The Passenger

This is an excerpt from Tides Ebb as Islands Dream. Obviously inspired by the Iggy Pop song of the same name.

The Passenger
By the time we hit the runway for Mactan the next day, the skies had cleared and the pilot had sobered from our night of drinking Tanduay rum and Coke-a-cola. It was just a short hop over the Bohol Straight. We caught a view of “my site” on the way over. I got to admit, a chill ran through me as we passed over the group of small islands that will forever remain in my mind as “my site”. More embarrassingly to admit; there was actually a flash in my mind that these islands could be one of those Sports Illustrated kind of swimsuit photo-shoot settings with tropical beauties sitting around drinking tropical cocktails. From the plane it looked like a perfect paradise. Parts of the reef were clearly visible from the plane. Then I saw obvious grayish areas that were tell-tale signs of damage to the reef; huge areas of white dead coral and coral rubble. As the plane turned toward Mactan to land, it was still mid morning. Gow and I would have the rest of the day to ready for the following long day of overland travel.

A taxi took Gow and I from the airport to the Mayflower Pension in Cebu. It seemed like an incredibly long ride through an endless urban jungle, stanking of sewage and waste. I couldn’t smell it because the cab was air conditioned, but I could feel the stank in the rippling heat waves rising from the burning ash fault streets and the septic, trash clogged sewers that paralleled the tenements we passed. The cabby’s radio muffled out a Beatles song. Young kids at every intersection trying to sell sunglasses, fruit, jasmine flower necklaces, and whatever else. The cabby actually described his sister to me and said she was looking for an American husband. Did he expect I might really say, “Sure I’ll marry her!” Gow was on his cell phone so he missed the exchange. I said nothing and just kept fumbling with my sunglasses and trying to cope with a morning-after-rum buzz. The Beatles song ended and Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” came on the radio.

“I am the passenger
I stay under glass
I look through my window so bright…”

Traffic had us at a stand-still. A group of children raced from car to car begging for money to buy food. I watched them as if I had been watching a movie. Not feeling any real emotion at first. Just watching as if everything outside the taxi were happening on a silver screen behind a cloud of desert dust. One child approached my car door window and peered through the tinted glass gesturing that he wanted food. When he caught my eye, my movie abruptly stopped. His deep brown eyes were penetrating real and his hair gray with road dirt. The lights in my imaginary theatre flashed me back to reality and the imaginary movie projector clicked off. I turned away trying to ignore the boy. A dozen reasons why not to give him money crossed my mind. Two more scraggily kids showed up with even more penetrating stares. I reached in my pocket for some coins and realized I only had bills. Stealthily pealing one bill away from the rest without taking my hand out of my pocket, I quickly cracked open the window and slide out the bill. The first boy ran off and the other two chased him. Just as two more boys approached, traffic started moving.

The driver shot me a strange look after I closed the window. He had noticed the bill I had given the boy was a 100 peso note. Really only equal to a couple of bucks on the exchange table, but enough to buy a few meals in Cebu. He commented that I shouldn’t give money to children beggars because they are lazy and don’t go to school. He added they worked for local gangsters who take a large percentage of what they make begging. He went on about how giving people money makes them lazy, but I became disinterested and faded back into the Iggy song.

“I see the bright and hollow sky
Over the city’s ripped backside
And everything looks good tonight
Singing lala lala…”

Things made sense for a second. It is so easy to be the passenger, safe behind the glass, watching reality like watching a movie. I reflected back on my hitchhiking days and asked myself why I love to travel. Freedom came to mind, and that day I felt very free and far away from any thoughts or problems I had left back in Ohio. Feeling free in that moment had its irony. First because a passenger is never really free. A passenger is stuck in someone else’s car while another person is doing the driving. Sometimes life is like that. The other reason my momentary elation, or possibly illusion, of freedom was ironic is because that day was not just another road trip to escape the humdrum life back in Cleveland. That day was not supposed to be a vacation. I had made a two-year commitment. And commitment is not freedom. Commitment is the lose of freedom. Apprehension and excitement peaked inside me momentarily when I realized the next day I would begin living with the community to which I had made that commitment.

The cab finally reached the Mayflower. The driver gave me a slight scowl because I only tipped him 50 pesos. It was actually a good tip since the fair was only 300, but I am sure he expected more after seeing me give the money to the begging children.

