Buried Gold: The Hunt for Yamashita’s Treasure | Part 1
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By the mid-1940s, the tides of World War II were turning, and legend has it that desperate Japanese soldiers buried a treasure of gold and relics in the Philippines.

They took an immense amount of treasure from temples, from banks, anything they could lay their hands on. It's alleged to have included gold bars which were taken, melted down as bullion and re-stamped as Japanese gold.

Is it true that a vast treasure was buried under the Philippines during World War II? And is it still there? Or did allied victors discover and take the valuables for themselves? Or is it all just a great story? The idea that there's this vast treasure under the surface, it's just too attractive to resist. The so-called lost Japanese treasure is one of the world's great unsolved mysteries.

While the Nazi looting in Europe took the spotlight, Southeast Asia was also being systematically plundered. A vast collection of relics, antiques, artwork and importantly gold was amassed over the course of World War II. When things took a turn for the worst for Japanese forces, they are said to have desperately searched for a location to hide their priceless treasure trove.

Is this mythical plunder real? If so, what was hidden and where? And what, if anything, is left today? Japan embarked on an absolutely ruthless effort to loot every country that they occupied before and during World War II. We're talking China, Korea, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines. Nothing was safe from their soldiers.

And it's the mere prospect of discovering untold wealth that continues to bring treasure hunters to the Philippines to this day, including Klaus Dona. Four years ago, the Austrian researcher disappeared off the grid. For a time, no one knew where he was. Then, only a few of his closest friends and family were told where he had gone. The Philippines. Deep below ground.

In the time he's been there, Klaus and his team of local workers have manually dug and pneumatically drilled vertical shafts deep into the ground, about 200 feet down. Having been given exact details on where to dig by his contacts, they unearthed an already existing network of tunnels. Who originally built them is unknown, but the fact they exist 200 feet underground makes this a very real treasure hunt.

Klaus believes he's very close to reaching the Japanese treasure.

But it's not easy down in the tunnels, and he acknowledges just how dangerous it is. In the first year, we were down already in a big hole, 30 meters, and we were already very close to one big, big bunker. And the whole mountain came down because what I did not know at that time, there was huge amount of clay.

And when that material gets dry, it will very easily collapse. The Japanese were well known to use booby traps within their bunker system complexes in the defense of the Pacific Islands. The Marines and soldiers were terrified of these things, and so usually instead of dealing with it, they would just throw hand grenades in and let the grenades take care of the booby traps. The threat of death is all too real among the treasure hunters.

The digs they undertake are difficult and sometimes deadly. There are many stories around this area that people died because the tunnel collapsed through a booby trap.

Last year, three men died because they arrived at the cement area. They thought this is the final entrance to a room. And when they started with the jackhammer drilling, they hit one of the poison put in a glass inside the cement. They hit it and they all three died immediately. There is a recurring myth that the Japanese placed

cyanide bottles, brown bottles full of this deadly drug into their tunnels. The idea being that if treasure hunters came along at a later date and stuck their spade in, it'd smash the bottle and all this cyanide would be released killing them. I think this probably misunderstands how cyanide works. It also probably misunderstands the nature of these brown bottles which probably held very basic medicines that the Japanese needed to treat all kinds of everyday ailments.

By 1942, the Japanese Imperial Army had invaded much of Southeast Asia and removed many treasures as they looted Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and what was then known as Burma. Similar to what the Nazis were simultaneously doing across Europe by stealing priceless valuables en masse, this practice continued in Southeast Asia for many years.

As the Japanese advanced, they mercilessly ransacked country after country, stealing art, gold and treasures on a massive scale. They are reported to have stolen from banks, museums, temples and private collections. It was said to be unrivaled in military history, possibly surpassing even the Nazis' epic plundering. This covert operation across Southeast Asia

was codenamed Golden Lily and was headed by Prince Chichibu, the Emperor of Japan's brother. Japan had never lost a war and never surrendered in its entire history. And that brought about this extraordinary beyond arrogance in each individual soldier.

This massive plundering of Southeast Asia was intended to fund the Japanese war effort and the direction, the coordination of this huge theft went right up to the imperial household.

