– English Lyrics

Lyrics & Translation

[English]

[Music]

In Japan, there is a legend of a great

buried treasure.

You would be talking about tens of

millions of dollars worth of gold coins

in today's money. It is the supposed

fortune of a mighty warlord buried deep

in the mountains.

It's in a bit of Japan that's pretty

much ignored. This warlord, Tokugawa

Yoshobu, was the last of his kind, the

last shogun of Japan. The shogunate

stayed for 250 years. Um, 15

generations.

The key to his riches lay with a

faithful servant who carried his secret

to the grave. He was just rounded up

suddenly and decapitated.

Two rival families are locked in a race

to find this fabulous treasure. It was

such an important part of Japan's

history. If only you could dig up some

bit from the time. Their quest would

bridge generations lasting more than a

century and capture the imagination of a

country. This just kind of fed into

people's desire to believe in some kind

of fantasy. This is the story of an

extraordinary treasure hunt, a bitter

rivalry, and a fortune beyond

imagination. The lost treasure of the

last shogun.

At the turn of the 21st century, an

elderly man spent his last days digging

deep in the mountains of central Japan.

He was looking for

gold. Japan is very mountainous, so

there's huge numbers of areas where

potentially somebody could have gone and

sequestered some stuff. His name was

Miso Tomayyuki. The fortune he sought

was a treasure that was lost almost 140

years

previously. According to the most

popular version of the legends, there

were originally over four or 5 million

coins total. So you would be talking

about tens of millions of dollars worth

of gold coins in today's money. Misano

Tomyuki had spent his entire life on a

quest for this vast horde of coins and

felt he was on the verge of an

extraordinary breakthrough.

We Mizuno can dig for three, four, five,

even 100 generations because warriors

from the Samurai days entrusted this to

us. If we hadn't been entrusted with

this, it would be just some treasure

hunt and I would have stopped long ago.

I'm not that stupid.

Where did all this money come from? And

why did it mysteriously vanish?

The roots of the legend stretch back to

a time of great

upheaval. 1866.

For 263 years, one family, the House of

Tokugawa, held the reigns of

power. They seized the country in a

violent insurrection, then brought

centuries of peace to this wild land.

Historically, it's been very hard to

hold the country together. It always

falls apart. Um, civil wars repeatedly

take place. If you imagine Switzerland

where you have mountain valley torrent,

another mountain, another torrent and

imagine that continuing from Stockholm

to Naples. That's what Japan

is. So far, there had been 15

generations of Tokugawa rulers, but they

were not

emperors. They were shoguns.

Shogun literally means barbarian

subduing general Lissimo. Um, and it's a

title that is given to someone

officially by the emperor who lives in

Kyoto. The latest of this long line was

Tokugawa

Yoshobu. In theory, he was a military

commander who served at the emperor's

pleasure.

In practice, he ruled supreme and all

bowed to

him. From his ancestral home at Edeto

Castle, the Shogun governed with the aid

of a vast aristocratic class, the

samurai. It was an ancient feudal system

that had endured for centuries. The

shogunal system was created early in the

17th century and the first shogun was

deified. that made it very difficult

ever to change anything that he had set

in place.

From his exalted position, the Shogun

not only held the reigns of power, but

wealth beyond

imagination. At his court, a group of

his most loyal and trusted samurai were

given the task of administering his vast

fortune. One of them was a man named

Oguri Tadamasa.

Aguri Tanamasa is what's called a

bannerman. He's one of about 5,000

mid-ranking samurai who are loyal to the

Tokugawa Shogunate and really function

as mid-level bureaucrats in the regime.

He was well educated bureaucrats, come

from a decent family. when he was young,

people very quickly realized he had both

mastered the military skills, but also

kind of literature and poetry and things

like that, which was what you needed in

order to have legitimacy in the top

levels of the Japanese bureaucracy.

Okuri reached an exalted position as the

Shogun's commissioner of

finance. His role was to account for the

huge sums paid to the Shogun in

taxation.

