Mutsuhiro "the Bird" Watanabe (18 January 1918-1 April 2003) was an Imperial Japanese Army sergeant who served in a number of prisoner-of-war camps during World War II and was infamous for torturing Allied prisoners, including former Olympic runner Louis Zamperini.
Biography[]
Mutsuhiro Watanabe was born in 1918 to a wealthy family of hotel and mine owners, and he became fluent in French and English. He went on to join the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, but he failed to attain an officer's rank. He was instead assigned to prisoner-of-war camps, where he became known for his excessive cruelty, frequently beating his prisoners, among them the American Olympic athlete Louis Zamperini, whom he supervised and tormented in both Tokyo's Camp Omori and the Naoetsu prison camp in northern Japan. After the war, he went into hiding and was never prosecuted, in spite of being included on General Douglas MacArthur's list of the 40 most wanted war criminals in Japan. In 1952, all charges were quietly dropped at the end of the Allied occupation of Japan, and he went on to become an insurance salesman. In 1998, he was interviewed by 60 Minutes and admitted to torturing prisoners, claiming that he treated them as "enemies of Japan"; that same year, he refused to meet with Zamperini when Zamperini visited Japan during the Winter Olympics in Nagano. He died in 2003.