Gow sorted out our rooms at the check-in desk while I stood near the air conditioner trying hard not to sweat so much. I felt a bit at Gow’s mercy since he was my “community contact” and therefore responsible for making sure I made it to site and was comfortable with any living arrangements. Gow was in the driver’s seat and making the decisions about what we doing and where we were going. I was his passenger. More accurately, Gow was my babysitter and I was like a spoiled child that might need special attention. Although I resented that feeling, I knew Gow was doing his best to make me feel comfortable. After all, I was the fish out of the fishbowl; though I felt as if I were the fish in the fishbowl, behind the glass with everyone looking in at me. I guess sometimes, perception and reality don’t match.

The following is a piece of fiction that I wrote in 2016. It is based partially on fact and partially on stories I have heard from Filipinos including my wife, Jasmen, who grow up on the island of Negros just west of Cebu Island. Some variations of this piece can be found in my novel, Tides Ebb as Islands Dream.

Stories of Yamashita’s Gold

Growing up in the mountains of Negros, it was common to hear the older folk telling stories about gold that had been buried by the Japanese during the war. There was always the cousin of somebody’s cousin who had found some of the gold or maybe knew about somebody who had found some buried treasure. More stories than gold, though, because nobody I ever knew had really seen any gold. For the kids of my generation, it was fun to listen to the stories because the older folk liked to talk, but in reality, at such a young age, we knew nothing about the war and probably had a better chance of finding the gold than finding Japan on a map.

Gold in Sibonga

I had not thought about those stories for many years, and then while traveling in southern Cebu, I serendipitously came across two locals on separate occasions who claimed to be experts on the subject of Yamashita’s gold. I met the first expert while staying in Sibonga. He was a man of few teeth, but many ideas on how to get rich. His ideas ranged from selling snake venom to finding Yamashita’s treasure. The latter caught my attention. “I am going to tell you the truth, they buried the gold in different places and there is still some gold buried here in Sibonga under the old stone pier. It is still there because the new cement pier was built right over the old stone pier.” He lost credibility with his first eight words. Often when people begin with, “I am going to tell you the truth…” the words that follow are not completely true. I asked the man how he knew the gold was there and he replied, “I am sure the gold is buried there. It must be there. I looked everywhere else.”

Even if it was true that some of the gold is still buried under the pier, the chewing-challenged old guy could offer no plausible (or legal) way of getting the gold.

Gold under Sumilon Island

A few days later at the southern tip of Cebu, I met a woman in Santander. Her grandfather was Japanese and had come to Cebu in the 1970s to start a dive shop. He had told her the story she told me:

“The stories about the gold are real. I know because my grandfather told me stories about Yamashita’s gold. My grandfather wasn’t in the war, but he had a scuba diving business and there were always Japanese coming to his shop asking about doing cave dives around Cebu. They wanted to go to specific places because they were looking for gold. Some even had treasure maps. The maps were real because they were drawn by soldiers that had made it back to Japan alive after the war.

“A group of shady men, like yakuza, came to his dive shop when it first opened. Back then, there weren’t any Japanese divers in Cebu so they had to come to my grandfather for help. At first, they said they were planning to open a hotel on Sumilon Island and they wanted my grandfather to help with a dive shop. He went there with them to explore dive sites, but they had their own plans. He saw a map, but never thought much about it.

“Then the group just left. But, they came back months later with government people and official papers. They asked my grandfather to help them translate documents and to plan some more cave dives. One night when they were drinking, one man told my grandfather that they were looking for Yamashita’s gold and they knew where it was. The others got angry about what the man had said. My grandfather told me he never saw that man again.

“My grandfather helped them do the cave dives around the island. But after, they just packed up and left again. He said they came a third time with all kinds of construction equipment and they started building a resort. For months on Sumilon Island, they were working, but the resort never got built, at least not then. My grandfather saw that they had brought hundreds of refrigerators for the resort, but the resort was only supposed to have forty rooms. During that time, President Marcos sent troops to Sumilon Island to keep it all secret, because he got a share of the gold.