Every warlord owed the shogun an annual

tribute and all that wealth passed

through Aguri's hands. Essentially, he

was the accountant for the Tokugawa

regime itself. And this was a very

important position because the Tokugawa

shogunate needed money not only to pay

all of its samurai, but to manage any

reforms that they wanted to

pursue. Aguri knew that reforms were

badly needed. Life in Japan had barely

changed in 200

years. Yet beyond her shores, the world

was in the throws of the industrial

revolution. Aguri was one of the few

Japanese who had been abroad and seen

the benefits this brought to Western

nations. He developed grand plans to

modernize his deeply traditional

society.

Our good was just stunned by how far

behind Japan was in terms of modern

infrastructure. He wanted to create a

postal system. He wanted to create a

shipyard to kind of imitate what the

west had. So he was one of the most

vocal supporters of westernization, if

you will.

But the shogun was not interested in

change. And while he continued to live

in splendor, the rest of Japan struggled

in dire poverty. 95% of people they were

living in little miserable huts in the

countryside as they had done for a

thousand years. They never left their

village. Life was hard and miserable and

cold in winter and hot in summer and

they died

young. This imbalance bred a wave of

resentment that slowly spread through

the country. A group of disaffected

warlords banished to the farthest

corners of Japan began to plot against

the Shogun. One starts to get already

feelings that the Shogunates outlast its

usefulness and there comes a movement to

return power to the emperor. The

conspirators were deeply loyal to the

16-year-old emperor

Magi. In 1868, they hatch a plot to

restore him to power and grab the wealth

of the Shogun for

themselves. Encouraged by his growing

band of supporters, Magi orders the

Shogun to resign and sends his troops to

remove

him. The response from the Shogun is not

what anyone expected.

When the shogunate collapses, it's

actually quite startling. Uh, the shogun

kind of like retires. He doesn't kill

himself. He doesn't set the city on

fire. He just goes off and lives in the

country the rest of his life. The Shogun

was gone.

Without their master's protection, all

of the Tokagawa retainers were in great

danger. None more so than Aguri

Taramasa, the man in charge of the

Shogun's

treasury. Aguri knew that the Maji

forces would be coming for him. They

desperately wanted the Shogun's vast

wealth, and he would be tortured and

killed in their efforts to find it. So,

he too fled the

castle. But far from saving his own

life, Aguri put himself at even greater

risk. His flight sparked a rumor that

would make him Imperial enemy number

one.

When Oudi was moving out, he had a lot

of luggage with him. Uh some of those

boxes were coin boxes, of course, so

people thought that there must be coins

in there.

A good escaped just in time.

When the Emperor's forces arrive in

Edeto Castle, they immediately go into

the treasuries and find that there are

no coins there at all.

The treasuries were empty. The vast

wells of the Shogun had vanished.

The Maji forces just can't believe that

there's no money at all. Someone must

have the money uh somewhere.

In one of the famous stories, they ask

one of the Tokugawa samurai, "Where's

all the money?" He tells them, "I don't

know, but you should ask Ouri, the

commissioner of finance."

But where was Aguri, and where could he

have hidden such a large cash of money?

It came to their attention that Agoodi

had disappeared. There were also some

rumors at the time from witnesses who

claimed to have seen a man getting off

of a boat in GMA Prefecture laden and

going off and potentially hiding

something.

GMA Prefecture was a Guri's ancestral

home. It was a wild region about 100

miles in land from Edeto.

Gunmar is is a is a fairly high area

with many mountainous plateaus. It's

wild. Um, it's far from everywhere. It's

very rural. Um, it's in a bit of Japan

that's pretty much ignored.

In other words, it was the ideal

location to conceal a

fortune. Aguri was now hiding here in a

Buddhist temple on the slopes of a

dormant volcano, Mount

Akagi. The rumor that he had millions of

coins in his possession made him a

marked man.

A matter of days after his arrival,

people came to rob him.

A group of about 10 gangsters or so whip

up a mob of up to 700 people and they

essentially send a messenger to Oudi

telling him to hand over all of the

money that he has. Oudi sends a

messenger with about 50 coins and says,

"Look, this is really all I have."

