nudge short of eighty, picked up the receiver.
The voice on the telephone belonged to Draggan Mihailovich, a producer for CBS television. The 1998 Winter Olympics had been awarded to Nagano, and Louie had accepted an invitation to run the torch past Naoetsu. Mihailovich was filming a profile of Louie, to be aired during the Olympics, and had gone to Japan to prepare. While chatting with a man over a bowl of noodles, he had made a startling discovery.
Mihailovich asked Louie if he was sitting down. Louie said yes. Mihailovich told him to grab hold of his chair.
“The Bird is alive.”
Louie nearly hit the floor.
——
The dead man had walked out of the darkness late one night in 1952. He’d been gone for nearly seven years. Watanabe stepped off a train in Kobe, walked through the city, and stopped before a house with a garden bisected by a stone path. Before his disappearance, his mother had spent part of each year living in this house, but Watanabe had been gone for so long that he didn’t know if she came here anymore. He strode about, searching for a clue. Under the gate light, he saw her name.
In all the time in which he’d been thought dead, Watanabe had been hiding in the countryside. He’d spent the previous summer pedaling through villages on a bicycle fitted with a cooler, selling ice cream, envying the children who played around him. When summer had ended, he’d gone back to farm work, tending rice paddies. Then, one day in March 1952, as he read a newspaper, his eyes had paused over a story. The arrest order for suspected war criminals had been lifted. There on the page was his name.
The lifting of the apprehension order was the result of an unlikely turn in history. Immediately after the war, there was a worldwide outcry for punishment of the Japanese who had abused POWs, and the war-crimes trials began. But new political realities soon emerged. As American occupiers worked to help Japan transition to democracy and independence, the Cold War was beginning. With communism wicking across the Far East, America’s leaders began to see a future alliance with Japan as critical to national security. The sticking point was the war-crimes issue; the trials were intensely unpopular in Japan, spurring a movement seeking the release of all convicted war criminals. With the pursuit of justice for POWs suddenly in conflict with America’s security goals, something had to give.
On December 24, 1948, as the occupation began to wind down, General MacArthur declared a “Christmas amnesty” for the last seventeen men awaiting trial for Class A war crimes, the designation for those who had guided the war. The defendants were released, and some would go on to great success; onetime defendant Nobusuke Kishi, said to be responsible for forcibly conscribing hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Koreans as laborers, would become prime minister in 1957. Though American officials justified the release by saying that it was unlikely that the defendants would have been convicted, the explanation was questionable; more than two dozen Class A defendants had been tried, and all had been convicted. Even in Japan, it was commonly believed that many of the released men were guilty.
Ten months later, the trials of Class B and C defendants—those accused of ordering or carrying out abuse or atrocities—were ended. An army officer named Osamu Satano was the last man tried by the United States. His punishment fit the reconciliatory mood; convicted of beheading an airman, he was sentenced to just five years. In early 1950, MacArthur ruled that war criminals’ sentences would be reduced for good behavior, and 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 seen since 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
