Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (59 page)

Sitting in his apartment, his pawlike hand clutching a crystal wine glass, he final y 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 that would have riled the men who’d been kicked, clubbed with his kendo stick and basebal bat, and whipped in the face with his belt. He said that he’d only been trying to teach the POWs military discipline, and asserted that he’d been acting under orders. “If I had been better educated during the war, I think I would have been kinder, more friendly,” he said. “But I was taught that the POWs had surrendered, and this was a shameful thing for them to have done. I knew nothing about the Geneva Convention. I asked my commanding officer about it, and he said, ‘This is not Geneva, this is Japan.’

“There were two people inside me,” he continued. “One that fol owed military orders, and the other that was more human. At times I felt I had a good heart, but Japan at that time had a bad heart. In normal times I never would have done such things.

“War is a crime against humanity,” he concluded. “I’m glad our prime minister apologized for the war, but I can’t understand why the government as a whole doesn’t apologize. We have a bad cabinet.”

After the interview, a Daily Mail reporter tracked down Tom Wade and told him that Watanabe had asked for forgiveness. “I accept his apology and wish him contentment in his declining years,” Wade said. “It’s no good hanging on to the hatred after so long.”

Asked if he’d like to accept Watanabe’s offer to let the POWs beat him, Wade said no, then reconsidered.

“I might just have one good blow,” he said.

The Daily Mail article apparently ran only in England. It wasn’t until almost a year later that Louie learned that Watanabe stil lived. His first reaction was to say that he wanted to see him.

——

In the decades after the war, the abandoned Naoetsu campsite decayed, and the vil age residents didn’t speak of what had transpired there. Over time, the memory was largely lost. But in 1978, a former POW wrote a letter to teachers at Naoetsu High School, beginning a dialogue that introduced many locals to the tragedy that had taken place in their vil age. Ten years later, former POW Frank Hole journeyed back to the vil age, which had joined another vil age to form Joetsu City. He planted three eucalyptus seedlings outside city hal and gave city leaders a plaque in memory of the sixty Australians who had died in the camp.

As they learned the POWs’ stories, Joetsu residents responded with sympathy. Residents formed a group dedicated to building a peace park to honor the dead POWs and bring reconciliation. Among the founding members was Shoichi Ishizuka, a veteran who’d been held as a POW by the Americans and treated so kindly that he referred to the experience as “lucky prison life.” When he learned what his Al ied counterparts had endured in his own vil age, he was horrified. A council was formed, fund-raising began, and exhibits were erected in town. If the plan succeeded, Joetsu would become, among the ninety-one cities in Japan in which POW camps once stood, the first to create a memorial to the POWs who had suffered and died there.

Though 85 percent of Joetsu residents donated to the park fund, the plan generated heated controversy. Some residents fought the plan vehemently, cal ing in death threats and vowing to tear down the memorial and burn supporters’ homes. In keeping with the goal of reconciliation, the memorial council sought the participation of relatives of the guards who’d been convicted and hanged, but the families balked, fearing ostracism. To honor the grief of families on both sides of the war, the council proposed creating a single cenotaph for both the POWs and the hanged guards, but this deeply offended the former POWs. At one point, the plan was nearly given up.

Eventual y, the spirit of reconciliation prevailed. In October 1995, on the site of the former Naoetsu camp, the peace park was dedicated. The focal point was a pair of statues of angels, flying above a cenotaph in which rested Hole’s plaque. In a separate cenotaph a few yards away was a plaque in memory of the eight hanged guards. At the guards’ families’ request, no names were inscribed on it, only a simple phrase: Eight stars in the peaceful sky.

——

In early 1997, CBS TV’s Draggan Mihailovich arrived in Tokyo to search for Watanabe, armed with an address and a phone number. CBS’s Japanese bureau chief cal ed the number and reached Watanabe’s wife, who said that her husband couldn’t speak to them—he was gravely il and bedridden.

Mihailovich had the bureau chief cal again to convey his wishes for Watanabe’s recovery. His wishes did the trick: Mrs. Watanabe said that her husband had left the country on business and she didn’t know when he’d return.

Seeing that he was being dodged, Mihailovich staked out Watanabe’s apartment building and office. He waited for hours; Watanabe didn’t appear.

