“Zamperini and the other prisoners remember you, in particular, being the most brutal of all the guards. How do you explain that?”
Watanabe’s right eyelid began drooping. Mihailovich felt uneasy.
“I wasn’t given military orders,” Watanabe said, contradicting the assertion he’d made in the 1995 interview. “Because of my personal feelings, I treated the prisoners strictly as enemies of Japan. Zamperini was well known to me. If he says he was beaten by Watanabe, then such a thing probably occurred at the camp, if you consider my personal feelings at the time.”
He tossed his head high, jutted out his chin, and directed a hard gaze at Simon. He said that the POWs had complained of “trifle things” and had used epithets to refer to the Japanese. These things, he said, had made him angry. With hundreds of prisoners, he said, he’d been under great pressure.
“Beating and kicking in Caucasian society are considered cruel. Cruel behavior,” he said, speaking very slowly. “However, there were some occasions in the prison camp in which beating and kicking were unavoidable.”
When the interview was over, Watanabe looked shaken and angry. Told that Zamperini was coming to Japan and wanted to meet him to offer his forgiveness, Watanabe replied that he would see him and apologize, on the understanding that it was only a personal apology, not one offered on behalf of the Japanese military.
As they packed up, Mihailovich had a last request. Would he agree to be filmed walking down the street? This, it seemed, was what Watanabe had come for. He donned his cap, stepped to the sidewalk, turned, and walked toward the camera. He moved just as he had in parades before his captives, head high, chest thrust out, eyes imperious.
——
One day nine months later, as he prepared to return to Japan to carry the Olympic torch, Louie sat at his desk for hours, thinking. Then he clicked on his computer and began to write.
——
To Matsuhiro [
] Watanabe,
As a result of my prisoner of war experience under your unwarranted and unreasonable punishment, my post- war life became a nightmare. It was not so much due to the pain and suffering as it
was the tension of stress and humiliation that caused me to hate with a vengeance.
Under your discipline, my rights, not only as a prisoner of war but also as a human being, were stripped from me. It was a struggle to maintain enough dignity and hope to live until the war’s end.
The post-war nightmares caused my life to crumble, but thanks to a confrontation with God through the evangelist Billy Graham, I committed my life to Christ. Love replaced the hate I had for you. Christ said, “Forgive your enemies and pray for them.”
As you probably know, I returned to Japan in 1952 [
] and was graciously allowed to address all the Japanese war criminals at Sugamo Prison … I asked then about you, and was told that you probably had committed Hara Kiri, which I was sad to hear. At that moment, like the others, I also forgave you and now would hope that you would also become a Christian.
Louis Zamperini
He folded the letter and carried it with him to Japan.
The meeting was not to be. CBS contacted Watanabe and told him that Zamperini wanted to come see him. Watanabe practically spat his reply: The answer was no.
When Louie arrived in Joetsu, he still had his letter. Someone took it from him, promising to get it to Watanabe. If Watanabe received it, he never replied.
Watanabe died in April 2003.
——
On the morning of January 22, 1998, snow sifted gently over the village once known as Naoetsu. Louis Zamperini, four days short of his eighty-first birthday, stood in a swirl of white beside a road flanked in bright drifts. His body was worn and weathered, his skin scratched with lines mapping the miles of his life. His old riot of black hair was now a translucent scrim of white, but his blue eyes still threw sparks. On the ring finger of his right hand, a scar was still visible, the last mark that
At last, it was time. Louie extended his hand, and in it was placed the Olympic torch. His legs could no longer reach and push as they once had, but they were still sure beneath him. He raised the torch, bowed, and began running.
All he could see, in every direction, were smiling Japanese faces. There were children peeking out of hooded coats, men who had once worked beside the POW slaves in the steel mill, civilians snapping photographs, clapping, waving, cheering Louie on, and 120 Japanese soldiers, formed into two columns, parting to let him pass. Louie ran through the place where cages had once held him, where a black-eyed man had crawled inside him. But the cages were long gone, and so was the Bird. There was no trace of them here among the voices, the falling snow, and the old and joyful man, running.
*
America’s War Crimes Acts of 1948 and 1952 awarded each former POW $1 for each day of imprisonment if he could prove that he wasn’t given the amount and quality of food mandated by the Geneva Convention, and $1.50 per day if he could prove that he’d been subjected to inhumane treatment and/or hard labor. This made for a maximum benefit of $2.50 per day. Under the Treaty of Peace, $12.6 million in Japanese assets were distributed to POWs, but because America’s POWs had already received meager War Crimes Acts payments, first claim on the assets was given to other nations.