They don't believe him and this mob

attacks the temple where Oudi is staying

and Ogoodi and his retainers route the

mob and kill many of the

gangsters. Aguri and a small band of

servants survive this attack in a

stunning display of marshall

skill, but it was a hollow victory.

Emperor Magi now saw him as a serious

threat to the new regime. Anyone with so

much might and so much money had to be

eliminated. Because Ouri demonstrated

that he has some kind of military

expertise and he has retainers with him

and also village men with him who know

how to fight. It is thought by the magi

forces that perhaps Ouri is plotting to

launch a counterattack.

A detachment of the emperor's best

samurai are sent to kill

Aguri. He was declared an outlaw on the

spot and summarily sentenced to

death. But because Ogoodi was just

rounded up suddenly and accused of being

a criminal, he was just decapitated.

The next day, Aguri's family and the

last of his loyal followers are rounded

up, too. They are also

executed. The only ones who knew the

treasures

whereabouts were

dead. Yet, from the ashes of Aguri's

household, the legend of the lost

treasure of the last Shogun was born.

With the restoration of the emperor,

Japan entered a brave new world. After

the Maji Emperor took over, Japan

changed dramatically, incredibly

quickly. Um, it was full-on

modernization.

The feudal system was abolished. Old

Edeto was renamed Tokyo. And Japan

leaped into the white heat of the

industrial revolution.

The world of the Shogun was consigned to

history. When the major regime came to

power, they had to villainize the

previous regime. So the Tokenau was

turned into a kind of dark, primitive,

unprogressive, feudal time.

Within a few short years, Aguri Taramasa

was all but forgotten. Though

ironically, his ideas about shipyards,

postal systems, and other new fangled

technology were adopted

wholesale. But one man could not let go

of the past. His name was Nakajima

Kurando. He would be the first in a long

line of treasure hunters.

Nakajima Kunando supposedly worked

within the Commission of Finance uh as a

very lowranking

bureaucrat. This petty bureaucrat

claimed he was a noble samurai and one

of Aguri Taramasa's most loyal

retainers. Somehow he escaped death at

the hands of the emperor's men and he

knew about the existence of the hidden

gold.

Sometime in the late

1870s, he began to search for

it. He believed it was somewhere in the

wild terrain of Mount Aagi, where his

master Aguri had died several years

earlier. He enlisted an American railway

man, one of thousands of foreigners

trying to make their fortune in the new

Japan. The American had two things that

Nakajima needed. money to fund an

expedition and dynamite to blast into

the hard rock of the

mountain. Nakajima buys land and says to

this American, "Here, I found this gold

coin and there's more of it up there.

You can go digging in there and find

it."

The pair dug together for

months.

However, no gold was found.

Believing he had been duped, the

Americans sued Nakajima.

And Nakajima was sentenced to 2 years in

prison for

[Music]

fraud. After his release, this once

proud samurai was destitute.

He was left homeless on the streets of

Tokyo and had to seek shelter with some

old family friends, the

Misenos. During his stay in the Misano

house, Nakajima quickly made an

impression with several members of the

family, especially Mrs. Miseno and her

oldest son, Tommoayoshi.

Miso Tommoayoshi was a young man. He

remembers Nakajima essentially having an

illicit relationship with his mother

after his father died.

For some months, Nakajima continued as a

living lover for Mrs.

Miseno. In that time, he also became an

inspiration to her

son. Tommy Yoshi came to regard him as a

stepfather.

Yet despite their close

relationship, Nakajima kept the legend

of the gold a closely guarded

[Music]

secret. Then without warning, Nakajima

strangely

vanished. Tomayoshi took the

disappearance particularly

hard. He assumed he would never again

hear from the man he once called his

dad.

He was wrong. A decade after he went

missing, Nakajima Kurando broke his

silence. One day after not seeing

Nakajima for some 10 years, a letter

suddenly arrives.

In the letter, Nakajima explains that he

is dying. He begs Tomayoshi's

forgiveness and pleads for his adopted

son to come to see him one last time.

He had to tell Tomoayoshi a secret about

the lost treasure of the last

[Music]

Shogun. So Mizuno Tomayoshi visits

Nakajima as he's sick and dying um and

is essentially given a bunch of

documents and told to go find the gold.