“My grandfather told me the construction just stopped one day and they all left. There was no resort, but there were many holes leading to a maze of limestone caverns. They left almost all the materials they brought for the resort like bulldozers and stacks of wood. They left everything except the refrigerators. Only twenty refrigerators were left there. They took the rest because they used them to smuggle the gold back to Japan. They put the gold in the fridges and used Cojuangco’s shipping lines to get it through customs in Japan. That was part of Cojuangco’s fortune. He got a share of the gold, too. The rest of the gold went to Shin Kanemaru. He was a right wing politician that my grandfather disliked very much”

^{A US MP returns Tomoyuki Yamashita, the “Tiger of Malayasia” to his cage after a day in court while on trial for war crimes.Source: By Unknown or not provided (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via}

Weave of Fact and Fiction

General Tomoyuki Yamashita

(1885 -1946)

Known as the “Tiger of Malaysia”, Yamashita was a general in the Japanese Imperial Army. On the same day that Pearl Harbor was attacked, Lieutenant-General Yamashita launched an offensive to take control of the Malay Peninsula, which culminated with the fall of Singapore and the largest surrender of British military in history. After a promotion to general in 1943, he was sent to the Philippines in October 1944. Ten days after his arrival in the Philippines, MacArthur stayed true to his promise and returned in the historical “Leyte Landing”. The war in the Philippines raged on for several weeks after the surrender of Japan. In September of 1945, Yamashita and his remain troops surrendered. After being found guilty of war crimes during a somewhat controversial trial that lasted six weeks, he was hanged in the Philippines.

Yamashita’s Gold

It was not only gold. It is also known as Yamashita’s treasure. The terms refer to the spoils of war from looting and plundering by the Japanese Imperial Army as they pushed through Southeast Asian and China. Did it ever exist? It is more difficult to believe that there was no looting than to believe there was looting. Was the gold melted down and stored in gold bars? Were the gold and other valuables under Yamashita’s control? Were they calculatedly buried and hidden throughout the Philippine Islands? The only sure answer is that Yamashita never took them with him. However, if treasures did exist, what happened to them?

Did Marcos Get A Share of the Gold?

Most Filipinos that have heard of Yamashita’s gold will say that Marcos got his share. His wife Imelda even said so in 1992. She even said that her husband Ferdinand kept the gold secret because there was so much gold “that it would be embarrassing”. She claimed her husband hid the gold in the walls of their home, but declined to explain where the remaining gold was.

Imelda Marcos describes how her husband filled their walls with gold bullion

Did Cojuangco Shipping Lines Transport Yamashita’s Gold?

The Cojuangco Clan has been one of the richest and most influential families in the Philippines since the early 20^th century. Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco Jr. is a businessman and in 1974 invested in a joint venture to establish Filsov shipping. According to a 1991 newspaper article in the Los Angeles Times, “Under his friend and mentor, Ferdinand E. Marcos, Cojuangco amassed $1.5 billion in corporate assets through illegal monopolies and massive fraud.” The article also says, “And although it was never proved, President Corazon Aquino reportedly suspected her long-estranged cousin of a role in the 1983 assassination of her husband, Benigno S. Aquino Jr.”

Nothing about a connection to Yamashita’s gold, but enough of a coincidence to lend a possibility of truth to the Santander woman’s story.

YAMASHITA TREASURE ALL OVER THE PHILIPPINES

Did Shin Kanemaru Get a Share of Yamashita’s Gold?

Shin Kanemaru (1914 -1996) was a very right-of-center political leader for the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party. In 1993, authorities were investigating Kanemaru on tax evasion and corruption charges when they found hundreds of gold bars, cash and securities with a total value of about $50 million.

Although speculation is that the money came from campaign donations, it is not completely clear.

Haruki Murakami, the award-winning Japanese novelist, created a character for one of his novels that seems to mirror Kanemaru. In A Wild Sheep Chase, the “Boss” (like Kanemaru) was a soldier in Manchuria during WWII. The Boss plunders his way through China and amasses “an inexhaustible stash of gold and silver.” He makes it back to Japan before the Soviet invasion of China. He then uses his war booty to fund a political party and buy up advertising companies so he can monopolize the advertising industry. Any connection to Yamashita’s Gold?

Other Stories

Yes, there are more stories than gold probably; some complementary and some contradictory. That is how fact and fiction weave together. The story of the Roxas Buddha is well known and one that most people want to believe is proof the legends of Yamashita’s Gold are true.

Truth is like treasure, we sometimes find it serendipitously!!!

And if you think you know where Yamashita’s Gold is hidden, please tell us in the comments.