Prince Chichibu, who was the brother of Emperor Hirohito, codenamed this operation "Golden Lily", which actually comes from a poem that was composed by the Emperor. And under this codename, "Golden Lily", all of Japan's neighbours were being plundered systematically to fund Japanese rule in the region. If the Imperial Japanese Army had taken all of their plunder

from private collections, from banks, bullion, gold, religious relics. If they'd taken all that to the Philippines, it would have been an incalculable hoard. They were going into temples and museums and private residences and basically hoovering up the lot. And they were taking billions of dollars worth of all this treasure, of all these artefacts, possibly down to the Philippines.

Having scoured treasures from across Southeast Asia, the next step in Operation Golden Lily is to get the treasure back to Japan. Before they can do that, they first melt down the gold into easy-to-move gold bars to erase any identifying features and prevent the valuable metal from being traced back to its country of origin.

The gold is then taken to the Philippines to be inventoried before being shipped home to Japan on their massive naval fleet. But before they make it home, some of the ships carrying this treasure are sunk off the coast of the islands. This plunder was meant to fund the Japanese military machine, and they knew they would need to win with technology. And they were investing heavily in some of the most sophisticated military vessels and weapons

ever in history. We're talking about billions of dollars, maybe even a trillion dollars that the Japanese needed to fund their war effort and to fund their control of the region, which is their overall ambition. So that had to fund the massive Imperial Navy. That had to fund all those kamikaze pilots launching their suicide missions. In order to do that, they had to steal on an epic scale across all the countries in the area.

What continues to give treasure hunters hope that the great Japanese fortune still lies buried beneath the Philippines so many decades later? And how far will they go to find it? Legend has it the priceless hoard was buried in the Philippines at the end of the war.

Unconfirmed reports say the Japanese forces secured their fortunes underground and placed explosives and poisonous gas traps within the tunnels to kill anyone who dared come near. Supposedly, it has never been discovered, but there are rumors of gold and valuables having been found in the area. Many treasure hunters have descended onto the islands to find it, but so far without much success.

The total treasure was said to weigh around 6,000 tons and be worth $100 billion today. Japan's Golden Lily Project probably was entirely real. Looting systematically is a huge purpose for embarking on war in the first place. Nations go to war to gain geopolitical power and riches.

Japan officially enters World War II on the morning of December 7, 1941, with its attack on the United States' vast naval fleet. Based at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the base was struck by 353 Imperial Japanese aircraft, launched from six aircraft carriers. The Japanese damaged or destroyed over 20 ships.

and killed or wounded over 3,500 American naval personnel. President Franklin D. Roosevelt reflected, "It was a date which will live in infamy." But not long after the Japanese invasion at Pearl Harbor, the tide turned.

You've got to imagine what a huge reversal of fortune this is for the Japanese. In 1941-42, they were conquering the Pacific. They had almost taken Australia. They were on their way with Hitler to achieve global domination. And yet, in just a couple of years, the United States was pushing them all the way back across the Pacific, straight back to Japan. In June 1942,

Just six months after both sides had entered the war, the US and Japanese forces meet again at Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean. Over the span of four days, the US sinks five Japanese ships, destroys 270 aircraft, and kills 3,700 military personnel. The Japanese have lost control of the seas.

and the only way back to Japan for the survivors and their looted treasure is now blockaded by the US. It's too risky for them to ship the gold home. They need a new plan. Allegedly, they sink a number of their own ships at sea to keep the Allies from intercepting them, and decide to bury much of the treasure hoard, especially the gold, under the island of Luzon in the Philippines. The Japanese were in a tight spot.

They had all of this plunder, but if they wanted to send it, let's say, to mainland Japan, they had to risk sending a ship with the wealth of their military

out into open waters riddled with American warships, submarines. And so if you look at the complex island chain and archipelago of the Philippines, there are lots of little hiding spots, lots of little places where they could safely tuck away some treasure without it being noticed. And that may have been a much safer option than putting that out in the open where it could get sunk. In their final effort to protect the treasure, the imperial family turns to one of their most experienced generals, Tamayuki Yamashita.

The general is instructed to hide the gold, with the hope that it can be recovered at a later time, once the Japanese are victorious. He identifies over a hundred underground sites across the islands, many of which are previously existing underground networks. This was their last chance to turn the war around, and General Yamashita was sent there just to do that.

because of his skill, expertise and the fact that the troops under him held him in high, high regard. To hide all this treasure, it's entirely feasible that the Japanese may have used pre-existing tunnels dug by the previous Spanish colonial power or the Americans and possibly dug their own tunnels. But all of this, of course, to remain out of sight of the Americans in the air and local resistance.

