, alike so many of the elite military members of the Gunbatsu, the Kodo-ha and the Kuromaku, was never caught or punished. In fact, as it was later proclaimed he was killed during the Battle of Manila, he was posthumously awarded the First Order of the Golden Kite, and promoted to Vice Admiral. For services rendered, above and beyond the call of duty.

The greater majority of the Jackdaws and the perpetrators of war crimes went uncaught, and unpunished. Most of the Gunbatsu and Kuromaku, who were tried and convicted, served minor portions of their sentences. Many, like the pervasive God of Strategy and Admiral Iwabuchi, continually slipped through the fingers of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, who were tasked with tracking down war criminals and bringing them to trial.

Some, as in the case of the two above-mentioned villains, surfaced in mainland China, in the employ of Chiang Kai-shek and his doomed Kuomintang Army. All eventually returned to Japan, once the occupational political climate had settled to a more temperate mood.

The insidious and brutal God of Strategy, Lt. Col. Masanobu Tsuji, was home by 1948, writing his memoirs, and planning a future political career. He was elected to the Diet, and took his seat, as a parliamentary member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, in the Japanese House of Representatives, in 1952.

Such was the sequel to the life of the man who designed and decreed Operation Sook Ching ( Ethnic Cleansing ), which resulted in the Chinese Massacres in Singapore, and later Malaya, with 50,000 innocent civilians dead. Who ordered the murder of 200 patients and staff at the Alexandra Hospital in Singapore on the eve of the British surrender ( For both events Yamashita was eventually to be blamed ).

The same General Command Staff officer who personally ordered the infamous Bataan Death March ( for which General Homma was tried, convicted, and executed ); the executions of the Philippines’ Chief Justice, Jose Abad Santos and his son ; the aborted murder of the future Philippine president, Manuel Roxas; and had ordered the beheading of a captured U. S. pilot in Burma, then publicly cannibalised his body.

Even after the surrender of Japan, and the occupation by the Allied armies, the Kuromaku still retained their power, albeit with a minor degree of diminished potency.

General Charles Willoughby, appointed to the position of General MacArthur’s assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence, in 1941, continued in this capacity during the occupation of Japan, until his retirement ten years later. Willoughby, a naturalised U. S. citizen, and born in Germany in 1892 under the name of Karl von Tscheppe-Weidenbach, recruited a broad selection of ex-Kempei-Tai and Japanese military intelligence officers and agents to his staff. Much as the American forces did in occupied Germany, after World War Two, in retaining the Nazi’s Abwehr military intelligence supremo, Major-General Reinhard Gehlen, as the head of their West German intelligence section.

The head of Japanese military intelligence, General Seizo Arisue, was retained, and their main agenda quickly swerved away from the pursuit of war criminals to combating the threat of communist expansionism : in Japan and Greater Asia.
Both men were utterly preoccupied concerning this issue: to the point of paranoid obsession. While Willoughby scoured Japan and the Asian region for budding communist plots and “Reds under the Beds”, alike Captain Queeg tracking down the missing strawberries, or Mohammed the Second of Turkey searching for his missing melon; his subordinate Japanese intelligence officers were busy constructing their own “Odessa” network across Asia; advising and assisting the likes of Iwabuchi and Tsuji, the God of Strategy, lobbying for the dismissal of war crimes against their Gunbatsu compatriots, and planning their covert returns to the home islands.

They established control over, and total access to, all Japanese wartime documents and files relating to the recent war; and edited, or destroyed outright, anything remotely mentioning the vast treasure hoard buried in the Philippines.
This powerful clique, under Willoughby’s autocratic banner, were able to continually, and repeatedly, thwart efforts by the U.K. War Crimes Section, based in Singapore, and its U. K. Tokyo Liaison Mission, to locate files under their control, on known Japanese war criminals; and hamper access to war criminals incarcerated in Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison.

Willoughby himself was ardently anti-British, a fact attributed by the U. K. Liaison Mission to his Germanic descent and sympathies. But the British were scrupulously persistent and diligent in their efforts to track down the war criminals, and interview those in Sugamo Prison.

