In August 2024, a construction crew clearing jungle for a new highway 90 mi north of Manila struck concrete.
Not just any concrete, reinforced military grade concrete 3 ft thick.
When the foreman ordered his men to dig around it, they uncovered a steel door.
Behind it, a tunnel and at the end of that tunnel, something that made the Philippine National Police Seal off the entire site within hours.
a perfectly preserved ImperialJapanese military compound that wasn’t supposed to exist.
The compound contained living quarters, a command center, and rooms filled with documents.
But it was a photograph on the desk that stopped investigators cold.
Lieutenant General Tadamaki Kurabayi Jr.
, son of a legendary commander of Ewima, staring directly at the camera.
The date on the back, September 1946.
Impossible.
Official records declared him killed in action on Ewima, March 1945.
That construction crew had just uncovered one of the Pacific Wars most carefully guarded secrets.
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Now, back to February 1945 and a battle that would become legend.
To understand how a Japanese general vanished into the Philippine jungle, we need to go back to the black volcanic sand of Ewima.
February 19th, 1945, the largest amphibious assault in Pacific theater history hit Ewima’s beaches.
While Lieutenant General Tadamaki Kurabai commanded the island’s 21,000 defenders, his eldest son, also named Tadamaki, but known as Junior to American intelligence, commanded the 145th Infantry Regiment on the island’s northern sector.
At 34 years old, Korabayi Jr.
was one of the youngest generals in the Imperial Japanese Army, promoted in December 1944 specifically for the Ewoko Jima defense.
The younger Kurabayashi had graduated top of his class from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1932.
He’d served in Manuria, survived the brutal Chinese campaigns, and earned a reputation for tactical brilliance and absolute loyalty to Bushidto code.
His father had specifically requested him for Ewima, writing in a letter intercepted after the war, “If we are to die, let us die together, defending the doorstep to our homeland.
” The strategic situation was desperate.
Ewima sat 660 mi from Tokyo, close enough that American B29s could use it as an emergency landing strip for bombing runs on Japan’s mainland.
The island’s three airfields made it invaluable.
Emperor Hirohito himself had declared it must be held at all costs.
The Americans knew this.
They expected the battle to last 5 days.
It lasted 36.
Kurabayashi Senior’s defensive strategy was revolutionary and terrifying.
No bonsai charges, no wasted lives on the beaches.
Instead, 11 miles of tunnel, hundreds of concealed artillery positions, and a directive to kill 10 Americans before dying.
Each Japanese soldier was expected to become a fortress unto himself.
The younger Kurabayashi commanded the northern sector, the most heavily fortified area where the tunnel system reached five levels deep.
Intelligence reports from Marine Reconnaissance noted something unusual about the 145th Regiment’s positions.
They weren’t just offensive.
In the final weeks before the invasion, aerial photography showed increased activity in a specific cave network position 371 by marine planners.
Large quantities of supplies were being moved in, construction materials, enough rice for 6 months, medical supplies far exceeding what a combat regiment would need.
None of the 70,000 marines landing on Ewanu that Kurabayashi Jr.
had received separate orders, orders that didn’t appear in any official Imperial Japanese Army documents.
Orders that came directly from elements within the Imperial General Staff who were already planning for Japan’s defeat.
and what would come after.
What those orders contained would only make sense 79 years later when investigators opened a sealed trunk in that Philippine compound.
The battle for Ewima began at 0900 hours on February 19th, 1945.
For the first 2 hours, the Marines advanced almost unopposed across the black sand.
It was a trap.
At 1,100 hours, the island erupted.
Hidden artillery, mortars, and machine guns opened fire simultaneously from positions the Americans couldn’t even see.
The slaughter was immediate.
Kurabayi Junior’s 145th regiment held the northern sector around Hill 382, the island’s highest point.
American Marines called it the meat grinder.
The fighting there was different from anywhere else on the island.
More methodical, more disciplined.
Marines reported that instead of fighting to the last man in four positions, Japanese troops in the 145th TH sector would fall back through tunnel networks, sealing positions behind them, making every yard cost blood.
On March 9th, 1945, the third marine division launched a major assault on position 371 that cave network intelligence had flagged before the invasion.
