The sun rises without his presence. He lies in the coffin peacefully, sleeps on the land he loves. He is Louie Zamperini, a bombardier who served in U.S Air Force during World War II, also a runner who joined 1936 Summer Olympics. Instead of being known by the public as an Olympics runner, his most impressive accomplishment is surviving in POW camps after being caught by the Japanese army. In the camp, life was not easy. There is a warden that he will never forget – Mutsuhiro Watanabe.
Mutsuhiro Watanabe (渡辺むつひろ), who was called “The Bird” by POWs, 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 …show more content…
On the other side of Kizuna, Watanabe’s life also became better little by little. After suffering as an escaped criminal for seven years, “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 the Australia’s Gold Coast. (Hillenbrand, 392) In early 1997, CBS TV’s Draggan Mihailovich arrived in Tokyo to search for Watanabe, armed with an address and a phone number. In a television interview, Watanabe said, “I wasn’t given military orders. 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.” (Making a New Life) His attitude shows that he had more things to say, but he didn’t explain everything in front of camera. For people who turn to be “evil” during wartime, there is an experiment which could explain this situation from a psychological view. The experiment is called Standford Prison