My Samurai Sword: A Master's Blade?

   

I am extremely pleased, to say the least, that I found a Japanese samurai sword on one of my expeditions in the Philippine mountains in the 1980’s.  I often wonder how the sword was lost; its owner was one of the thousands of Japanese troops who occupied the Philippine islands during World War II.    Did he die violently in combat?  Or simply succumb to a tropical disease-- with the sword left in a cave for me to find.

I carefully feel its razor-sharp blade and morbidly speculate about how many people have died from a blow.  I look at the writing on the tang and wonder if it is a 14th century work of a great Japanese sword master— or simply a 20th century manufactured blade.  I have done a great deal of reading on samurai swords and am fascinated with the long history of sword veneration in Japan.  

I fantasize about finding a famous centuries- old sword, one made by the 14th century master sword maker Masamune.   Swords produced by Masamune were reportedly the strongest and sharpest ever made, even compared with those made by old masters in Europe.  One 19th century French treatise on Japanese art described these Koto-era Japanese swords as the most beautiful the world has ever produced; it further noted that swords made in Damascus, Syria and Toledo, Spain the efforts of children compared to Japanese swords.

The era of Japanese sword masters peaked in the 14th century. By the 17th century, the secrets of the old masters were lost, and no one had been able to recreate the quality of the old Koto swords.   A skilled Koto sword master took months to make a single blade.

A sword started out its life as a long piece of unattractive steel. It was heated then hammered and folded scores of times.  Layer upon layer of steel was pounded and forged by the master into unparalleled strength and sharpness.  Old famous swords had mystical qualities about them— similar in western culture to King Arthur’s Excalibur.

Romance aside, the blades were foremost killing machines with a dark history. Reportedly, some notable historic blades had a number etched on the tang signifying the number of men the sword could hack through with one forceful stroke. The bodies of dead, and sometimes live, prisoners or criminals, were lined up like cord wood for the test.

While the 14th century samurai sword was, in its time, a high-tech battlefield weapon, the samurai sword in the hand of the 20th century Japanese soldier was less glorious.   For the Japanese foot soldier in World War II, the sword was a symbol for leading suicidal banzai charges and a means of brutal execution of prisoners of war, both civilian and military.

During World War II, Japanese imperial army officers and senior NCOs were issued mass-produced inferior swords, which most carried into combat; however, some soldiers chose to carry personal or family blades.  Imperial army regulations forbade the use of family blades, but officials looked the other way if they had military issue scabbards and handles.

The only way to tell if a sword is truly old and valuable is to remove the handle and see the tang beneath it.  Removing the handle is a complicated process— but necessary to determine the sword’s origin.  Etched on the tang would be the family name and, more importantly, the name of the master who produced it.

I’ve never had the tang of my sword analyzed to see if it is by a famous master.  I guess deep down, I’ve never really wanted to know.

The Marcos Legacy: Still Poison After All These Years

   

It is amazing after all these years that the Marcos’s continue to drag the Philippine people through the muck, tarnishing their image on the world stage.  My novel  Steel’s Treasure weaves characters from the Marcos regime and their poisonous corruption  with the book’s protagonist Capt. William Steel’s  quest for lost WW II Japanese treasure.  

I wasn’t surprised, more embarrassed for the Filipino people, when recently, Imelda Marcos’ former aide, Vilma Bautista, appeared in court in NYC charged with illegally selling a Monet painting.  Apparently, several more famous paintings were found in Bautista’s apartment.   Bautista was attempting to unload them for tens of millions of dollars and had reportedly stolen them from Marcos’s Upper East Side townhouse —sometime after the dictator’s fall from power. 

 The paintings are yet another reminder of the Marcos’s long legacy of stolen wealth.







Along with the Bautista article was press on the deteriorating condition of Imelda’s shoe collection housed in a special museum in Marikina, Manila. It seems insects and moisture are destroying the shoes.   For years now, photos of the thousands of pairs of Imelda’s designer shoes have been synonymous with the Marcos’s decade’s long rape and pillage of the Philippine economy.

     

  

  

My involvement with the Marcos’s came as a young U.S. Air Force captain stationed in the Philippines.  I was assigned to 13th Air Force at Clark Air Base and in February 1986, watched firsthand, as the Philippine “People Powered Revolution” overthrew the Marcos regime.   Behind the scenes, at the 13th Air Force command center, I read the frantic cables between Washington and the Marcos’s trying to figure out how to solve the crisis. 

Clark Air Base F-4's in the 1980's

  
The U.S. urged Marcos to leave peacefully and not use his military and violence to suppress the demonstrators.   Washington sent Clark-based fighter aircraft in low level “shock and awe” flights over Manila, hoping that the roar of the jet engines would persuade Marcos that U.S. military forces were supporting the opposition.   Finally, after calls from President Reagan, who had a close relationship with the Marcos’s – Ferdinand, Imelda and family agreed to leave the country. 