The fighting lasted 14 hours.
Flamethrowers, satchel charges, direct artillery fire into cave mouths.
When Marines finally breached the outer defenses, they found something unexpected.
The position was almost empty.
Evidence of recent occupation, warm rice pots, medical supplies, ammunition, but fewer than 30 defenders.
For a position that size, they’d expected 200.
Lieutenant Colonel Howard Kenyon, the Marine officer who led the assault, noted in his afteraction report, “The enemy withdrew in organized fashion through a tunnel system more extensive than any we’d encountered.
We pursued for approximately 300 yd before the tunnel was collapsed by demolition charges.
Seismic equipment suggested the tunnel continued much deeper, possibly to sea level.
The official record states that Lieutenant General Corbay Jr.
was killed on March 21st, 1945 during the final bonsai attack led by his father.
But there’s a problem with that record.
Three separate Marine units reported encountering Kora Bay Senior’s final attack group of approximately 300 men.
None of the American afteraction reports mention a second general among the dead.
In fact, the younger Korabayashi’s body was never positively identified.
What Marines did find in the ruins of position 371 days after the collapse was a command post, maps of the tunnel system showing connections to the coast, a radio room with equipment smashed beyond use, and a desk with a single item on it, a family photograph of the Korabayashi family taken in Tokyo 1940.
The younger Korabayashi is father, his mother, and two sisters.
on the back in Japanese until we meet again.
March 26th, 1945.
The battle for Ewima officially ended.
American casualties, 26,038, including 6,821 dead.
Japanese casualties, 20,73 confirmed dead.
But here’s the statistical anomaly that troubled American intelligence.
216 Japanese soldiers were captured alive.
Another 300 to 400 defenders, according to calculations based on the tunnel system size and supply caches, were simply unaccounted for.
The Navy maintained a tight blockade around Ewima from February 16th through April 1945.
No surface vessel could have left the island undetected.
But on the night of March 21st, the same night Kora Bay Senior led his final attack, the destroyer USS Haywood L.
Edwards reported a possible submarine contact 12 mi northeast of Ewima.
Depth charges were dropped.
No debris surfaced.
The contact was classified as probable whale and forgotten.
It would take 79 years and a construction crew in the Philippines.
To understand what actually happened in those final hours beneath Ewima’s volcanic rock.
The official investigation into Korabayashi Jr’s fate was prefuncter with 21,000 Japanese dead on an island just 8 square miles.
Precise identification was nearly impossible.
The Marines had used flamethrowers extensively.
Many bodies were buried in collapsed tunnels or thrown into mass graves for sanitation reasons.
In June 1945, the young Aurora was officially listed as killed in action, body unreovered, the same designation given to 11,000 other Japanese defenders.
His mother, Yoshiko Kurayashi, refused to accept the notification.
In a letter to the American occupation authorities in 1946, she insisted her son had survived.
“A mother knows,” she wrote.
“I feel his presence.
” The letter was filed and ignored.
Japan was in ruins.
Millions were dead.
One grieving mother’s intuition meant nothing.
But Yoshiko wasn’t alone in her suspicions.
Captain Wadab Hiroshi, who’d served under Korabayashi Jr.
in Manuria, was captured on Okinawa in June 1945.
During his interrogation, he made a strange statement.
Korayashi’s son carried the seeds.
That’s all I can say.
When pressed, he refused to elaborate.
The interrogator noted it as delusional rambling from traumatized prisoner.
American intelligence did notice something odd in the aftermath.
Between March 1945 and August 1945, Japanese submarine activity in the Philippines increased despite critical fuel shortages.
The submarines weren’t attacking American shipping.
They were transiting, going somewhere.
Aerial reconnaissance spotted what appeared to be submarine births in hidden coes in northern Luzon.
But by the time forces could investigate after Japan surrender, the sites were abandoned.
In the Philippines, locals in the Sierra Madre Mountains reported seeing Japanese soldiers who didn’t know the war had ended.
Not unusual.
Scattered holdouts appeared throughout the Pacific for years.
But these reports were different.
The soldiers weren’t hiding in jungle camps.