Yamashita orders detailed maps to be made of each treasure vault, what is stored there, and how to navigate the tunnels into it, which is then carefully encoded. Unless you know the complex code, these maps are meaningless, and there are even further layers of security to defend the sites. The number of people in the know is ruthlessly kept to a minimum. But for all of Yamashita's work, the gold is still not safe.

The Japanese protected their hidden treasure locations by creating a system of treasure maps coded very elaborately based on ancient Japanese symbols which would be very difficult for anybody else to decipher.

If they were able to do so, however, there was a second line of defense in the hiding places themselves in the form of booby traps such as cyanide vials that would explode upon contact, bombs, other things rigged to kill anybody who tried to go and take what the Japanese thought was theirs. With time running out, Yamashita orders the engineers to seal the treasure vaults.

Yamashita has one last trick up his sleeve to protect the gold. The story goes that while the soldiers are carrying out his orders, Yamashita seals the vaults himself, with the engineers still inside. Now they will be its guardians for eternity.

The Japanese soldiers all knew how to basically tunnel. Every island that the Marines and Army had to take from the Japanese was filled with tunnels. These tunnels weren't for plunder. These tunnels were defensive fortifications. So they were already experts, essentially, at mining and tunneling.

Under sustained American attack, the Japanese decided to make their last stand in the valleys and the hills around northern Luzon and Baguio and retreated there with their treasure, where it's more than likely that they burrowed into those hills, creating new tunnels to hide away the bullion that they'd stolen from the region. Within three months, World War II is over. General Yamashita is put on trial for war crimes.

He takes the secrets of the gold to his grave. There is allegedly only one other person who knows of the gold's whereabouts, Prince Chichibu. But he has already died of tuberculosis before the war ended. It seems Yamashita's gold is lost forever. Yamashita never even had the chance to consider revealing the locations of the treasure after he was captured because he was executed by the American government.

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Today, dozens of people are on the islands trying to discover the elusive treasure, but so far, without much success. One of those who has dedicated their life to finding the gold and treasures is Austrian historian and researcher Klaus Donoff. Based on insider information from the locals, he and his team have targeted one village of particular importance.

Across the site, they have dug four vertical shafts deep into the earth, some nearly 200 feet. We are not allowed to reveal the locations of his shafts, nor the information he has gleaned from the locals. But he is sure he's close. It's dark and treacherous. The threat of death is all too real. The most dangerous moment is coming when we open one of the chambers.

because if there would be some dead people inside, we have to expect gas, which would hit our workers and of course me too. So we prepared already gas masks and then we have to be very careful because I'm sure that in the rooms you will find explosives.

If we find gold bars, we have to be very careful because I got information that some of the gold bars have a poison on top of the gold bars. That means if you would touch them with your plain hands,

With thousands of treasure hunters all over the Philippines taking great risks, tunneling, excavating,

So far what's been found? Very little. But maybe someday in the future, somebody will find the hoard, the big one. Although Klaus hasn't made a great discovery yet, there was one infamous finding by a local that has been documented. In 1970, Filipino locksmith and amateur treasure hunter, Rogelio Rojas, obtained a permit to excavate a particular site in Baguio, in the north of the country.

Why he chose that site is unclear, but he was reported to have dug underground for many months before uncovering an existing network of tunnels. As he dug further, there were reports of him finding weapons, a wireless radio, and the skeletal remains of Japanese soldiers.

After several weeks, he broke through a concrete floor to a lower-level chamber where it's said he discovered a large quantity of wooden boxes, each one about the size of a beer crate. When he opened one of the crates, he found 24 gold bullion bars. Rojas also claimed to have discovered a golden Buddha whose head tilted back to reveal several handfuls of uncut diamonds.

Now imagine that you've been searching for this for years, this is your passion, and you finally find this. This is a once in a lifetime epic find. He just hit the jackpot. His bucket list was complete. You can imagine how ecstatic he would have been.