When they met, Nakajima revealed that in

all his years away, he had been

desperately searching for the hidden

treasure. To Tomoshi's utter amazement,

Nakajima asked him to continue the quest

and gave him all of his research.

It doesn't have a map and it doesn't say

the treasure is here, but it supposedly

has all these puzzles that will help him

find the treasure.

Just days after this

encounter, Nakajima died. Tomayoshi was

shocked at the secret life of his

stepfather. To him, the whole idea of

the quest seemed

ludicrous. Mount Akagi is 6,000 ft high

and covers hundreds of square miles. The

gold could be anywhere, and Nakajima's

documents offered no concrete

information.

But around the turn of the 20th century,

his life took a dramatic

turn. It seems that the real tipping

point for Miseno was when his wife

suddenly died of uh pneumonia.

In the wake of this devastating loss,

Tomayoshi fell back on the legacy of the

lost treasure and threw himself into

Nakajima's cryptic

research. He essentially has an

emotional crisis, sells his business,

sells his house, and moves out to Mount

Akagi in Guma Prefecture to begin buying

land and looking for the treasure.

Tomayoshi made a solemn vow to carry on

Nakajima's quest for the lost treasure

of the Shogun.

It wasn't long before he made a

breakthrough in deciphering some of the

arcane riddles and that in turn led to

his first real

discovery. He claims to have found a

small gold statue. He also claims to

have these copper plates that have

markings on them and a little map.

[Music]

Tommy Yoshi's entire life was now

dedicated to the search for gold. He

goes around and tells people that he has

these things in order to get money to

continue digging for the gold in Mount

Akagi. For almost 40 years, he

dug and

dug and

dug. He even found a new wife who agreed

to help him in his search and started a

family. All the while with no job to

speak of, Tommyoshi burned through the

savings he built up from his previous

life.

When he starts off, he's rather wealthy.

He was a real estate guy in Tokyo, and

he had a lot of money with him when he

first moved out there, but he gradually

ran out of money.

The quest for the treasure bankrupted

Tomayoshi. But whatever troubles he had,

he ignored them. He was obsessed with

only one thing, finding the Shogun's

gold. Yet, no matter how deep he went,

no matter how carefully he scrutinized

the clues in his growing pile of

documents, he

found

nothing. In 1926, Miso Tomayoshi died

heartbroken and penniless.

Tommyoshi's son, Misano Aizaburo, was a

policeman who wanted nothing to do with

buried treasure. But Aizaburo's mother

was desperate to continue the search.

She begged Aabaro to carry on the family

quest. After Tomayoshi dies, Tomoshi's

wife tells her son, "Look, your father

felt that you were the one who really

should be digging for treasure." And so

she gives Aabaro

uh all of the documents that uh

Tommoayoshi had.

Aabaro felt he had no choice but to

honor his father's wishes. He quit his

job and moved to Mount Akagi. The torch

had passed to a new generation.

In a way, this tradition of treasure

hunting has become associated with the

Misor family. So they're the experts and

they have this lineage as well.

Aabaro had inherited all of Nakajima

Kurando's documents and still more

research that his father had done in 40

years of searching. Still, no gold had

yet been found and the vast bulk of

Mount Akagi remained unexplored. Where

to start? He does continue in some part

digging some of the tunnels that his

father had started. But through his own

research, he also starts digging other

tunnels around uh Mount Akagi.

[Music]

After just a few months of digging, some

valuable new clues were uncovered.

And they do find this kind of stone

tortoise with strange writing on it. And

they see that as a sign that this is a

clue that will lead us closer to the

[Music]

treasure. Isaburo's search continued

into the 1930s. But as he dug on, Japan

was changing around him. The country

harbored vast imperial ambitions, and it

was marching steadily towards war.

At this time, there was a newfound

interest in Aguri Taramasa, the last

Shogun's most fervent modernizer and the

source of the Shogun's treasure

legend. In the late 1920s and early

1930s, there's an ogoodi boom. He really

becomes a kind of national hero, a

supporter of the Japanese Navy, and

there are lots of books and biographies

written about him.