They were building something.
concrete structures, organized work parties, and they had a commander the locals described as the young general who never smiled.
The Philippine government investigated in 1947.
They found nothing.
The jungle is thick in the Sierra Madre.
Without precise coordinates, you could hide an army based 20 m from civilization and never be found.
In 1952, a former Imperial Navy officer named Goat Takashi published a memoir in a small Japanese journal.
One passage stood out.
Some officers prepared for continuation even after the homeland surrender.
They believed the war would resume.
They cashed supplies, established positions, recruited loyal men.
The emperor’s broadcast ended the war for most.
For others, it simply changed the mission.
The passage was dismissed as fiction.
But in 1978, when Lieutenant Hero Onodak finally surrendered in the Philippines after 29 years in the jungle, he carried a map.
American intelligence examined it.
The map showed locations in Luzon with coded Japanese characters.
One location was marked with two characters.
Kurabayashi’s garden.
No one knew what it meant.
The location on the map, if the scale was accurate, pointed to dense jungle in Isabella province.
The area was searched.
Nothing was found.
The map was filed in the National Archives.
Rehook 3 for decades.
The mystery collected dust until June 2024 when a highway construction project called the Isabella Kagayana Expressway began cutting through that exact grid coordinate.
Between 1945 and 2024, the jungle where the compound sat remained largely untouched.
The area was remote, mountainous, prone to typhoons.
The few local villages nearby had no reason to venture into the dense forest.
They had stories, yes, old men spoke of Japanese ghosts and strange sounds of the jungle in the 1950s, but these are written off as folklore.
In 1989, a logging company obtained permits to clear timber in the region.
They worked the area for 6 months.
Their equipment never came within 200 yards of the compound.
The jungle growth was too thick, the terrain too unstable.
They abandoned the sector and moved to easier territory.
A Philippine Army training exercise passed within half a mile of the site in 2003.
Nothing was detected.
The compound’s construction, buried beneath the jungle canopy, concealed by volcanic rock outcroppings, camouflaged by 58 years of vegetation, made it invisible to everything except ground penetrating radar, which wasn’t being used.
Historical researchers occasionally revived interest in Korabayashi Jr’s fate.
A 2011 doctoral thesis at Kyoto University examined discrepancies in Ewima casualty records.
The author noted that the 145th regiments confirmed dead totaled 847, but unit strength before the battle was estimated at 1,200.
Where were the other 353 men? The thesis concluded they likely died in tunnel collapses, bodies never recovered.
In 2015, a Japanese veterans organization funded an archaeological survey of Ewima, now returned to Japanese control.
They explored some of the tunnel networks.
They found artifacts, remains, ammunition, but position 371, Kurabayashi Jr.
‘s command post remained inaccessible.
The tunnel collapse the Marines had triggered in 1945 was complete.
Attempts to dig through risk bringing down the entire hillside.
Technological advances changed what was possible.
Ground penetrating radar satellite archaeology lighter mapping.
But these tools needed to be pointed in the right direction.
Ewima was surveyed extensively.
The Philippine jungle was not.
No one thought to look there.
In 2018, the Philippine government approved the Isabella Kagayan Expressway project, a modern highway to connect remote northern provinces to Manila.
The route was chosen for topographical ease and minimal environmental impact.
The surveyors had no idea what sat 40 ft beneath the planned roaded.
Then in August 2024, everything changed.
August 12th, 2024, 092 hours.
Construction foreman Raphael Santos was supervising a crew clearing jungle at kilometer marker 87 of the expressway route.
The bulldozer operator Mario Reyes reported his blade hitting something solid.
Not rock.
Rock would crack.
This didn’t crack.
Santos ordered the dozer to pull back.
They dug by hand around the obstruction.
One foot down.
They exposed concrete.
Military grade concrete poured in forms reinforced with steel rebar.
The construction plans showed no structures at this location.
Santos called his site supervisor.
By 1400 hours, three engineers were on site with ground penetrating radar.
The scan revealed a structure 120 ft long, 60 ft wide, buried under 3 to 4 ft of soil and jungle growth.
The concrete walls were 3 ft thick bunker grade construction.
The GPR also detected hollow spaces, rooms, corridors, and something that looked like a vertical shaft.
