The Mystery of Yamashita's Map

Chapter Five

Lisa and the professor sat across from each other in the University canteen, staring into their respective cups of steaming beverage: Lisa with hot chocolate, the professor camomile tea. For at least ten minutes neither had said a word to the other and the only sound they heard was the dull roar of a fairly busy restaurant: people coming and going, plates being stacked, the buzz of voices as people made their way to their tables. The professor held his cup in both hands and circled it in his saucer; Lisa occasionally dipped a little finger into the liquid, pulled it out covered in chocolate and licked it — more for something to do than actually wanting to taste it. The full meaning of their discovery of the morning had not sunk into either of their minds but it kept circling them. Suddenly, breaking the silence, the professor spoke: ‘Of course, this could be the making of us.’ Lisa did not answer.

‘The mystery of Yamashita’s gold has puzzled experts for years, ever since his death in 1946. There were rumours of what he had done but no one has ever authenticated it.’

‘Do you think we can? Do you think this does?’ she asked.

The professor lowered his eyes. ‘The romantic in me says yes. The scholar says no. After all, what have we but a map that purports to be from a captain we are not sure exists from a time and battalion we don’t know existed in a place we don’t know?’

Lisa stirred her chocolate. ‘But the girl, uncle, the girl was murdered for that map. And those men, why would they do that to your apartment if it wasn’t important, if they didn’t think you were on to something?’

The professor thought, ‘Yes, of course you are right.’ Then he slapped his head. ‘Anderson! Why didn’t I think of him first?’

‘Who’s Anderson?’

‘An expert on Japanese military history. He’s an Englishman, his family moved over here about twenty years ago. They moved back and he stayed here. I’m sure he’d know if there were any truth in the stories or the map.’

‘But where is he, uncle? Is he far away?’

Her uncle chuckled to himself. ‘About a hundred yards,’ he said, and pointed in the direction of the corridor.

Lisa and her uncle set off down the corridor. Lisa expected them to turn right into the stairwell that led to the history department. She stopped at the top of the stairs and waited for her uncle but to her surprise he wandered straight past her and carried on down the hall. Lisa sighed to herself. She was used to her uncle’s little inconsistencies. She was used to him not knowing what day it was or that he had put on the wrong shirt with the wrong tie but, she thought to herself, considering all the time he had been at the university she might have assumed that he knew his way around.

‘Uncle!’ she called after him. ‘The history block is on 2B.’

Her uncle shuffled ahead and turned back to face her. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But maintenance is on 3F.’

Lisa was taken aback for a moment but eventually followed her uncle.

The door was barely noticeable among the discarded waste paper baskets and the old vending machines that stood around like open bodies in a graveyard, their bright lights dimmed by time and neglect. On the floor, wires and sockets and tape and all manner of things stuck to their feet at every step. Lisa carefully picked her way through it all.

‘Uncle,’ she said. ‘What the hell are we doing here?’

Her uncle stopped by a tiny blue door that was no bigger than himself. He turned round and put his finger to his lip.

‘Quiet, he is often asleep.’ Gently, the professor knocked on the door and listened. Nothing. He tapped again and still nothing. Then, slowly, Lisa began to hear a shuffling. It was slight at first and then got louder and louder until, after a series of locks were pulled back, opened and set free, a small face appeared at the door, blinking in the sunlight like a mole.

‘Yes?’ it said.

The professor answered him. ‘Anderson, it’s Okada. I am after some information.’

Anderson was about thirty-five years of age, with brown hair that fell about his shoulders, a small goatee beard and eyes of deepest blue that would flash as he talked enthusiastically about this general or that battle. Lisa guessed he was a janitor at the university but was not sure; he could well be a professor, or he could be from the street. They entered his room and the first thing she noticed was the smell: a mixture of patchouli oil and sweat. In the corner was a huge stack of books, some in Japanese, some in English, some in Cantonese. On a table in the middle of the room was a typewriter, a pipe and an ashtray full of ash. Towards the back of the room was a chair that had obviously been recently vacated.

