tago and the yamashita treasure

Tago’s urban legend includes Yamashita burying part of his treasures in selected spots in Tago. And so when a few Japanese recently surveyed Tago like vultures looking for carcasses after a great flood, Tagon-on tongues began wagging again.

The last time the same tongues wagged was in the early 90s when two Japanese firms rose and bade sayonara faster than the owners could say arigato. The firms--- a coconut processing plant in Siti with the Cejocos as partners and a chopstick factory in Gamut with the Pichays as partners---were taken by Tagon-ons as mere fronts to hunt for the Yamashita treasure. “How else could you explain men working at night instead of day behind a tall fence?” they said.

Nobody knows if the Japanese got what they came for. But there’s another urban legend that a Tagon-on businessman and a contractor-politico from Tandag found gold bars separately in each of these areas through pure happenstance.

Frankie Laurente holds the story behind the recent Japanese visit to Tago. And it amazed him that these Japanese knew how Tago was configured long before his parents were even born. But then Frankie thought that it must be the map rolled inside the plastic tube that one Japanese kept close to his body even when asleep as though it was surgically attached to him.

Once, in 2008, Frankie said that he and the Japanese went to our house to look at the area. And it was then that he learned that the lot on which our house now stands was a cemetery.

Suddenly I was thrown back to the 80s when Muslims came to our house to ask my father to allow them to look for antiques in our backyard. With their tester, a thin metal rod so long it extended from Panawsawon to Buruwakwak, they poked the ground and pushed deeper. And when it hit something and clanked, they dug a hole like cats frantic to make a pooh. But the most they got were a blue chip off an old plate, a rusty hasp, and a dented silver bansil attached to a molar.

When I asked my father why Muslims flocked to our house, he said that our lot could be a treasure trove because it was once a cemetery. Seeing I was puzzled, he told me of the ancient practice of burying pieces of clothing and jewelry along with the dead.

It was not until years later, when I was in college, that he finally told me what his father told him before that Yamashita was said to have buried some of his treasures on our lot.


(Next: Frankie’s story)