X marks the spot

Sukkhai Panyareaunkaew remembers joking with her boyfriend, an Imperial Japanese Army officer, about gems from Myanmar (Burma).

“He would say, ‘Do you want some sparkling gems from Burma? Shinier than sticky rice.’ And I’d say, ‘Can I eat them?’ and we’d both laugh,” she recalled, sitting in her home 280 kilometres northwest of Bangkok near the Burma border.
Sukkhai was a 15-year-old ethnic Karen girl selling kanom, a Thai sweet, when the Japanese Imperial Army marched in, 60,000 prisoners of war and about 100,000 Asian slave labourers in tow, to build the Burma-Siam railway.
Her mother grew concerned by all the attention the soldiers paid her daughter, so she arranged for her to be an officer’s girlfriend. His name was Sanjo, Sanjio or something like that, Sukkhai can’t remember for sure.
That was a long time ago and like the Japanese language she spoke quite well, the 79-year-old says she has forgotten a lot. The gems, however, she remembers.
Gold, on the other hand, she does not remember him talking about. But in subsequent years she has heard the persistent rumours that the Japanese hid great quantities of it during their retreat in 1945. Just five kilometers south of her home is Lejia cave, the site of much speculation and gold digging.
Senator Chaowarin Latthasaksiri of Ratchaburi said in a short telephone conversation that he does not talk with Thai newspapers now because of all the crazy news reported during his own search in 2001.
But, in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur, dpa, he admitted he is still a believer and is still looking.
“The project never stopped, never had a holiday,” he said.
Chaowarin still visits Lejia cave himself on occasion, and has a 15-man team searching the labyrinth of interconnecting passageways in the mountain there. He is the best known of many treasure hunters.
In December 1995 and January 1996 he led a large team that turned up a lot of dirt but no treasure, but he was back in April 2001, six months after six treasure seekers suffocated in Lejia cave. That time Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra visited the sight and promised to help.
Chaowarin and Thaksin promised to use the treasure to pay off the substantial national debt, and the country was behind them. Well, at least one poll released after Thaksin’s visit showed 62 per cent of Thai people believed in the treasure.
None materialized, Thaksin went quiet and the public stopped listening to “I’m not crazy” Chaowarin. But legends of hidden treasure are hard to kill, and there is much fact behind the rumours of Japan hiding looted goods at the end of the war.
Such talk is almost a national pastime in the Philippines, where it’s called “Yamashita’s Gold” after the commanding officer who surrendered to American forces there. But only after he buried billions in war loot, the story goes. And there is a lot of compelling evidence the Japanese did loot the treasures, both government and personal, in many of the countries they occupied.
Sterling and Peggy Seagraves in Gold Warriors go into great detail how, where and why the Japanese hid gold and other treasure.
Their book deals mostly with the Philippines, but in an e-mail response to questions about Burma and Thailand, Sterling Seagraves said: “Obviously, the ‘Death Railway’ would have been used to move stuff to Bangkok, where Golden Lily (the Japanese organisation in charge of moving treasure) would have moved it on by sea, while individual officers would have found places to stash what they’d come back for after the war.”
But he said Japan moved most goods out of Myanmar by sea, not by what became known as the “Death Railway” because of the POWs and Asian slave labourers who died building it.
There have also been reports of some Japanese searching for buried treasure in parts of Myanmar, including the Mon state, which borders on Thailand’s Kanchanaburi province.
Nagase Takashi, 89, was an interpreter based in the province with the Japanese military police during the war. Since the war’s end he has worked tirelessly to repair wounds and make amends for the damage his country caused.
He has visited Kanchanaburi more than 100 times since the war, setting up scholarship programs for locals, and building shrines for the many Japanese who died during the war but whose bodies were not retrieved.
On a visit last February he said he didn’t believe in the gold rumours. But, he added, some soldiers did hide their samurai swords and war loot along the railway after the surrender. “That was the treasure,” he said. “But they came back and retrieved them.”
Nagase has made a point of building and visiting shrines to the Japanese war dead still in Thailand. One of them is four kilometres from Sukkhai’s house. Perhaps her officer boyfriend is there.
He committed ceremonial “seppuku” suicide in a cave after Japan surrendered, Sukkhai later learned.
So he can’t put the rumours to rest. And in the absence of fact, rumour thrives, and when gold is part of the story it dies harder still.