Later life and death edit
Watanabe was ranked number 23 on General Douglas MacArthur’s list of the top 40 war criminals in Japan in 1945. [1].
However, Watanabe went into hiding and was never prosecuted. In 1952, all charges were quietly dismissed. [1] An interview with Watanabe titled “I do not want to be judged by America” was published in 1956 in the Japanese literary magazine Bungeishunjū. ” He later became an insurance salesman.
The CBS News program 60 Minutes spoke with Watanabe at the Hotel Okura Tokyo before the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano. The interview was part of a feature on Louis Zamperini, who was returning to carry the Olympic Flame torch through Naoetsu en route to Nagano, which was not far from the POW camp where he had been held, four days before his 81st birthday. Watanabe admitted to beating and kicking inmates during the interview, but he expressed no regret, stating, “I treated the prisoners strictly as enemies of Japan.” Zamperini made an effort to see Watanabe, his most vicious and powerful tormentor, but the man, who had escaped from justice, would not see him.
On April 1, 2003, Watanabe passed away at the age of 85. [2].
World War II edit
Watanabe worked at POW camps in Yamakita, a civilian POW camp, Omori, Naoetsu (now Jōetsu), Niigata, and Mitsushima (now Hiraoka).
Watanabe allegedly practiced judo on an appendectomy patient while in the military, and he gave a man who reported to him the order to be punched in the face every night for three weeks. Olympian and American track star Louis Zamperini was among his prisoners. Zamperini stated that Watanabe frequently beat his inmates, seriously injuring them. It is claimed that Watanabe imprisoned a 65-year-old prisoner for days by tying him to a tree and forcing one officer to spend four days in a shack while only wearing a fundoshi undergarment. According to Laura Hillenbrand’s book, Watanabe was interested in the French school of nihilist philosophy and had studied and spoken French fluently.
Mutsuhiro “The Bird” Watanabe Quotes in UnbrokenThe Unbroken quotes below are all either spoken by Mutsuhiro “The Bird” Watanabe or refer to Mutsuhiro “The Bird” Watanabe. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Now, in order to prevent himself from starving to death, he was forced to crawl through the filth of a pig’s sty and pick up excrement with his bare hands while stuffing handfuls of the animal’s food into his mouth. Of all the cruel and horrible things the Bird had done to Louie, nothing had made him feel as scared and hopeless as this had. Louie thought that if anything could break him, this would be it.
Though Louie was unsure of the Bird’s whereabouts, he was confident that he could track him down if he could return to Japan. He would respond to the Bird’s relentless attempts to eradicate his humanity with this: “I am still a man.” He could conceive of no other way to save himself. Louie had found a quest to replace his lost Olympics. He was going to kill the Bird.
Louie had never truly returned home, so no one could get in touch with him. He had been beaten in prison camp into dehumanizing submission to a world order where the Bird held absolute sovereignty, and he continued to live under this world order. Louie felt that only the Bird could restore him—by enduring pain and death in his hands—after the Bird had stripped him of his dignity and left him feeling helpless, humiliated, and ashamed. A once incredibly optimistic man now thought that murder was his only chance for salvation
When Louie heard Watanabe’s fate in Sugamo Prison, all he saw in Watanabe was a lost soul, a life that was now past redemption. He experienced a feeling for his captor that he had never experienced before. He shuddered in shock to learn that it was compassion. At that moment, something shifted sweetly inside him. It was forgiveness, beautiful and effortless and complete. For Louie Zamperini, the war was over.
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