Treasure off Tsushima

Old tale about the czar's gold may be true

Almost 75 years have passed since Admiral Heihachiro Togo, in the climactic encounter of the Russo-Japanese war, sank 20 of the 38 czarist warships that participated in the battle of the Sea of Japan. The echoes still reverberate. Spurred anew by an old tale that Czar Nicholas II's sunken fleet had been carrying a fortune in gold and other precious metals, a team of divers six months ago reached the 8,524-ton Russian cruiser Admiral Nakhimov, in 314 ft. of water 5.5 miles off Tsushima Island, in an area between South Korea and Japan that lies well within Japanese territorial waters. They surfaced with a dull silver, footlong, 22-lb. ingot bearing Cyrillic markings. Said Salvage Chief Katsumi Uchinai as he displayed the bar before a packed Tokyo press conference: "At long last we have uncovered the treasure."

The salvage team insisted that the bar was platinum, but too "sacred" to be submitted to analysis. Some experts thought that it was too light for platinum and might be sterling silver. But after 15 more ingots were recovered last month, the discovery touched off shock waves almost as strong as those of the original battle. The find started a gold rush--to the delight of Sadami Umeno, mayor of Tsushima's isolated principal town of Kamitsushima (pop. 7,300). "We would like to have a hospital and a 3,000-ton ferryboat," said the mayor, suggesting that the treasure hunt entitled the island to some benefits it was previously promised. "We might even have an airport built."

Meanwhile, a Soviet diplomat called at the Foreign Office in Tokyo and claimed for Moscow whatever treasure was found; his stand was backed by Kyushu University's Hideo Takabayashi, a professor of international law. Abandoned warships, said Takabayashi, unlike abandoned merchantmen, continue to belong to the governments whose flag they once flew. Not so, said the Japanese Foreign Office. The find, it held, belonged to neither the Soviet nor the Japanese government.

That view sat well with Ryoichi Sasakawa, 81, famous in Japan as a philanthropist and longtime prewar supporter of conservative causes, an accused war criminal who spent three years in jail after World War II, and a multimillionaire whose fortune was made by, among other things, staging hydroplane races on which eager Japanese bettors could wager. Sasakawa disclosed that he had sponsored the salvage ship Teno and its team of divers at a cost of $13.6 million. The ingots and whatever else was found were his, said Sasakawa, who estimated that treasure worth no less than $36 billion was aboard the Admiral Nakhimov.

With that, Sasakawa unveiled a patriotic proposal: he would surrender the entire treasure to the Soviet Union in exchange for a group of islands off Hokkaido that the Soviets seized from Japan after World War II and have steadfastly refused to return. Promised Sasakawa, with a chuckle: "I'm ready to talk with whomever Brezhnev-san might send over to my office."

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