After all that digging in dusty tunnels, tunneling his way in the dark, Rogelio Rojas, that moment of wonder where he finds those 24 gold bars and the gold Buddha, you know, he's finally found the enigmatic treasure buried by the Japanese all those years ago. Rojas made no effort to conceal what he claims was a major find. He posed with the golden Buddha for at least one newspaper photographer.

and it's reported that he showed it to several potential buyers. During the following weeks, Rojas is said to have sold seven of the 24 gold bars.

He did this during a time when Ferdinand Marcos was dictator of the Philippines. And Marcos had issued an edict stating that all treasure hunters needed to get permission from him in order to go searching. Well, Rojas had not done this. Ferdinand Marcos sent his henchmen to knock on this guy's door and hauled him off to prison. On April 5th, 1971, men in uniform came to Rojas' house.

They showed a signed search warrant issued by the local judge, a member of the Marcos family. And they inspected his house. They attacked his brother with their rifles and terrorized his family. They came to our house in Aurora Hill. They raided our place. They get our personal things, Philippine money, the Golden Buddha, and the gold bars. They take everything.

We were a happy family before and after they destroyed our family circle. My dad told us that everyone of our family, they will kill. We ran away almost half day to walk to go to the mountain. I stayed at the mountain almost seven years. I'm six years old at the time. We don't have any parents because my dad they put in jail almost two years.

He was held captive and told to sign an affidavit that the raid on his home was performed in a peaceful manner. There is a paper they want to sign. My dad don't like to sign that paper. They tortured my dad. They put an electric shock inside the body and they hit my dad. My dad has a big black eye.

They beat him so badly about the face that he lost his eyesight in one eye and he was just a completely broken man. Everything for years and years he had strived for he had finally achieved success and now he was just completely physically and emotionally demoralized.

This myth of buried treasure evidently got around. There were local people in the Philippines who looked for this treasure, and there's at least evidence of one individual who found something. Roger Rojas was digging in the area. He found a cave. It contained apparently a fabulous gold Buddha filled to the brim with diamonds and some gold bars, which he took and he attempted to sell.

Once the authorities got wind of his discovery, his whole life was turned upside down. His house was raided, it was cleared by the authorities, he was taken into custody, he was imprisoned by the state and, you know, he was left very much as a broken man as a result of finding this treasure.

It is alleged that Ferdinand Marcos hired some experienced mining operatives to search for and find the lost Japanese treasure, and especially the gold bars.

Marcos clearly wanted in on this treasure. He hired an individual called Bob Curtis, who claimed to be very experienced at this sort of thing, who went out and came back and said, "Look, I found gold bars. I found gemstones. I found statuary." Bob Curtis and Charles MacDougall are very interesting characters, very credible characters. They claim that they have seen the treasure and they put a very convincing case forward. The only problem is that they

don't produce any photographic evidence and that's really where the question mark is left hanging in the air. Interestingly,

The case of Roger Rojas is perhaps the one piece of this story which is documented in legitimate historical evidence. And that is in the records of a trial that was held in the Hawaiian Supreme Court 20 years after Rojas found his treasure when he brought suit against the Marcoses for violation of his human rights for the torture that he was subjected to when he was imprisoned.

In February 1986, Ferdinand Marcos was deposed and fled with his wife Imelda to Hawaii under U.S. protection. He allegedly carried suitcases full of gold bullion bars and massive amounts of bullion certificates.

During President Marcos's trial in 1993, American mining experts testified that Ferdinand Marcos had shown them a solid gold Buddha statue with a removable head, as Rogelio Rojas had described. It also matched the photograph of the Buddha with Rojas in 1971. They also testified that they were asked to help with the remelting of gold bullion and removing any trace elements that might reveal the country of origin.

Was this the treasure that Rojas had found? Rojas again tried to press charges of bodily harm and the theft of his gold, diamonds, and the Buddha. A series of legal actions followed in Hawaii, culminating in a staggering jury verdict in 1996, awarding Rojas $22 billion.

A Hawaiian court conclusively decided that Rojas had discovered gold treasure buried in a cave in the Philippines and that the Marcoses had taken it from him wrongly. But nothing has ever been paid to either Rojas or his family. We're waiting for the justice since 1986 until now. Rogelio Rojas died a broken man in 1993.

Klaus Dona has now spent over four years on his hunt for the Japanese treasure, funded by his own money and research efforts. He and his team have excavated four large vertical shafts down to about 200 feet into the earth.