One man decided to use Aguri's newly

restored good name for his own ends to

seek out the Shogun's missing fortune.

He was called Kawahara

Hideori. Now the Misenos had arrival and

the race to find the treasure was

heating up. Kawahare Hide Muri decides

to claim that he is the grandson of an

illicit relationship between Oguri and

some mistress.

As Aguri's illegitimate grandson,

Kawahara believed only he had the right

to search for the Shogun's treasure. He

had been researching likely burial sites

for

years. But before he could begin his

dig, he needed to raise a substantial

amount of money.

In 1934, he launched a publicity drive.

Taking advantage of the nationalist

sentiment of the day, Kawahara arranged

a press conference at the Buddhist

temple where the severed head of Aguri

Taramasa was supposedly buried.

He becomes very popular in the 1930s uh

among treasure hunters. He shows up with

a kimono with the Oudi family crest on

it and essentially says that he's here

to, you know, help find the treasure.

Before a small crowd at the temple,

Kawahara promised to completely

refurbish it in Aguri's memory and

donate the rest of the money to the

nation, minus his own cut for expenses,

of course.

But then the chief monk of the temple

unexpectedly

intervened. He had been watching

Kawahara's performance and didn't

believe a

word. He stepped in front of the crowd

himself to denounce Kawahara as a fraud.

In the monk's opinion, Kawahara was

definitely not Aguri's grandson, and

Aguri himself would not have approved of

this whole sherad.

Still, many members of the Japanese

public bought into his story and gave

money. Kawahara also attracted one major

sponsor, a shady pachinko gambling boss.

A wash with money, Kawahara began his

own dig for the treasure. Unlike the

Miseno family, he claimed the gold was

not on Mount Akagi, but in a small

village to the southwest of Tokyo.

[Music]

Like his rivals, Kawahara dug for many

fruitless years. Nothing stopped his

relentless quest or the flow of money

from

well-wishes. Not even the Second World

War. Indeed, his promise to donate any

gold he found to the Japanese nation was

a source of hope in those turbulent

years

throughout the war and even into the

1950s. Kamahara continues to uh dig in

all sorts of places south of Tokyo and

earns a lot of money from people who he

convinces that this story is

true. By the early 1960s, Kawahara had

been searching for almost 30 years. Now,

Japan was undergoing a massive economic

revival. And Kawahara's gambling boss

patron was a rich man. His change in

fortunes helped take the expedition to a

new

level. In this period, Japan forms an

economic miracle. It's absolutely

incredible. And the middle class expands

and everybody seems to be doing

incredibly well out of this economic

nationalism. Unlike the Misenos

struggling in poverty, Kawahara could

afford to delve far underground.

He dug a deep mine with an electric lift

and the latest groundwater pumps to keep

the site dry. He also had 13 workers to

help him

[Music]

excavate. With these new resources, he

raced ahead in the contest to uncover

the

gold. He dug down 250 ft to the supposed

location of the great chests of coins.

But despite his well- financed

operation, Kawahara Hideori, the alleged

illegitimate grandson of

Aguri, was unable to find any

treasure. In 1967, he died, but still

the legend of the treasure lived on.

People were aware of this idea of the

the Tokugawa treasure. in the 1970s that

the Yomi newspaper ran a massive series

on this idea of hidden treasure. Every

single article said, "Well, this is the

legend and nothing's been found. This is

the legend, but nothing's been found."

These people um were searching and they

didn't find anything. But this went on

and on and on for 16 separate articles.

Rumors of buried treasure rumbled on for

decades after Kawahara's death, and the

legend became part of Japanese popular

culture.

But it was not until the 1990s that

another serious effort was made to find

it. This time it was the Misenos, the

rival treasure hunting family, that

would come closer than ever to unlocking

the mystery of the Shogun's lost

fortune. Two generations of the family,

Tomayoshi and his son Aizaburo, had been

digging on the slopes of Mount Akagi for

nearly a century.