Just as Mihailovich was losing hope, his cel phone rang. Watanabe had returned the bureau chief’s cal . Told that the producers had a message from Louis Zamperini, Watanabe had agreed to meet them at a Tokyo hotel.

——

Mihailovich rented a room at the hotel and set up a camera crew inside. Doubting that Watanabe would agree to a sit-down interview, he rigged his cameraman with a tiny camera inside a basebal cap. At the appointed hour, in walked the Bird.

They sat down in the lobby, and Watanabe ordered a beer. Mihailovich explained that they were profiling Louis Zamperini. Watanabe knew the name immediately. “Six hundred prisoner,” he said. “Zamperini number one.”

Bob Simon, CBS’s on-air correspondent for the story, thought that this would probably be his only chance to question Watanabe, so there in the lobby, he began gril ing him about his treatment of Louie. Watanabe was startled. He said something about Zamperini being a good man, and how he

—Watanabe—hated war. He said that his central concern had been protecting the POWs, because if they had escaped, civilians would have kil ed them.

Asked why he’d been on the list of most wanted war criminals, he puffed with apparent pride. “I’m number seven,” he said. “Tojo number one.” Exile, he said, had been very painful for him.

They asked Watanabe if he’d come upstairs for an on-camera interview. Watanabe asked if the interview would air in Japan, and Mihailovich said no.

To Mihailovich’s surprise, Watanabe agreed.

Upstairs, with cameras rol ing, they handed Watanabe a photograph of a youthful Louie, standing on a track, smiling. Simon dug in.

“Zamperini and the other prisoners remember you, in particular, being the most brutal of al 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 wel 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 [sic] 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 Bil y 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 [sic] and was graciously al owed to address al 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 practical y spat his reply: The answer was no.

When Louie arrived in Joetsu, he stil 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 vil age 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 stil threw sparks. On the ring finger of his right hand, a scar was stil visible, the last mark that Green Hornet had left in the world.

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 stil sure beneath him. He raised the torch, bowed, and began running.

Al 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 mil , 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 fal ing 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 mil ion 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.

“I’l be an easier subject than Seabiscuit,” Louie once told me, “because I can talk.”

When I finished writing my first book, Seabiscuit: An American Legend , I felt certain that I would never again find a subject that fascinated me as did the Depression-era racehorse and the team of men who campaigned him. When I had my first conversation with the infectiously effervescent and apparently immortal Louie Zamperini, I changed my mind.

That conversation began my seven-year journey through Louie’s unlikely life. I found his story in the memories of Olympians, former POWs and airmen, Japanese veterans, and the family and friends who once formed the home front; in diaries, letters, essays, and telegrams, many written by men and women who died long ago; in military documents and hazy photographs; in unpublished memoirs buried in desk drawers; in deep stacks of affidavits and war-crimes trial records; in forgotten papers in archives as far-flung as Oslo and Canberra. By the end of my journey, Louie’s life was as familiar to me as my own. “When I want to know what happened to me in Japan,” Louie once told his friends, “I cal Laura.”

In opening his world to me, Louie could not have been more gracious. He sat through some seventy-five interviews, answering thousands of questions with neither impatience nor complaint. He was refreshingly honest, quick to confess his failures and correct a few embel ished stories that journalists have written about him. And his memory was astounding; nearly every time I cross-checked his accounts of events against newspaper stories, official records, and other sources, his recol ections proved accurate to the smal est detail, even when the events took place some eighty-five years ago.

A superlative pack rat, Louie has saved seemingly every artifact of his life, from the DO NOT DISTURB sign that he swiped from Jesse Owens in Berlin to the paper number that he wore as he shattered the interscholastic mile record in 1934. One of his scrapbooks, which covers only 1917 to 1938, weighs sixty-three pounds. This he volunteered to send me, surrendering it to my late friend Debie Ginsburg, who somehow manhandled it down to a mailing service. Along with it, he sent several other scrapbooks (fortunately smal er), hundreds of photographs and letters, his diaries, and items as precious as the stained newspaper clipping that was in his wal et on the raft. Al of these things were treasure troves to me, tel ing his story with immediacy and revealing detail. I am immensely grateful to Louie for trusting me with items so dear to him, and for welcoming me into his history.