The engineers contacted the Philippine National Museum.
Wartime structures weren’t uncommon.
The Philippines had been a major battleground in WW2, but this structure was far from any known battle site.
No Japanese or American military maps showed installations in this area.
Dr.
Maria Saledo, a military historian with the National Museum, arrived on August 13th.
She brought portable X-ray equipment and a team of archaeologists.
The initial scan confirmed the structure was Japanese.
Rebar spacing and concrete composition matched known Imperial Japanese Army construction techniques from 1943 to 1945.
The decision was made to excavate.
A controlled dig began on August 15th.
Ironically, the 79th anniversary of Japan surrender.
The crew worked carefully removing soil, cutting back jungle growth.
By August 17th, they’d exposed the steel door Santos had initially discovered.
It was sealed with a locking mechanism that had rusted but held.
Markings on the door were in Japanese military code.
Dr.
Saledo photographed everything before they attempted entry.
She contacted the Japanese embassy.
They sent a military attache, Colonel Yamamoto Kenji, who specialized in WW2 historical sites.
He arrived August 19th with a translator and equipment.
On August 20th, 2024, at 1,030 hours, they opened the door.
The tunnel beyond was pitch black, but structurally sound.
The air was stale, but breathable, ventilation shafts, still functional after 79 years.
The team entered with lights and cameras.
50 ft in, the tunnel opened into a large chamber.
This was the command center.
Maps on the walls, preserved by the dry air.
A radio room to the left, equipment intact, but useless.
Living quarters to the right.
Bunks for 30 men neatly made.
A mess area with tables and benches.
Everything covered in dust, but everything in place, as if the occupants had simply walked away.
But it was the command desk that stopped them.
A Japanese military desk standard issue with a photograph on it.
The photograph that made Dr.
Saledo immediately contact the Philippine National Police.
Lieutenant General Tadamaki Kurabayi Jr.
in full dress uniform standing in front of this very compound.
Behind him, visible in the photo, the concrete structure before it was buried and the date handwritten on the back in Japanese.
September 14th, 1946, 18 months after Ewoko Jima fell, 6 months after Japan surrendered.
But the real shock was what they found in the sealed rooms beyond the command center.
Documents that proved this wasn’t a hideout.
It was a mission that had continued for years after the war officially ended.
The Philippine National Police sealed the site within 4 hours of the discovery.
This wasn’t just a historical find.
This potentially involved war crimes, looted assets, and international implications.
They assembled a joint investigation team, Philippine authorities, Japanese government representatives, American military historians, and forensic specialists.
The first priority was documentation.
Every room was photographed before anything was touched.
The compound consisted of seven main chambers connected by concrete corridors.
The layout matched Imperial Japanese Army Command bunker specifications from 1944.
Construction quality was excellent.
No structural damage despite 79 years and countless typhoons overhead.
The living quarters revealed the compound housed approximately 30 to 35 people longterm.
Uniforms hung in storage size for Japanese soldiers.
Medical supplies expired but intact filled an entire room.
Enough stored food, mostly rice and canned goods, to sustain 30 people for 6 months.
But the supply dates were telling.
Some crates were marked 1945, others 1946.
A few impossibly, showed dates from 1947 and 1948.
Dr.
Kenji Sado, a forensic archaeologist from Tokyo University, analyzed the documents found in the command center.
There were hundreds of pages, operations log, supply manifests, coded communications.
The earliest dated document was March 15th, 1945, 6 days before Korabayashi Jr.
‘s reported death on Ewima.
The latest was November 3rd, 1951.
The operations logs told an incredible story.
On March 20th, 1945, Kuru Bayi Jr.
received orders not from Ewima Command, but from a classified section within the Imperial General Staff in Tokyo designated only as continuation group.
The orders were clear.
Evacuate selected personnel and materials through a pre-prepared tunnel to a submarine rendevous point.
Proceed to the Philippines.
Establish a covert base.
Wait for further instructions.
Lieutenant Sato Hiroshi, an intelligence officer in the 145th Regiment, kept detailed daily logs.
March 21st, 1945, 020 hours.