Now a third generation of Misano

treasure hunters was about to enter the

game. Misano Tomyuki, the son of

Aizaburo. Like his father and his

grandfather before him, he was highly

skeptical of the legend. Initially, he

did not want any part of the treasure

hunting. He thought it was a total sham.

He didn't believe that the Tokugawa

Shogunate would have buried gold coins.

And basically he went off on his own in

Tokyo and worked in a variety of jobs.

But Tomayuki could not resist the pull

of the quest that his family had been

pursuing since the late 19th century. It

was not simply a question of finding the

money. It was a matter of family honor.

There's the weight of carrying on the

family tradition which is established in

Japanese culture and history and

society. This idea of you trying very

very hard until the end. This idea of

gambaru you you which means to work

hard. You will persevere through

whatever comes along and you will

ultimately succeed in the end. This is

very much instilled in people in Japan

at a very very early age. Tomayuki

decided that he must follow in the

footsteps of his forebears and give up

his day job in Tokyo. He swore to

dedicate his life to the completion of

this epic

quest was just attracted by the legacy

of his father and his grandfather. And

he also became convinced because of all

these old documents that his grandfather

had from the 19th century. So he began

doing research on his own and began

digging a whole separate series of

tunnels separate from his father and

grandfather. Tommyuki's quest coincided

with a new time of upheaval in

Japan. The economy had collapsed and a

national mood of depression set in. The

Japanese media began casting

around for a hero.

The 1990s is called the lost decade.

Japan's lost decade is about economic

stagnation. One should remember that

that stagnation came after an protracted

period of enormous growth which could

not have been maintained forever.

Not only was there economic crisis, but

there was political scandal, a natural

disaster, a terrorist attack in

Tokyo. And this just kind of fed into

people's desire to believe in some kind

of fantasy. And what better fantasy than

the legendary lost treasure of the

showun? One enterprising television

network called Miso Tomyuki to see if he

wanted to be on TV.

[Music]

In the early 1990s, there was a Japanese

uh entertainment show appropriately

called Give Me a

Break. It follows a pattern of Japanese

television shows that you still get

today. It'll have a number of

celebrities interviewing other

celebrities, um, music, animation, um,

sketches, all put together in a 2-hour

format.

A Japanese copywriter who grew up in

Guma was familiar with the legend, and

he decided to produce a show about the

treasure hunting in Mount Akagi.

In their call to Tommyuki, the producers

explained they wanted to cast him and

his family as modern-day heroes. Men

determined to succeed in the face of

insurmountable

odds. Men who embodied the noble idea of

GBA is entirely sensible for them to get

in contact with the misinos and try and

use their expertise, but also to

legitimize what they're doing. They're

not just rushing off into Gum Prefecture

with a load of cranes and digging holes.

They've got the guy and he's the person

who's going to make sure we do this

properly.

It was a mutually beneficial

arrangement. The producers of Give Me a

Break got a neverending real life soap

opera to inspire the nation. In return,

Tomayuki received more resources than he

could ever dream of. After years in the

wilderness, the Misenos were back with

the best chance they would ever have of

striking gold. The Miso um they've been

searching for 120 years and haven't

found anything. If a TV producer says to

you, "We're going to give you 12 cranes

um and loads of digging equipment. Would

you like to get on board?" I mean, for

him, this is a huge boon cuz he doesn't

have to do it on his own.

The whole nation seemed to be willing

Tommyuki on. And with his help, the TV

company found gold. Ratings gold.

There would be these huge backhoes and

cranes that would dig this enormous uh

pit almost the size of a rock quarry. Uh

and they would find these uh horizontal

tunnels. And so they would go digging in

there and then some earth would fall in

a funny way and they would say, "Aha,

someone must have buried something

there." They would find a few bottles

which was an indication that perhaps

Ogood's French connections had wine out

here and dropped a bottle long ago.

Altogether, the network revisited the

Mount Aagi treasure site 10 times in the

1990s, each time with a more elaborate

and expensive effort to find the hidden

treasure. When they find lots and lots

of tunnels, what they're finding are the

tunnels that were dug in the 1930s in

order to find the treasure. But that is

conveniently left out of the story

because it's not very exciting. This was

no longer about logic. It was about

magic. Fueled by growing viewer numbers,

the search soon became completely

detached from reality.