     They were flown by U.S. helicopter to Clark.  An Air Force security police buddy of mine helped the Marcos’ off of the helicopter, personally carrying diaper bags crammed with money and jewelry—evidence of their hasty departure from the palace.*    Curious about the spectacle, I watched the Marcos family shop at the military base exchange store for the personal items they needed for their trip-- then get on a C-130 aircraft and head out for Honolulu.

Before the revolution

To his credit, Marcos did refrain from using direct violence against the masses of demonstrators, unlike the Chinese government which mowed down protesters in Tienanmen Square.    As he sat in exile in Hawaii, after the shell-shock had worn off, I often wondered if Marcos wished he had listened to his dog-faced chief of the armed forces, General Ver, who had wanted to use tanks and force to break up the demonstrators.

After the revolution

       

Right after the revolution, a buddy and I traveled to Manila and scammed our way into a tour of the looted former-presidential palace.   It was quite an eye opener seeing the opulence in which the Marco’s lived— juxtaposed with the sea of impoverished people squatting in Manila. 

  I remembered thinking what rotten people the Marcos’s were, and whether it was it worth it for the U.S. to have supported such a clearly despot and corrupt government for all those years.

* It was reported by the press that, when Marcos fled, U.S. Customs agents in Hawaii discovered 24 suitcases of gold bricks and diamond jewelry hidden in diaper bags and in addition, certificates for gold bullion valued in the billions of dollars.

The Treasure Steel is Chasing: Yamashita's Gold

While the novel Steel’s Treasure is part fiction, it does serve a whopping dose of historical fact.  The book’s principal character, Air Force Capt. William Steel, is obsessed with the legend of Yamashita’s treasure, or Yamashita’s gold. The infamous Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the “Tiger of Malay,” commanded imperial army troops in the Philippines and is believed to have stashed billions of dollars’ worth of treasure in vaults scattered around the islands.   

General Yamashita,
the Tiger of Malay

The imperial army amassed the riches during its occupation of Southeast Asia-- looting temples, businesses, and the capital cities. They consolidated their booty in the Philippines with plans to move it to Japan once the U.S. blockades on shipping and air transport ended. There, the wealth would finance the dream of an Asian empire known as the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” --- a dream permanently put on hold when Japan unconditionally surrendered to ally forces in 1945. 

The treasure remains hidden in secure vaults somewhere in the Philippines’ vast mountainous jungles.   Steel and his Negrito pygmy tribesmen explore a few of these caves and Japanese army command bunkers in their adventures in Steel’s Treasure.

Remote mountainous Philippine jungle where Yamashita’s engineering units constructed elaborate tunnels to house looted treasure.

Yamashita’s engineering teams, using enslaved Filipino civilians and U.S. and allied POWs, built underground chambers, so well hidden that most are still undiscovered. Hundreds if not thousands of the forced laborers died building the sites. In addition to layers of concrete and earth, the vaults were booby-trapped with high explosives and, in some cases, glass tubes of cyanide gas.  None of the Japanese engineers who designed these death traps are thought to have survived the war.  Even the Tiger himself was captured and executed by the Allied Forces, a scene briefly visited in Steel’s Treasure.  He carried to his grave the answer to the question that consumes Steel—where is the treasure?       

Entrance to large underground Japanese bunker complex of the type explored by Steel.    

A Negrito tribal leader points out a rock
with Japanese troops marks with coded
 instructions leading to a treasure site.

Since the war, Steel and other treasure hunters have tried to locate the hidden gold.  Most are amateurs, and a cottage industry has sprung up of locals who offer to sell their “expertise,” complete with forged Japanese maps, to locate the Tiger’s treasure. It is rare that a professional, adequately-funded foreign-led operation makes a run at the fortune.  

Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos,
photographed on a bulldozer,
reportedly found part of the Yamashita treasure.

For twenty years, President Marcos and his family had a near monopoly on treasure hunting, crowding out any significant foreign expeditions. Some allege that the Marcos families’ ill-gotten wealth stashed in Swiss bank accounts came from locating some of the Tiger’s stash. Since the overthrow of the Marcos, successive Philippine governments have been more open to letting foreign companies search for the treasure, but few are interested because of corruption and the lack of information on where the sites are located.

Steel’s Treasure is set in the 1980’s in the Philippines’ carnival-like political scene, with a huge U.S. military presence, a corrupt dictatorship, and an active and violent Communist insurgency.  Here, neither Marcos and his crony military officers nor the Communist New Peoples’ Army can prevent Steel, his Filipino side-kick, Jo Jo, and a motley band of Negrito tribesmen from finding gold. 

Negrito tribesmen—armed and dangerous