What is the Tokugawa buried treasure?
The Tokugawa buried treasure is a legend that at the end of the Edo period, just before the shogunate fell, its enormous war funds were secretly buried somewhere to keep them from the new government’s army. When the new government’s forces entered Edo Castle in 1868, the castle treasury was said to be almost empty, giving rise to the rumor that “the shogunate’s money must have been hidden somewhere.”
Oguri Kozukenosuke and Mount Akagi
At the center of the legend is Oguri Kozukenosuke Tadamasa, who served as the shogunate’s finance commissioner, among other posts. Oguri argued for all-out resistance against the new government but was overruled, and he moved to Gonda Village in his domain in Kozuke Province (today’s Gunma Prefecture). In 1868 he was captured by the new government’s army and executed without any trial.
Because Oguri moved a large amount of baggage from Edo to Gunma and knew the shogunate’s finances inside out, the theory spread that “Oguri buried the shogunate’s gold on Mount Akagi in Gunma.” Its value is said to be tens of trillions of yen in today’s money.
Digging for the treasure
Around Mount Akagi, many people have dug for the treasure since the Meiji era. In the 1990s, a TV program broadcast several large-scale excavations using heavy machinery, drawing attention from all over Japan, but no treasure was found.
Besides Mount Akagi, legends of Tokugawa treasure exist in Nikko, Shizuoka and elsewhere, and there is even a theory that the words of the children’s song Kagome Kagome are a code showing the hiding place. On the other hand, some point out that the shogunate was already in financial trouble at the end of the Edo period and had no money left to bury in the first place.