He claims that he was given exact details on where to dig and they uncovered a large tunnel network. Who built them and why is unknown, but the fact that the system exists 200 feet below ground makes this a very real treasure hunt. He still believes in absolute secrecy and maintaining security. Of course you have to be very quiet

You can only talk with really trusted people because once you open the possibility that people might try to rob what you found or even to kill you, that possibility of course is there. Researcher and writer Andrew Goff is a self-confessed mystery enthusiast.

He has spent years investigating the mystery of the Japanese gold. He believes that much of the treasure is still hidden underneath the Philippines. He's a friend of Klaus Dona and has visited him at his excavation site before.

I've been passionate about the Philippines and the legend of the Japanese who looted 12 Asian countries. The question being, did they take that loot and bury it in the Philippines? Is that fact or is that fantasy? So over the course of a number of years, I had reached out to Klaus Dana. He'd completely gone off grid.

Nobody had heard from him other than the rumor that he was someplace so spectacular that he couldn't leave. There's different kinds of sites, right? There's sites that have just

football pitch chamber full of gold bars, but there's also something called Imperial Treasure. What's that and which one do you think that you're close to? I'm sure that we are working on two Imperial Treasure sites because on the way we had a lot of poopy traps. The most dangerous was always the cyanide. They were putting cyanide in glass

And they put the glass inside the cement. I know what I'm doing because with 70 years, I would not be four years here digging in knowing that I'm spending my time for nothing. I hope for me that we find also many interesting very old artifacts. Now we are really close and now we are breaking. But some believe that the treasure has already been removed from the islands.

by one of the greatest superpowers in the world. The Japanese general tasked with hiding and booby-trapping the loot, Tamayuki Yamashita, was tried and hanged by an American military tribunal in February 1946. He took many secrets to his grave, including the maps and specific contents of the treasure. Even today, dozens of people are on the islands trying to uncover it.

But so far, few discoveries have been reported. Skeptics have questioned if the plunder is still located within the Philippines. Perhaps the victorious American forces discovered the underground chambers and took everything for themselves. Or is it just a fantastic story with no proof to back it up? It's said that 175 or more sites were created

Japanese soldiers, prisoners of war were conscripted to dig these things, to move all the treasure in, and then to climb in after it to face their death because they knew too much about what was hidden there. Eventually, General Yamashita's driver and right-hand man, Major Kojima, was tortured and allegedly revealed 176 treasure sites in the Philippines.

There is a fascinating story that Major Kojima was interrogated by a Filipino called Santa Romana. And Santa Romana goes in very hard on Kojima. He's really rough with him. He's trying to find out where those tunnels, where that treasure is. At some point, somebody called Edward Lansdale, who's working for U.S. intelligence,

comes into the room and tries a different tack. Santa Romana's strong-arm tactics haven't worked. Edward Lansdale simply offers Kojima a cut of the action, a commission, if the treasure can be revealed. Well, that seems to change the whole atmosphere, and Kojima starts talking. You know, one might say that loyalty would have prevented Kojima from revealing where the treasure was.

But if Kachima knew that the war was basically done, and he was sort of looking to what lies next on the horizon for him personally, if I was in his shoes, I probably would have told where the treasure was. I would have taken the cut, as they say. There is a strong belief that the American soldiers did find out about the hidden treasure in the Philippines, and that through torture and tunneling, they managed to find it.

According to reports, the treasure turned out to be worth an absolute fortune. The claims are that a secret fund was set up by the Americans called the Black Eagle Trust. It provided very secret but very substantial funding to all manner of covert projects over the next 50 years. These are alleged to have included campaigns against the Russians in the Cold War, the drug barons in South America,

More recently, Al-Qaeda and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But there is no concrete proof this trust really existed.

There's a very well-established conspiracy that the American CIA operatives set up an epic slush fund called the Black Eagle Trust to be used to fund covert activities in support of anti-communism and the Cold War generally throughout the world, beginning in the 1950s supporting the Korean War, in the 1980s supporting Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra crisis, and

According to these theorists, they do not specify, but it's enough further action to fill several volumes. If the story is true that the Americans used all these assets to fund covert anti-communist activities around the world, the question has to be asked, was there anything left for the Marcoses? While the Black Eagle Trust may or may not be real, in the Philippines, Klaus Donner firmly believes the treasure is still there.

and that he is on the verge of discovering it.