And such has been the sad history of mankind in ALL the past wars. Looting and sacking of each other's countries has gone on. And sure, sometimes those goodies are found 100s, or 1000's of years later. But to jump from that factoid, to somehow saying "there's a treasure in every cave", is a leap of logic.
This is up for dispute. It is an assumption that is only conjecture. And is, in fact, counter-intuitive. I mean, think about it: JAPAN was the conqueror in this case. The Philippines was only one of their conquered zones. And would have required shipping to this location. Why oh why oh why would they simply not have taken the looted goodies back to their
own HOME country ?
Like if you got goodies and had a treasure, don't you take it back to YOUR OWN headquarters ? Rather than squirreling it away at someone else's remote location
This has been the bone of contention by those scholars who have challenged this whole notion. I'm sure the "Yamashita faithful" will come up with all sorts of colorful conspiracy theories of how "anything's possible". But just saying that when you ask yourself if there's a "more plausible explanation", you begin to see that the freighting of those plunders to some off-shore colony (
as opposed to their own coffers and home-base) it starts to make little sense.
But I'll bet if portions of the material were
supporting the alleged treasure, you would certainly subscribe to those portions of the article. Right ? Hence it's just a matter of picking and choosing.
I challenge you to read the portion of the article on the skeptic's view. And FORGET THAT IT'S "WIKI". Instead: Go to the footnotes of the VERY AUTHORS that they are citing for those statements. To get the source material in the bibliography that those statements are coming from. Because it's not "wiki" saying those things. It's drawn from the balanced comments from each side's proponents. And wiki is nothing more than an encyclopedia, where they are simply reporting what the different viewpoints are saying. The footnote sources are right there David.