Mutsuhiro Watanabe

Mutsuhiro Watanabe (Japanese: 渡邊 睦 裕; * 1918 ; † April 2003 ) was a Japanese soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army . Watanabe (nickname: The Bird ) became a warden in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps during World War II . Because of his brutality towards his prisoners, he was on the list of the most wanted Japanese war criminals after the war.

In 2015 he became known through the film Unbroken , which tells the fate of the American athlete and prisoner of war Louis Zamperini . He was portrayed by the Japanese singer and actor Miyavi . Also in the film Unbroken: Path to Redemption , released in 2018, his person plays a role.

Life

Career

Mutsuhiro Watanabe was born the fourth of six children to Shizuka Watanabe. Little is known about his father, a pilot , and his fate. According to some sources, he died, according to other sources, he left the family when Mutsuhiro was a child. Watanabe grew up in prosperity; his family had invested in real estate, including mines in Nagano and Manchuria .

He spent his childhood and youth in Kobe . As a young man, he enrolled at Waseda University in Tokyo Prefecture , where he studied French literature and became interested in nihilism . In 1942, after graduating, he worked for a news agency in Tokyo for about a month ; but as an ardent patriot he soon joined the army as a soldier. Watanabe wanted to be an officer like his older brother. Since his brother-in-law was the commander of the Changi POW camp in Singapore , he thought he could make a career just with his name and family background.

But he was turned down by the military academy for reasons not known. He could not count on a higher rank than corporal . It was this personal humiliation that later led him to commit attacks mainly on officers among the Allied prisoners of war. Corporal Watanabe then served for around a year as a member of the Imperial Guard , protecting the Imperial Palace of Hirohito . He was never involved in acts of war.

War crimes

On November 30, 1943, he took up his new position as a "disciplinary officer" in the Ōmori prisoner-of-war camp . Why he experienced such a “degradation” - from protector of the emperor to overseer of prisoners of war - is not known.

However, Watanabe quickly developed into an incalculable psychopath. If one moment he was kind and sympathetic to the prisoners, supplying them with cigarettes and even talking admiringly about the United States , the next moment he slapped the heads of his victims with the buckle of his belt, using a Japanese sword or his kendō staff . In the book Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand numerous abuses have been documented. He is said to have locked a prisoner dressed in a loincloth in a hut in winter, and almost tore off the ear of another prisoner. Watanabe used a man with an inflammation of the appendix as a target for judo exercises . He forced a clergyman to salute a flagpole all night and to shout the Japanese word keirei (English: greeting). In the evening, Watanabe invited GIs and soldiers from other Allied countries to his barracks to discuss things with them and to prepare pastries. It could happen that he had the same men flogged the next day on a whim. In addition to physical torture, psychological torture was also on the agenda. Watanabe quickly established a reputation as "the most gruesome guard of all prison camps in Japan". International Red Cross parcels that reached Ōmori and were actually intended for the prisoners, Watanabe had confiscated and consumed them himself. He stole 48 parcels of 240 parcels, more than 225 kilograms of goods. The prisoners often had to starve after having performed forced labor.

Like other Japanese guards, Watanabe got numerous nicknames from the prisoners, among them "the animal", "Little Napoleon" or "The Bird" (the bird), as he was most often called.

When Louie Zamperini, a former Olympic athlete and officer, came into the camp and Watanabe felt resistance and defiance from him, he became the predominant target of his attacks.

Although Watanabe was just a simple corporal and his superiors often disagreed with his way of mistreating prisoners, nothing was done about it. Since Kaname Sakaba , the camp commander of Ōmori, was hoping for his promotion and he did not tolerate any incidents in his camp, a man like Watanabe was right for him, who ensured discipline and order. "The Bird" was therefore invulnerable and de facto had the say in Ōmori.

When the attacks by US bombers on Tokyo, in the immediate vicinity of Ōmori, increased in the autumn and winter of 1944, the behavior of the "Bird" became increasingly aggressive and violent. He accused US officer Bob Martindale of planning an arson attack on his office and beat him almost to death. He is said to have slapped another officer for five minutes without a break.

In 1944, Yoshitomo Tokugawa , the former secretary of the Japanese-British Society and now vice-president of the Japanese Red Cross, visited the Ōmori prison camp. The American prisoner Lewis Bush quickly made contact with the dignitary and told him about the attacks by Watanabe. Although Watanabe then beat and intimidated Bush several times, he did not succeed; Bush continued to provide Tokugawa with information about the "Bird". So it happened that the case landed before the Army Ministry and Watanabe Ōmori had to leave around the turn of the year 1944/1945. Shortly before, Colonel Sakaba, commander of kurzmori, promoted Watanabe to the rank of sergeant major.