The head of the U.K. War Crimes Mission, Cyril Wild, a superbly qualified British Army colonel, who had been present at the surrender of Singapore and spoke Japanese fluently, was hot on the trail of the God of Strategy. Arriving in Tokyo in September of 1946, he conducted interrogations of Lt. Col. Ichiji Sugita, the 25th Army’s intelligence chief, in Sugamo Prison over several days, before having the shackled Sugita flown to Singapore for further interrogation, and to stand trial again on additional war crimes charges.

The Sugita interviews led the British colonel to discover a multitude of highly secret documents within the Japanese War Ministry’s files, comprising of studies made soon after Japan’s capitulation, devised to function as repudiations and justifications, during anticipated war crimes trials, for the atrocities they had committed. This laid bare the duplicity of the Japanese
government to conceal and whitewash the war crimes perpetrated by their military.

It was during the scope of his current investigations that the Colonel learned Willoughby was aware of the existence of the documents discovered in the War Ministry, and had suppressed their existence and circulation.
Just as he had suppressed evidence, and employed delaying tactics, in matters concerning sought war criminals; hindering British efforts, in this sphere, at every opportune occasion. The Colonel was out for blood, and intended to pursue the issue to the lofty heights of General MacArthur’s Tokyo-based SCAP offices and Admiral Lord Mountbatten’s SACSEA High Command in Singapore if necessary : to have Willoughby relieved from his post, and establish a fresh air of transparency and honesty over the Tokyo War Crimes Section : under direct British control.

But time was running out for the intrepid British colonel. During the initial interrogations of Sugita, he had been warned that convictions for his total war crimes would guarantee a death sentenced being handed down. The Colonel was willing to cut a deal. Co-operate with the British War Crimes Mission in identifying and tracking down the top suspects on their lists and his
sentencing would be treated with leniency.

Sugita, grown cynical towards the Kuromaku and their lack of concern or remedial action regarding his present state of incarceration, realised it was becoming an urgent matter of suave qui peut. Grasping at the opportunity to avoid the gallows he agreed to assist. He commenced on a monologue that made the British officer’s head turn and his ears prick up in close, unwavering attention. Sugita could not only provide testimony regarding the God of Strategy’s connection to numerous war crimes, but also reveal where the vast riches, plundered throughout Asia by the Japanese conquering armies, were hidden.

The Colonel quickly realised Sugita wasn’t referring to an odd bar of gold bullion or a handful of jewels, but the systematic and methodical looting of high value assets and treasures throughout the course of the war, which a cabal of the Japanese military had secreted in a multitude of buried sites around the Philippines during their occupation of the islands. The Golden Lily.

By the latter end of September, the Colonel was anxious to get back to Singapore. To take up with SACSEA and Mountbatten the matter of the secret documents that Willoughby had suppressed, and push for Willoughby’s dismissal as intelligence chief. He also wished to continue his interrogations of Lt. Col. Sugita, and unravel the enigma of the fabulous treasure the Japanese had plundered, and the current whereabouts of the evasive God of Strategy and his criminal military cohorts.

He departed Tokyo on the 24th September, 1946, and arrived in Hong Kong that afternoon, en route to Singapore. He held meetings that night with the colony’s war crimes investigators. The following morning he was scheduled to travel on to Singapore, via Saigon, aboard a Royal Air Force Transport Command flight. Sitting aboard the Dakota aircraft the next morning, the 25th September, he probably chatted with fellow passenger and friend Rex Davies, one of the British prosecutors at the Tokyo war crimes trials.

The Dakota lumbered down the runway at Kai Tak Airport and took to the skies, gradually beginning its ascent over Kowloon. A few minutes after take-off the plane suffered an internal explosion, dived violently, and crashed into the Kowloon Tong hillside, resulting in a massive explosion and fireball upon impact. All on board died instantly, and the British Colonel’s accompanying vital files and notes were lost in the inferno.

Subsequent examination of the wreckage by British RAF investigators determined that sabotage had been the cause of the crash. The shadowy hands of the Kuromaku, still manipulating the strings, and weaving their Mysterious Threads. To maintain the continued liberty of their secret society comrades, their otoko no kyodai ; to protect their own anonymity, and to guard the all-consuming secrets of Yamashita’s Treasure.
Prince Chichibu’s Golden Lily. Those hallowed and immaculate Nests of the White Crane.



PROLOGUE

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