As if asking for an audience with a dignitary, Lisa and her uncle shuffled towards Anderson. He asked if they wanted any tea but they declined.

‘What can I do for you?’ he asked in a clipped English accent that seemed to belie the state of the room and himself.

The professor was obviously quite nervous, the first time Lisa had seen him so ever since she had been old enough to notice. He fiddled with his hands and stammered his words.

‘Well, my niece and… er… I are… — this is my niece by the way, Lisa — are completing a little project on… er… Japanese military history…’

Anderson sat down. ‘You’re a rocks man aren’t you? Geology?’

‘Yes, yes, er… usually I’m a geologist but I have come into some er… information that I thought you might be able to help us with.’

‘Information, eh?’ Anderson seemed intrigued. ‘Carry on. Carry on.’

‘Well,’ the professor said. ‘Well, we’d like some information on Yamashita.’

‘The General?’

‘Yes, the General.’

‘Why? What have you found out, professor?’

The professor looked coy. He obviously was not going to give anything away even though he felt he trusted Anderson. ‘Well, just some things, it may be nothing. I just want it validated.’

Anderson looked at Lisa and back at the professor. He stood up and crossed the room to where a large filing cabinet sat. Thoughtfully he pulled out a huge set of keys and began searching through them. Finally he found the one he was after and placed it in the lock of the filing cabinet. Lisa heard the separate locks on all of the drawers spring open. Anderson opened the top drawer and searched inside. Eventually he brought out a smooth white Sake bottle which he carried back to the table. He poured himself a cup.

‘Professor?’ he offered but the professor declined. He did not offer Lisa any.

Anderson sat back and drank. ‘At the end of the war,’ he said, ‘The Japanese were well aware of what fate had in store for them. Like the Nazis in Europe they had counted upon winning in order to cover up their activities. It’s not so uncommon really; there are new rules in war, not no rules. People live differently, they live from day to day, they are not answerable to anyone. As early as 1936 Hirohito had been plundering the areas around South East Asia. He knew a war was coming and in order to defeat the Americans he would need might — money and might. So began what was known as Kin no yuri, named incidentally, after one of Hirohito’s poems, or Operation Golden Lily in English, that, erm… acquired all the gold they could in the areas that they had conquered. They must have amassed millions, in fact so much that the only thing they could do was bury it and wait until they needed it.’

‘So they began all this before the war?’ Lisa asked.

‘Sure, they had been doing it for years. You have heard of the Rape of Nanking; well, that was purportedly part of the operation. Whole areas were decimated, art treasures were stolen, religious artefacts, money stored in banks, the wealth of ancient families. Everything was taken. There was even a rumour that many of the Netherlands’ national treasures had been moved to the Dutch Indies (which of course is now Indonesia) prior to the war for safe keeping. They thought moving them there would remove them from the path of the Nazis. However, they were, ironically, stolen by the Japanese. The whole area was stripped; there was virtually nothing left.’

‘What happened to it?’

‘Well, as I said, much of it was buried since there was no chance of selling it.’

‘Why?’

‘Think about it. You have half the world’s gold reserves sitting in your back garden. If you sell it, not only will your rather nefarious past catch up with you sooner or later but, more to the point, the price of gold goes down the pan; you literally flood the market, making what you have got virtually useless. Hirohito and his advisers knew that if their scheme was to be worth anything in the long run they had to store it somewhere, so that’s what they did. The Emperor did not trust anybody so he got his brother, Prince Chichibu to oversee the whole operation. He was the ideal choice as he was educated in Oxford University in England, hell, he even once had dinner with Adolf Hitler.’

Anderson was enjoying sharing his information with the professor, it wasn’t often that he got the chance to discuss Japanese military history outside of class. ‘They dug huge complex tunnel systems in the Philippines and stored the gold underground.’

‘They got the army to dig?’