Watanabe was transferred to Naoetsu, a prison camp on the northwest coast of Japan. Here, too, he had prisoners under him again, here too he made the most of his superiority by beating the prisoners and letting them go psychologically to death. When Louie Zamperini was also deported to Naoetsu at the end of February 1945, Watanabe continued the beatings and humiliations of the former Olympian seamlessly. After suffering from diarrhea and fever, Watanabe forced Zamperini to clear out the stable of a pig in Naoetsu with his bare hands without tools.

In May 1945 Watanabe took over in addition to his duties in Naoetsu also the task of the disciplinary officer in Mitsushima , a prison camp in Chūō-kōchi , the highlands of Japan. Here, too, he beat prisoners who then one day decided to kill "The Bird". Two doctors, Richard Whitfield and Alfred Weinstein, mixed a solution of salt , glucose and stool samples from prisoners suffering from dysentery with the food of the "Bird". He got diarrhea and a fever of 41 degrees. Although Watanabe was believed to have died from it, he recovered in ten days. The attempted murder had failed.

In Naoetsu, too, the US prisoners planned to kill Watanabe. They wanted to overpower the Bird and drown it in a nearby river with a rock on its neck. But this attempted murder never materialized, probably also because Japan's unconditional surrender took place shortly after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki .

After the war

Watanabe then fled Naoetsu. For a short time he lived in Kusakabe , a small town in Kagawa Prefecture . He was soon on the list of war criminals wanted by the Americans and the Japanese police. Relatives, friends and former classmates were questioned and observed, Shizuka Watanabe, his mother and his sister Michiko were subjected to intensive interrogations.

Watanabe first went into hiding in the city of Kofu , and later he came to Nagano Prefecture . Here he took the false name Saburō Ōta and stayed in an inn. Here he met a farmer who offered him the opportunity to work on his farm in the mountains for board and lodging. Watanabe was now a farm laborer. Watanabe grew a schnauzer and wore glasses to make himself unrecognizable. In 1946 Watanabe left his isolation and lived first in Akita , later in Niigata . In 1946 he visited his mother in Tokyo. Suddenly the police were at the door. Watanabe was able to hide in a closet and barely escaped his arrest.

The farmer's son, with whom Watanabe had found shelter, soon opened a coffee shop; Watanabe started working as a waiter there. A marriage that the farmer's son wanted to arrange did not materialize, despite the sympathy between Watanabe and the young woman. In the fall of 1946, police officers found the bodies of a man and a woman in a ridge in the Okuchichibu Mountains . The man was initially assumed to be Watanabe and was declared dead. His mother also identified the body as that of her son. The autopsy could neither confirm nor deny that it was Watanabe. In case of doubt, the manhunt was resumed. And indeed, in October 1948, two years later, Watanabe was standing in front of his mother again, only to disappear again shortly afterwards.

From 1945 to 1952 Watanabe lived in anonymity; he also tried to avoid arrest. He had odd jobs, such as an ice cream seller, farm worker or fishmonger. In March 1952, as part of a general amnesty, the arrest warrant for the war criminals on the run was revoked. In order to win Japan as a partner against communism in the beginning of the Cold War , the USA tried to achieve reconciliation with its former enemy.

Watanabe was now a free man. He never acknowledged his guilt as a war criminal. He always referred to himself as a victim of a "sinful, absurd, insane war". In 1956 he wrote in a letter: "I was just very happy about the complete discharge and release from all accusations of guilt!"

Watanabe was able to build a private life again after 1952, which his victims were often denied for decades, which were marked by the blows and humiliations of the "Bird". He married and had two children. Professionally, he was the head of an insurance agency in Tokyo and owned a $ 1.5 million luxury apartment in the Japanese capital thanks to family assets. He also owned a holiday home in Australia . He also visited the USA several times as a tourist.

However, many former prisoners, like Louie Zamperini, believed that "The Bird" was dead. It wasn't until the early 1980s that an American officer found out while visiting Japan that Watanabe was still alive. It wasn't until a decade later, in the mid-1990s, that the media began to question Watanabe's role in the war. He gave his first interview to the British Daily Mail in the summer of 1995 . In it he apologized for his behavior, described it as strict and offered every former prisoner to hit him in the face again after more than 40 years. Tom Wade, a former prisoner from Ōmori, did not accept the offer: "I accept his apology ..." "There is no point in harboring feelings of hatred after such a long time".

Watanabe gave a television interview in 1997 with CBS and journalist Bob Simon . When Simon asked him why he was on the list of the most wanted war criminals, The Bird replied, “I'm number seven. Tōjō number one. "

Watanabe died in April 2003.

literature

• Laura Hillenbrand : Indomitable: a true story of resilience and struggle for survival . 2011, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, ISBN 978-3-608-94624-6