Commander Cororabashi assembled 34 selected personnel in position 371.
We were told the emperor had sanctioned a contingency operation.
Our mission was to survive, preserve critical intelligence, and prepare for the continuation of operations should circumstances allow.
The tunnel from position 371 went down 200 feet, then laterally 1.
2 miles to the northeastern coast of Ewima.
The tunnel had taken 8 months to construct, dug simultaneously with the defensive positions, using the same slave labor and Korean conscripts who’ built the island’s main tunnel network.
But this tunnel was secret, not shown on maps, known only to Corbayashi Jr.
and his elected staff.
March 21st, 2345 hours.
The same night as Korabayashi Senior’s final bonsai attack, a deliberate diversion, while Marines fought and died on the northern hillsides, 34 Japanese soldiers moved through the hidden tunnel carrying waterproof containers of documents, maps, gold bars, 63 total, each marked with Imperial Navy seals and seeds.
Actual seeds carefully cataloged seeds from Japanese crops preserved in sealed containers.
The submarine was I36, a type B1 submarine under Commander Sugamasa Naboro.
American records confirmed I36 departed Kuray Naval Base on March 10th, 1945.
It was officially reported sunk on April 17th, 1945.
Depth charged by the destroyer escort USS Conklin near Okinawa.
But the wreck was never found because I36 wasn’t near Okinawa in April 1945.
The submarine’s log found in a waterproof case in the compound showed it picked up Korabayi Jr’s party at 0340 hours on March 22nd submerged 400 yardds offshore from Ewima’s northeast coast.
The submarine then transited submerged to the Philippines arriving April 2nd, 1945 at a predetermined location in Luzon’s northeast coast.
Dr.
Saledo’s team found the landing site using coordinates from the submarine log.
Local fishermen confirmed the location.
A hidden cove accessible only during high tide surrounded by cliffs.
The cove showed evidence of concrete peers now eroded that match the time frame.
From the cove, Korabayashi Jr.
led his group inland.
They had maps provided by the continuation group showing the pre-selected compound site.
But when they arrived in midappril 1945, the site was just jungle.
They built the compound themselves.
34 men working for 7 months using supplies cashed by submarine runs through summer and fall 1945.
The forensic team found construction records.
The concrete was poured in sections between June and October 1945.
The steel reinforcement came from a demolished Japanese bunker in Manila, salvaged before American occupation.
The electrical system, yes, they had electricity from a small hydroelectric generator in a nearby stream, was installed in November 1945.
By December 1945, the compound was operational.
And here’s where it gets strange.
The mission logs indicated they were waiting for orders.
Orders to resume operations when the time was right.
Some personnel believed the American occupation would fail, that Japan would rise again.
Others thought they were preserving knowledge for a new generation.
Kurabayashi Jr.
‘s personal diary found in a lock box suggested something more complex.
We are seeds in fertile ground we wait not for war but for something we do not yet understand.
The seeds, the actual agricultural seeds they’d carried from Ewima were planted in test plots around the compound.
Rice, wheat, soybeans.
The log showed harvest records through 1949.
They were literally preserving Japanese agricultural genetics in Philippine soil, but the gold 63 bars, 22 kg each, worth approximately $84 million in 2024 values, was never spent.
It sat in a vault room untouched.
Payment for something that never happened.
The last entry in the log was November 3rd, 1951.
No further communications from homeland.
Supply is depleted.
21 personnel departed for Manila to integrate into civilian life.
13 chose to remain maintaining the site.
I will stay until relief or death.
Torabayi.
But if Korabayashi Jr.
stayed until death, where was his body? The compound’s final mystery was about to be revealed in the one room investigators had saved for last.
A sealed chamber at the back of the complex that wasn’t on any of the maps.
The sealed chamber had a door different from all the others.
Would not steal with Japanese characters carved into it.
Until we meet again.
The same phrase from the family photograph found on Ewima.
Dr.
Saledo opened it on August 27th, 2024.
Inside was a small room 10x 10 ft.
a single wooden cot, a table with writing materials, and a skeleton laying on the cot dressed in the tattered remains of an Imperial Japanese Army general’s uniform.
Forensic analysis by Dr.