When more money started coming in to

produce the show, they hired a few

American psychics to come over. They

flew over Mount Akagi in a helicopter to

try to feel the psychic power of where

the treasure would be buried. They also

hired an esoteric Buddhist monk uh to

pray to the ancestors to find where the

treasure was. And each episode ended

with a cliffhanger that, you know,

something had just been found uh that

would get people to watch uh the next

time. In the final installment in

1999, the dig reached fever pitch. By

now, the Misano excavation works

resembled something like an open cast

mine. It descended fully 200 ft below

the surface of the mountain, a network

of tunnels dug over generations by the

Misenos went down even further still. In

one final dramatic push, a huge

industrial mining drill was brought in

to dig still further, hoping to find a

hidden cavern containing the

gold. But the media frenzy had

overwhelmed

Tomyuki. He came to believe the TV

company did not care about the treasure

itself. All they wanted was a grand

spectacle to please their audience. It

seems that in the later episodes, Miso

felt that they were going on the wrong

track and he almost felt that there was

a rivalry between this team and his own

search and he eventually dropped out of

the project altogether.

The TV audience soon began to dwindle

and the show was eventually

cancelled. Tomayuki was alone once more

and still he pressed on with his dig.

[Music]

there was always some aspect uh

something that made them feel like we're

almost 90% there and so he couldn't give

up. Meanwhile, the Misanu's rivals for

the treasure, the Kawahara family, had

been laboring away 140 m to the south,

largely under the radar since the death

of Kawahara Hideori in 1967.

The quest to find the lost treasure had

passed from old Hidamorei to his son

Kawahara

Jiro. In his early digs, Jiro made a

number of discoveries which he claimed

were clear evidence that the gold itself

was only a few meters further down.

He claims to have found uh little

objects here and there, and those

objects he gives as proof that he's

closer to the treasure legend. And of

course, that makes it easier for him to

convince people to give him money. Among

the objects he found were human bones

and other Tokugawa era artifacts

pointing towards the treasur's

location. In the year 2000, Jiro took a

leaf from his father's book and launched

a publicity drive. Just like his father,

the thing he wanted was

money. The press descended on the same

location where his father had appeared

almost 70 years

before. There they witnessed Kawahara

unveiling a bronze sword and a golden

coin dating from the time of the

Tokagawa shogunate.

[Music]

But however much Jirro insisted his

artifacts were

genuine, the public was now quite

skeptical of the whole story. When

experts look at the objects, they find

out that essentially these are objects

that he bought at a local antique store.

Jirro's claim to be on the verge of

finding the treasure was widely

denounced. and he seemed to have little

hard evidence to back his story up. The

Kawahara family's hunt for the treasure

was

over. The latest generation, Jirro's

son, has abandoned the quest

completely. The youngest member of the

family wants absolutely nothing to do

with his father's search for buried

treasure and is actually quite

embarrassed by it.

But what of Miseno

Tomayuki, the unlikely star of Give Me a

Break? In 2006, another filmmaker caught

up with

him. These are some of the extraordinary

images he

captured. Now a wized old man dying of

cancer, the proud treasure hunter felt

he had been cursed by two generations of

his family.

He could not give up his

quest ever.

But that's the star I've been born under

with this family. I have this sense of

responsibility that I have to do this.

That's why I do it. Is there anyone else

who has this kind of responsibility? If

so, I'd like to meet them. Is there

anyone else in Japan who has been

entrusted by the samurai of the past?

Someone asked him once, you know, what

would you do if you found the treasure?

And he said, I would kick it really hard

because my family struggled and lost a

lot of money and energy in finding this.

But he just felt that it was his

destiny, his fate, uh, to find this

treasure, a fate that no one else but he

and his family would be able to fulfill.

After almost 140 years of

searching, no one has yet found any

gold.

So does the treasure really exist or was

the legend just that?

There has been a lot of stories about

the shogunate the kind of shogunate that

wouldn't die. It was such an important

part of

Japan's history. There's a kind of

romantic feeling. We don't want it to go

away. Only you could dig up some bit

from the time.

