‘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 smelclass="underline" 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.’