Raone Torres, chief medical examiner for the Philippine National Police.
Confirmed male, age 45 to 55 at time of death, height 5’8 in, matching Kora Bayi Jr.
‘s recorded physical description.
DNA was extracted from the remains and compared to samples provided by Korabayashi Jr.
‘s niece, now 83 years old, living in Tokyo.
Positive match 99.
7% probability.
The body was Lieutenant General Tadamaki Kurabayi Jr.
Carbon dating of the uniform fabric and analysis of decomposition in the sealed dry environment suggested death occurred between 1953 and 1955.
Cause of death, natural, likely heart failure or disease.
No signs of trauma.
He died alone in this room, waiting for orders that never came.
Next to the cot was a wooden box.
Inside letters, 73 letters written but never sent, addressed to his mother.
The last was dated April 1954.
In it, he wrote, “Mother, I have failed in my duty to return to you.
I stayed too long believing in a purpose that no longer exists.
The others have gone.
I remain because I do not know how to be anything other than what I was.
Forgive me.
I will see you and father in the next life.
The truth pieced together from documents, logs, and forensic evidence was both mundane and tragic.
The continuation group that gave Korabayashi Jr.
‘s orders was a fringe element within the military command.
officers who refused to accept defeat, who believed the war would resume.
But when it didn’t, when Japan rebuilt under American occupation, there was no resumption, no orders, no mission.
The submarine I36 made three supply runs to the Philippine compound.
June 1945, September 1945, and January 1946.
After that, nothing.
The submarine was likely scuttled when Japan surrendered its remaining vessels.
The continuation group disbanded or was arrested.
The paper trail ended.
Kurabayashi Jr.
and his men were forgotten, abandoned.
Not deliberately, simply lost in the chaos of Japan’s collapse and reconstruction.
Records were destroyed.
Personnel scattered.
The handful of officers who knew about the Philippine mission either died in the war or kept silent after.
So 34 men built a fortress in the jungle for a mission that evaporated while they worked.
By 1950, most realized the truth and left.
They integrated into Philippine society.
Japanese expatriots weren’t uncommon in Manila postwar.
Some may still be alive.
elderly men who’ve never spoken of what they did.
But Kurabayashi Jr.
stayed, perhaps out of duty, perhaps because leaving meant admitting his father died for nothing.
Perhaps because he didn’t know how to stop being a soldier.
The log showed he maintained the compound alone until at least 1954, then silence.
The compound sat sealed and forgotten for 70 years, reclaimed by jungle, lost to history, until a bulldozer blade hit concrete on a Tuesday morning in August 2024.
The recovered materials are now split between the Philippine National Museum and the Japanese Ministry of Defense Archives.
The 63 gold bars were claimed by the Japanese government, which paid fair market value to the Philippine government as a gesture of goodwill.
The seeds somehow incredibly included varieties of rice that have since gone extinct in modern Japan.
Agricultural geneticists are attempting to germinate them.
Korabayashi Junior’s remains were returned to Japan in December 2024.
He was buried next to his father in the Korabayashi family plot in Tokyo.
His niece attended.
So did four elderly Filipino men who came forward after news reports, claiming they’d known the Japanese general in the jungle as children in the 1950s.
They remembered he gave them candy and told him stories, but made them promised never to speak of where he lived.
The compound is being preserved as a historical site.
The Philippine government in cooperation with Japan is converting it into a museum dedicated to the forgotten aftermath of war.
The soldiers who didn’t die in battle, but were lost in the confusion of peace.
Yoshiko Kurabayashi died in 1982, never knowing her son had survived Ewima, never knowing he’d lived another 9 years, isolated in a jungle, waiting for a purpose that dissolved around him.
She was right, a mother does know, but sometimes knowing isn’t enough.
The story of Tadamaki Kurabayi Jr.
isn’t one of heroism or villain.
It’s about the inertia of war, the men who couldn’t stop fighting even when the fighting stopped, and the cruel truth that sometimes survival is harder than death.
His last letter to his mother, the one from April 1954, ended with a line that’s now carved on his headstone.
I remained in my post.
That is all a soldier can do.
79 years after Ewima, the last soldier of position 371 finally came
