Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

requesting [POWs] to obey the rules.” “Am I guilty?” he wrote. He didn’t answer his question, but he also expressed no remorse. Even as he wrote of his gratitude for the humanity of the farmer who had taken him in, he couldn’t see the parallel with himself and the helpless men who had fallen into his hands.
    The radio in the farmer’s house was often on, and each day, Watanabe listened to reports on fugitive war-crimes suspects. He scanned the faces of his hosts as the stories aired, worried that they’d suspect him. The newspapers, too, were full of articles on these fugitives, described as “enemies of human beings.” The pronouncements wounded Watanabe’s feelings. It seemed to him outrageous that the Allies, who “would not forgive,” would oversee trials of Japanese. God alone, he felt, was qualified to judge him. “I wanted to cry out,” he wrote, “ ‘That’s not fair!’ ”
    The tension of living incognito wore on him. He was especially wary of the farmer’s wife, whose gaze seemed to convey suspicion. Sleep came so reluctantly that he had to work himself to exhaustion to bring it on. He brooded on the question of whether or not he should surrender.
    One night, as the evening’s fire died in the hearth, Watanabe came to the farmer and told him who he was. The farmer listened, his eyes fixed on the fire, his tongue clicking against his false teeth.
    “People say to control your mouth, or it brings evil,” the farmer said. “You should be careful of your speech.”
    He said nothing else and turned away.
    ——

    As the Bird hid, other men who had abused POWs were arrested, taken to Sugamo Prison, in Tokyo, and tried for war crimes. Roughly 5,400 Japanese were tried by the United States and other nations; some 4,400 were convicted, including 984 given death sentences and 475 given life in prison. * More than 30 Ofuna personnel were convicted and sentenced to a total of roughly 350 years in prison. The thieving cook, Tatsumi “Curley” Hata, was sentenced to twenty years. Masajiro “Shithead” Hirayabashi, who’d beaten countless prisoners and killed Gaga the duck, was given four years. Commander Kakuzo Iida, “the Mummy,” was sentenced to death for contributing to the deaths of five captives. Also convicted was Sueharu Kitamura—“the Quack”—who had mutilated his patients, bludgeoned Harris, and contributed to the deaths of four captives, including one who was carried from Ofuna at the war’s end, hours from death, crying out “
Quack
” over and over again. Kitamura was sentenced to hang.
    Kaname Sakaba, the Omori commander, was given a life sentence. Of the men from Naoetsu, six civilian guards were tried, convicted, and hanged. Seven Japanese soldiers were also convicted: two were hanged, four given life imprisonment with hard labor, and one given twenty years.
    The police found Jimmie Sasaki working as a liaison between the Japanese navy and the occupying forces. Ever a fabulist, he told investigators that Ofuna interrogators were “always kind to prisoners,” that he’d never seen a prisoner abused, and that prisoners rarely complained. In questioning, the truth about his position at Ofuna finallyemerged. He had not been the chief interrogator, bearing a rank equal to admiral, that he had claimed to be; he’d been only a low-ranking interpreter. This man of ever-shifting allegiances tried to shift them again, speaking of his debt to America and asking if someone could get him a job with the U.S. Army. Instead of a job, he received an indictment, charged with ordering the abuse of several captives, including one who’d been starved and tortured to death. Though the trial testimony seemed to raise enormous doubt as to his guilt, Sasaki was convicted and ultimately sentenced to six years of hard labor.
    And so the strange and twisting war journey of Louie’s onetime friend ended in Sugamo Prison, where he was a model prisoner, tending a vegetable garden and a grove of trees. Who Jimmie Sasaki really was—whether artful spy and willing instrument in Japan’s machine of violence or something more innocent—remains a mystery.
    ——

    Of the postwar stories of the men who ran the camps in which Louie had lived, the saddest was that of YukichiKano, the Omori private who’d risked everything to protect the POWs and had probably saved several prisoners’ lives. Just after the war’s end was announced, Kano came upon a group of drunken guards stumbling