Glass Bottles - Noted.
I received an account of Julio from a man in the North who befriended the old man in the late 80s / early 90s, up until his death 1996.
initially Julio pretended to be a Filipino POW, chosen by the General in the Tarlac POW camp, after Yamashita put several prisoners to the test for their cooking abilities. He insisted that Yamashita enjoyed only half cooked foods. Over the course of their friendship, despite speaking every dialect of every mountain province in the North, it slowly became clear that Julio was not a Filipino at all, but a Pure Japanese, and someone of great significance to the burials.
He bore a bikini clad girl on his forearm. He would often awake at 2am and reminisce many of the surreal moments from his campaign with the General.
During their 9 months in The Philippines before surrender, he and Yamashita only visited Palawan and Mindoro, briefly, but primarily Northern Luzon was the point of focus, arriving with 2 divisions of Koreans and 1 division of Japanese and roughly 9,000 horses for carrying the loads up into the mountains.
Those ships you mentioned Z. I heard that upon scuttling the vessels, Julio and Yamashita issued injection kits to all surviving crew and told to inject themselves to boost strength, within minutes all dead. This was one of the favourite methods for eliminating witnesses, they did this in several tunnel complexes in the North. They scuttled those ships prior to their arrival on PH soil from what I understand.
Julio had even been there that fateful night all the engineers were blasted shut inside one particular command centre beneath a colonial church, he knew Ben Valmores and always insisted that Ben could never really point a site because he'd always been kept at arms length by the prince.
Julio helped Marcos retrieve 2,000 Tons from a certain tunnel north of Manila, testing the honour of Marcos to see if he received a share, instead Marcos tried to have him killed, so Julio never bothered pointing out the branch in the tunnel which led to another 3,000 MT, since it was a 5K MT deposit.
He also helped Peping cojuangco retrieve from 3 deposit amounting to over 100 Tons, in their ranch in Tarlac, Peping also tried to have the old man killed after the retrieval, but failed. Each time Julio would retreat and hide under the umbrella of the INC. Peping bought millions of $$ worth of drilling equipment after this but never succeeded again.
Noli De Castro, who later became VP, was putting out late night news announcements searching for an old man with a bikini clad girl tattooed on his forearm, the reward increased exponentially but they never found him.
Though Julio has gone under the radar of most people not least of all Macarthur, many of the most powerful people in PH new about him and searched for him tirelessly under the radar.
All he ever got from Marcos was a cheque for $500K which he only attempted to cash after 1986, when he did, they tried to arrest him in the bank.
He died in 1996 with chronic asthma and in poor health, penniless, surrounded by only a small handful of trusted friends, cursing Marcos for betraying him.
His body was covered in Tattoos which he insisted held secrets to some of the largest sites they buried.
He would speak of how Yamashita and his men would bring a virgin or 2 out to the site at dawn, sever the head and sprinkle the blood across the concrete seal, placing the head on the Eastern portion, facing the rising sun. They believe these pure spirits would serve as powerful guardians over the sites.
Yamashita even left his favourite wife inside the biggest deposit up north, daughter of a governor up North, with 6 months of food supplies and 2 helpers, he said goodbye before sealing in the treasure room with cement, laced with 1000 pound bombs, a true romantic.
Julio left his long samurai in that tunnel, he sold his short one to a US navy officer in Clark for $500, that wasn't you was it Z?
I wonder if Yamashita ever told his family back in Japan what he did out here, must have made one hell of a dinner party story.