‘At first, but the gold kept on coming and coming. Imagine it, it must have been a nightmare. You desperately need gold, cash, so you steal it from largely defenceless countries. You’re happy now, you have all the money you want, but you can’t stop once you’ve started, you have to keep on going. Pretty soon, you have more than you need and, finally, you have more than you can handle. The more holes you dig to put the gold in the more the gold comes flooding in from all over your territory. You need more holes but now you haven’t got the manpower — most of your soldiers are fighting in Burma or on the borders of India. So what do you do? You take slaves, you take prisoners of war, civilians though, and make them dig the tunnels.’

‘It’s chilling,’ Lisa said.

‘It makes perfect sense when you think about it. You are getting the very people you stole the gold from in the first place to dig the holes. It has the kind of perverse logic that I associate only with military minds. Anyway, as the war progressed this situation carried on. The more they stole, the more tunnels they dug, the more they had to make slaves of the native Filipinos. When they had finished with a tunnel they would simply blow it up leaving whoever was inside to die. No one quite knows how many died like this but it must have run into hundreds, perhaps even thousands.’

‘So,’ Lisa began. ‘Who was Yamashita?’

‘Well, to be honest he was just another general whose operation this was. He was no more or less barbaric than any of them; his story happens to be the one that has become famous because of his public execution. Just before the war ended Hirohito ordered a massive surge in operations and a huge percentage of the Japanese army was dedicated to burying gold and artworks. However, this time it was not to store in order to provide money to fight the Americans but to cover up their activities during the last five years. You see, all of this wealth could not only be used for reparations and the like but it also meant evidence of war crime. Put it this way — it was the embarrassing dust that the Empire wanted to brush under the carpet.’

Anderson poured another cup full of Saki and gulped it down. ‘People have been looking for Yamashita’s gold for years, ever since it was buried. Some of it has been found, but no one actually knows how much was actually hidden. Rumour has it that the Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos found most of it. There could be troves still out there.’

‘Why? Where would you look? I mean there’s only jungle there, no one left to talk about it, no maps.’ The professor said the last word with hesitation. He studied the look on Anderson’s face.

‘You haven’t any information in that line, have you, professor?’

The professor looked the picture of innocence. ‘Of course not, dear Anderson, I am merely interested in your tales.’

Anderson suddenly became as white as the bottle of Saki that he held within his thin bony fingers. ‘Because it would be bad news, professor, to try and recover any of the gold.’

‘Why?’

‘The aswang.’

‘What is that?’ Lisa asked.

‘The spirits of the Filipinos — best not tarried with if you ask my opinion. I have seen things that would make you age twenty years in five minutes where the aswang are concerned. They enter the body and can manipulate you from inside. They can appear in any form they choose, and they do not take kindly to their habitat being invaded.’

Suddenly the professor thought about the dreams he had been having — the smoke, the feeling of oppression, the smell, the darkness and the terror. He swallowed hard and tried to pull himself together. ‘So Yamashita’s gold would be in the Philippines?’ he asked, rather overstepping his own mark of secrecy.

‘Yes,’ Anderson said.

There was silence.

‘You have got something, haven’t you?’

The professor looked around the room. He crossed over and pressed an ear to the door then returned to his seat at the table.

‘We have come into possession of a map, of the location of Yamashita’s gold.’

To their surprise, Anderson burst out laughing. He rocked forward in his seat, holding his stomach and showing his brown crooked teeth. For the first time since she had arrived Lisa wondered whether she could trust Anderson, he seemed duplicitous all of a sudden. For a brief moment he looked ugly in the half-light of the room with the darkness making shadows on his face and causing his skin to appear more and more wrinkled. Perhaps it was the way he threw his head back but, to Lisa, he suddenly became the laughing face of a demon.

Anderson stopped finally and allowed himself to calm down. ‘Please excuse me, professor, but it was the seriousness with which you said that you had a map. Honestly, I don’t think there is a day goes past without someone saying to me that they have a map to Yamashita’s gold. I mean, you are an intelligent man, you are a scholar; I am surprised you are fooled by such ridiculousness.’

The professor looked placid and stared at Anderson. ‘You know of Amichi?’

Anderson thought. ‘Yes, yes, I have heard the story. Wait a minute.’