Despite all of the research done down

the years by the Miseno family, a more

objective examination of the facts show

that in all likelihood there was no

money buried in the first place.

There's absolutely no evidence and no

possibility that there was buried

treasure anywhere.

This is because in Japan during the

shogunate, gold coins were not used as a

measure of wealth.

It's a sort of western notion that you

have a kind of a jewel tower in which

you put all these rich things and as

long as they're in there, you're rich.

But for Japan, you're simply having um

gold sitting in a tower was not of a

great deal of use to anyone.

Instead, the great lords of the era

counted their riches using a different

material, rice. The standard unit of

exchange was rice. And rice is a

wonderful unit of exchange because if

you're hungry, you can eat it. But also,

it can be broken up into any sizes.

Also, it lasts for quite a long time.

And the principal unit of rice was what

they call a koku. And a koku, it's

enough to sustain an adult for a

year. A junior samurai might earn 100

koku a year. The higher up the social

scale he was, the more koku he would be

entitled to as tribute from the farmers

on his

land. The leading lords such as the

shogun himself would have each claimed

more than 1 million koku

annually. In fact, the entire class

structure of Japan during the shogunate

was built around the growing and storage

of

rice. This was helpful for feeding

armies.

But when it came to acquiring desirable

goods like silk, pottery or

weapons, rice was useless. The samurai

class are paid in rice

yield. Um the merchants operate in coin.

You can't buy things with rice. So that

the merchants change rice into coin and

they take a rake off and over time uh

the amount of coin you get for your rice

goes down. The samurai class are

increasingly impoverished.

In time even the shogun himself found

his vast stockpiles of rice were worth

barely a handful of gold

coins. So when the revolution came, he

could not afford to defend himself.

[Music]

One of the reasons why the Tokugawa

regime falls is because it doesn't have

cash to pay its allies for continued

military support. If they had any money

at all, the Tokugawa shogunate would

have been using it to fund their defense

against their warlords.

So the question then

remains, if there was no gold, why would

anyone spend so much time and effort to

try and find a treasure that never

really

existed? I think they really believed in

this legacy. Especially Miso Tomayoyuki

felt that this was just the destiny of

his family that there was too much in

terms of hundred-year-old documents to

really just give it up.

Regardless of how much Misano Tomayuki

believed in the legend, he could not

convince his children that the gold

really

existed. He would be the last in his

family's long line of treasure hunters.

He has three adult children. None of

them have expressed any interest at all

in continuing this Miseno family legacy

of searching for the treasure.

Tomayuki was utterly alone in his

quest. But even though he had no one to

help him, he continued to dig until his

very last

days. In 2010, Misano Tomyuki died.

The search for the lost treasure of the

last Shogun died with him.

[Music]

[Music]

Key Vocabulary

Vocabulary	Meanings
treasure /ˈtreʒər/ B1	noun - valuable possessions or money
legend /ˈledʒənd/ B2	noun - a traditional story, often about heroic deeds
buried /ˈberid/ A2	verb - put something in the ground and cover it up
fortune /ˈfɔːrtʃuːn/ B2	noun - a large amount of money
warlord /ˈwɔːrlɔːrd/ C1	noun - a military leader who exercises military and political control
secret /ˈsiːkrət/ A2	noun - something kept hidden
rival /ˈraɪvəl/ B1	noun - a competitor
history /ˈhɪstəri/ A2	noun - the study of past events
dig /dɪɡ/ A1	verb - to make a hole in the ground
generation /ˌdʒenəˈreɪʃən/ B1	noun - all the people born and living at about the same time
capture /ˈkæptʃər/ B2	verb - to catch or seize
desire /dɪˈzaɪər/ B2	noun - a strong feeling of wanting something
rivalry /ˈraɪvəlri/ C1	noun - competition
fortune /ˈfɔːrtʃuːn/ B2	noun - a large amount of money
hunt /hʌnt/ A2	noun - the activity of searching for something
wealth /welθ/ B2	noun - an abundance of valuable possessions
modernize /ˈmɒdərnaɪz/ C1	verb - to make something more modern