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

those serving life sentences would be eligible for parole after fifteen years. Then, in 1951, the Allies and Japan signed the Treaty of Peace, which would end the occupation. The treaty waived the right of former POWs and their families to seek reparations from Japan and Japanese companies that had profited from their enslavement. * Finally, in March 1952, just before the treaty took effect and the occupation ended, the order for apprehension of fugitive war criminals was lifted. Though Watanabe was on the fugitive list, hardly anyone believed that he was still alive.
    When he saw the story, Watanabe was wary. Afraid that the police had planted the story as a trap, he didn’t go home. He spent much of the spring working as a fishmonger, all the while wondering if he was free. Finally, he decided to sneak back to his mother.
    Watanabe rang the bell, but no one answered. He rang again, longer, and heard footfalls on the garden stones. The gate swung open, and there was the face of his youngest brother, whom he hadn’t seensince the latter was a boy. His brother threw his arms around him, then pulled him into the house, singing out, “Mu-cchan’s back!”
    Mutsuhiro Watanabe’s flight was over. In his absence, many of his fellow camp guards and officials had been convicted of war crimes. Some had been executed. The others wouldn’t be in prison for long. In keeping with the American effort to reconcile with Japan, all of them, including those serving life sentences, would soon be paroled. It appears that even Sueharu Kitamura, “the Quack,” was set free, in spite of his death sentence. By 1958, every war criminal who had not been executed would be free, and on December 30 of that year, all would be granted amnesty. Sugamo would be torn down, and the epic ordeals of POWs in Japan would fade from the world’s memory.
    Watanabe would later admit that in the beginning of his life in exile, he had pondered the question of whether or not he had committed any crime. In the end, he laid the blame not on himself but on “sinful, absurd, insane war.” He saw himself as a victim. If he had tugs of conscience over what he’d done, he shrugged them away by assuring himself that the lifting of the fugitive-apprehension order was a personal exoneration.
    “I was just in a great joy of complete release and liberation,” he wrote in 1956, “that I was not guilty.”
    ——

    Watanabe married and had two children. He opened an insurance agency in Tokyo, and it reportedly became highly profitable. He lived in a luxury apartment worth a reported $1.5 million and kept a vacation home on Australia’s Gold Coast.
    Almost everyone who knew of his crimes believed he was dead. By his own account, Watanabe visited America several times, but he apparently didn’t encounter any former POWs. Then, in the early 1980s, an American military officer visiting Japan heard something about the Bird being alive. In 1991, Bob Martindale was told that a Japanese veteran had spotted a man he thought was Watanabe at a sports event. Among the other POWs, few, if any, heard of this. Louie remained in ignorance, convinced that the Bird had killed himself decades earlier.
    In the summer of 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of his flight from Naoetsu, Watanabe was seventy-seven years old. His hair had grayed; his haughty bearing had bent. He seemed to be close to concluding his life without publicly confronting his past. But that year, he was at last ready to admit that he had abused men. Perhaps he truly felt guilty.Perhaps, as he approached his death, he had a troubling sense that he’d be remembered as a fiend and wished to dispel that notion. Or perhaps he was motivated by the same vanity that had consumed him in wartime, and hoped to use his vile history, and his victims, to draw attention to himself, maybe even win admiration for his contrition. That summer, when London
Daily Mail
reporter Peter Hadfield came calling, Watanabe let him in.
    Sitting in his apartment, his pawlike hand clutching a crystal wine glass, he finally spoke about the POWs.
    “I understand their bitterness, and they may wonder why I was so severe,” he said. “But now my feeling is I want to apologize. A deep, deep apology … I was severe. Very severe.”
    He made a fist and waved it past his chin. “If the former prisoners want, I would offer to let them come here and hit me, to beat me.”
    He claimed that he’d used only his hands to punish POWs, an assertion