Again he crossed over to the filing cabinet but this time he opened the drawer second from the top. It was filled with manila files and sheaves of dirty yellowing paper. He flicked through them, eventually stopping on one in particular. He looked at it surreptitiously, then pulled it from the cabinet. He crossed the room and slammed it on the table.

‘Amichi, Captain, served under General Yamashita, 1943 to 1945 when he went missing, believed to have been killed.’

Lisa gasped. ‘Killed?’

‘Yes. It was thought that he was killed by Filipino workers in 1946 after Yamashita himself had been hanged in the prison.’

‘Was there any proof of this?’ the professor asked.

‘Only a body. Is that who you are after, professor? A dead man?’

The professor thought for a moment. ‘His death comes as no surprise to me,’ he said slowly. ‘But the time of it does. You see, we were under the impression that he died only recently. His granddaughter, you see…’

‘His granddaughter?’

‘Yes, his granddaughter. It was she who gave me the map.’

Anderson looked interested all of a sudden. ‘Who is his granddaughter?’

‘You heard of the girl in the temple?’

‘The one recently who was found dead?’

‘Yes, the very same.’

‘But it’s impossible. Amichi died in 1946 after Yamashita.’ ‘Did they ever identify the body?’

‘No, of course not. He was merely a captain and besides they would not have let his body return home. They would have scattered it in the jungle as punishment.’

‘So it’s possible it was not him and that our Amichi was alive and well and managed to smuggle a map of the gold tunnels out?’

Anderson thought for a moment. ‘Well, of course it’s possible,’ he said. ‘But it’s highly unlikely.’

‘Well,’ the professor said. ‘I’ll settle for possible.’ He got up to leave. ‘Good day, Anderson. Thank you for your information.’

‘Wait!’ Anderson grabbed his arm. ‘Have you got the map?’

The professor smiled and tapped his pocket. ‘Always,’ he said.

‘Can I see it?’

The professor hesitated; he looked across at Lisa who nodded slightly. The professor reached a hand into his coat pocket and pulled out the map. He spread it on the table. Anderson looked at it intently.

‘Well, it looks as though it’s about the right age. Obviously I can’t recognise any of these features.’

‘What would you suggest?’ the professor asked.

‘For finding it? Hmm, well, it will be difficult whatever you do. If I were you I’d hire a plane to take you all over the jungle to look for these distinguishing features — look, here there is a ridge and a small hillock, there is a distinctive collection of large trees. They will be still there — it is a remote place, there would be no loggers around there.’

Anderson poured the last of the Saki into his cup. ‘You know, professor, for my help I might ask for a little… er… restitution.’

‘Now or later?’ the professor asked.

Anderson laughed. ‘What with the aswang and the jungle I’d prefer it now if you don’t mind. For you there may not be a later.’ He laughed again and the sight of his teeth sent shivers down Lisa’s spine. The professor opened his wallet and took some notes out. He placed them on the table, picked up the map and put it back into his pocket.

‘Don’t drink it all at once,’ he said and Anderson laughed.

As they turned to go Anderson stopped them. ‘Professor,’ he said. ‘Be careful of the jungle. It bites.’

The professor and Lisa made their way along the corridor again to the canteen. Their talk with Anderson had made them all the more eager to find out all they could about the map and possibly even find the gold for themselves. They chatted casually about what might happen and their feet made short sharp tapping sounds on the floor. They passed the stairwell and headed off back into the refectory. Behind them a pair of deep brown eyes watched them from the level of the floor. As the professor and Lisa opened the door to the busy University restaurant, the eyes revealed themselves to belong to Kono, one of Tanaka’s men. He slowly and silently travelled up the stairs and made sure Lisa and the professor were out of sight before making his way along the corridor to the door that he had just seen them exiting from.

Anderson opened the door. ‘Have you forgotten it all already?’ he said, thinking that it was the professor at the door but his words were cut short by a hand to the throat that nearly lifted him off the ground. Kono barged his way in to the small room, knocking the small Saki bottle from the table.