The United States and Japan conspired to hide imperial wartime loot, say

IT contains all the elements of a political thriller: family squabbles, power struggles, duplicity and murder. It involves a huge pile of treasure - bullion worth billions stashed all over the world - and secret operations to retrieve it. It promises a sequel. And best of all, it is all true.

So say Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, in their latest work, The Yamato Dynasty (Bantam Press, $150), an incisive biography of five generations of Japan's imperial family since the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Their most controversial claims, however, centre on the country's longest-reigning emperor, Hirohito, who died in 1989.

The book claims to reveal for the first time the imperial family's alleged role in Japan's wartime looting of Asia - a covert operation named Golden Lily that was headed by Prince Chichibu, a brother of Hirohito, and involved the military, the secret service, underworld figures and businessmen.

It aims to expose the extent to which Washington and Tokyo supposedly collaborated to keep this secret and deceive the world into thinking the fighting had left Japan too poor to compensate its victims meaningfully.

It dashes once and for all assumptions that the imperial family was a fossilised symbol removed from day-to-day decisions during the war.

It also says that the people involved in Hirohito's exoneration of war crimes - including General Douglas MacArthur and former US president Herbert Hoover - walked away from the occupation with huge amounts of gold.

'I think this is going to turn out to be one of the great scandals of the century,' Sterling Seagrave says matter-of-factly.