Mutsuhiro "The Bird" Watanabe

"The Bird" 

Mutsuhiro Watanabe January 1,1918 – April 1,2003), POW-given nickname, "The Bird", was an Imperial Japanese Army sergeant in World War II who served at POW camps in Ōfuna, Naoetsu (present day Jōetsu, Niigata), and Mitsushima (present day Hiraoka). Watanabe was classified as a war criminal following the war for his abuse of prisoners of war (POWs) held by the Japanese military.

Watanabe beat POWs every day, fracturing their windpipes, rupturing their eardrums, shattering their teeth, tearing one man’s ear half off, leaving men unconscious. He made one officer sit in a shack, wearing only a fundoshi undergarment, for four days in winter. He tied a sixty-five-year-old POW to a tree and left him there for days. He ordered one man to report to him to be punched in the face every night for three weeks. He practiced judo on an appendectomy patient.

Watanabe openly admitted getting a sexual thrill from beating prisoners. Additionally, he had unceasing mood swings. One minute he would be beating a prisoner, and the next he would be handing them fistfuls of candy and cigarettes. Watanabe took a special interest in American track star Louis Zamperini. Zamperini was a legend to the villagers of Ōfuna, Japan, and Watanabe felt that Zamperini challenged his authority for that reason. Once he made Zamperini hold a heavy wooden log over his head for over 37 minutes, at the end of which Watanabe punched him in the stomach. "The Bird" would later haunt Zamperini's dreams, causing him to shake and sometimes even lash out. The Japanese word "Keirei" (salute) was used extensively by Watanabe to get the POWs to stand at attention while he beat them. Zamperini would sometimes mistakenly hear this word and stand at attention, awaiting the beating.

War criminal
In 1945, General Douglas MacArthur included Watanabe as number 23 on his list of the 40 most wanted war criminals in Japan. Watanabe went into hiding for seven years and was never prosecuted. He reemerged into society only after war crimes prosecutions were stopped and the U.S. Occupation of Japan was ending. During his time in hiding, Watanabe worked on a farm and in a small grocery store. He also visited his mother at a restaurant every few years to let her know he was alive. In 1956, the Japanese literary magazine Bungeishunjū published an interview with Watanabe titled (I do not want to be punished by America."

Later life
Following the Occupation, Watanabe became a life insurance salesman and was reportedly wealthy, owning a $1.5 million apartment in Tokyo and a vacation condominium on the Gold Coast of Australia.

Prior to the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, the CBS News program 60 Minutes interviewed Watanabe at the Hotel Okura in Tokyo as part of a feature on Zamperini, the former war-time prisoner who was returning to carry the Olympic Flame torch through Naoetsu en route to Nagano. Watanabe did not apologize in the interview but acknowledged beating and kicking prisoners. "I wasn't given military orders. Because of my own personal feelings, I treated the prisoners strictly as enemies of Japan." Zamperini forgave Watanabe and wanted to meet with him, but Watanabe declined the meeting. Watanabe died in April 2003.

Legacy
Watanabe's abuses are detailed graphically in Laura Hillenbrand's book about Zamperini titled Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (2010). And also in Dr. Alfred A. Weinstein's memoir, "Barbed Wire Surgeon", published in 1948. In 2014, Japanese musician Miyavi played Watanabe in Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, the film adaptation of Hillenbrand's book.