Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption (54 page)

It did no good. Kano was arrested and jailed as a suspected war criminal. Why he was fingered remains unclear. He was mentioned in many POW

affidavits and, in every one, was lauded for his kindness. Perhaps the explanation was that his last name was similar to those of two vicious men, Tetsutaro Kato, an Omori official said to have kicked a POW nearly to death, and Hiroaki Kono, the Bird’s acolyte at Naoetsu. Months passed, and Kano languished in prison, frightened and humiliated. He was neither charged nor questioned. He wrote a plaintive letter asking authorities to investigate him so his name could be cleared. “Cross my heart,” he wrote, “I have not done anything wrong.”

In the winter of 1946, Kano was final y cleared, and MacArthur ordered his release. Kano moved to Yokohama and worked for an import-export business. He missed his POW friends, but for years, he didn’t try to contact them. “I thought I should refrain from writing them,” he wrote to Martindale in 1955, “as my letter might make them to remind up the hard days in Omori, which, I am sure, they would like to forget.” Sometime later, he died of cancer.

——

In the mountain vil age where he was known as Saburo Ohta, Watanabe waited out a bitter winter. The visit from the policeman shook him. After the policeman left, the farmer’s wife eyed Watanabe with what seemed to be recognition. When night fel , Watanabe lay awake, mul ing capture and execution.

When summer came, Watanabe was asked to attend the farmer’s son as he toured the country, sel ing leather straps. The tour would take them through major cities where Watanabe was surely being sought, but he was living on the good graces of the farmer and had to accept. Watanabe donned glasses to obscure his features and headed off, fil ed with trepidation.

They went to the busy port cities of Akita and Niigata. No one gave Watanabe a second look. As his fear of being discovered eased, he began enjoying himself. The conversation in the cities was dominated by the war, and everyone had an opinion about the conduct of Japanese soldiers, especial y those accused of war crimes. People talked of how the hunt for suspected war criminals was being conducted. Watanabe listened intently.

Being out in society made him long to see his family. He thought of how his mother would now be in Tokyo, on her regular summer visit to his sister Michiko’s home. The yearning was overpowering. Watanabe took out the fortune-tel ing cards that his little sister had given him and dealt himself a hand.

The cards told him that if he went to his family, he’d be safe. On a sweltering day at the height of the summer of 1946, he boarded a train for Tokyo.

His timing couldn’t have been worse. The winter’s push to find Watanabe had yielded no clues, and the police were again doubling their efforts. A newly discovered photograph of Watanabe had been copied and distributed, along with a report that described him as a man “known to have perversions” who might be found “wherever there are loose women.” Since Japanese citizens were required to register changes of address, police were ordered to pore over registries in search of men traveling alone. They were instructed to monitor transactions at ration boards and prowl post offices, train and bus stations, taxi stands, ferry landings, mines, black market outlets, dive hotels and lodging houses, and any businesses that might attract a man fluent in French. Probably inspired by the clue that Watanabe might have committed suicide, police moved to investigate al unnatural and unusual deaths since November 1945, especial y those in which the deceased person was unidentified. As a homesick Watanabe journeyed out of hiding and into Tokyo, he was walking into the manhunt.

Shizuka Watanabe was sitting in Michiko’s house with two of her other children when the front door swung open and in walked Mutsuhiro. The room fel silent as the startled family members looked at Mutsuhiro and then at one another. Mutsuhiro, emotional y overwhelmed and dizzy from the midday heat, wavered, afraid he would faint. Michiko came in and saw her brother. The family broke into celebration.

For two hours, Mutsuhiro sat with his family, sipping drinks and listening to them tel of being arrested, questioned, fol owed, and searched. He said nothing of where he’d been, believing that his family would fare better if they didn’t know. As time passed, the family members grew anxious, afraid that the detectives would catch them. They’d been there just two days previously. At two o’clock, Shizuka warned Mutsuhiro that it was the time of day when the detectives usual y came to search. Mutsuhiro reassured them that the playing cards had told him that al would be wel .

There was shuffling outside. The detectives had arrived. The Watanabes sprang up. Someone tossed Mutsuhiro’s belongings into a closet. Someone else snatched up the cups and dumped them in the sink. Mutsuhiro raced into a tearoom and shut the door. Behind him, he heard footfal s as a group of detectives entered the room that he had just left. He heard them questioning his mother and sister, tel ing them that if they caught Mutsuhiro, he’d be treated wel .

The detectives were just feet away, on the other side of the door. His heart racing, Mutsuhiro tried to decide whether to run or to conceal himself here.

The room was tiny, scattered with pil ows, but there was a closet. Ever so slowly, he inched open the closet’s sliding door and squeezed inside. He decided not to close the door, fearing that it would make noise. He stood there, a hand clasped over his mouth to smother the sound of his breathing.

The door opened. A detective looked in. “ You have plenty of room,” he said to the family. There was a pause as he looked about. If the detective turned his eyes toward the closet, he’d see Mutsuhiro. “It is tidy,” the detective said. The door closed. The detectives left.

Mutsuhiro had wished to stay overnight, but the close cal changed his mind. He told his mother that he’d try to see her again in two years. Then he left, walking back, he wrote, “into the lonesome world.”

——

Watanabe returned to the vil age. The farmer’s son, unable to make a go of his leather strap sales, opened a coffee shop in the vil age. Watanabe became his waiter.

The farmer approached Watanabe with a proposition. Arranged marriage was stil common in Japan, and the farmer had found a match for him.

Watanabe was tempted; he was lonely and unhappy, and liked the idea of marrying. But marriage while in his predicament seemed impossible. He said no.

The young woman eventual y came to him. When the farmer’s son fel il , she paid him a visit, and Watanabe, curious, went into the sickroom to see her.

He raised the subject of the novel that the farmer’s son was reading, thinking that, he wrote, “if she liked books, she must understand the mind and hardship of human life.” In his notes about the meeting, he didn’t say if she possessed that understanding, but he did seem to like her and thought she would be “a good house-keeper.” Part of him seemed to want to fal for her, and he believed that love “could save my daily life.”

The woman was taken with the attractive waiter, and began lingering in the coffee shop to be near him. He kept his identity secret from her. She began tel ing her parents about him in hopes of winning their blessing for a wedding. After brooding on her, Watanabe decided that he had to end the relationship. Al he told her was that he had “a burden which would make her unhappy.”

With that, he broke with the tenuous existence that he had created in the vil age. He quit his job and left. He wandered onto a stretch of the Nagano grassland along the Chikuma River and took a job as a cowherd. His inability to control the wil ful animals exasperated him. He was despondent. At sunset, he lifted his eyes to the majestic Asama volcano, watching a ribbon of smoke unspooling from her upper reaches, the cattle grazing below.

——

In Japan’s Okuchichibu Mountains stands the holy peak of Mitsumine, its sides fleeced in forest, its summit ornamented with an ancient shrine. In the fal of 1946, two bodies were found amid the hol ows and spines of the mountain, a pistol lying with them. One was a man, the other a woman. No one knew who they were.

The police went to Shizuka Watanabe and asked her and her family to accompany them to the mountain. The Watanabes were driven up to Mitsumine and, with the help of guides, taken to the bodies. Shizuka looked down at the lifeless form of the young man.

Japanese newspapers ran the sensational story: Mutsuhiro Watanabe, one of Japan’s most wanted men, was dead. He and a woman, probably a lover, had kil ed themselves.

* Some death sentences were later commuted; 920 men were eventual y executed.

Thirty-seven

Twisted Ropes

LOUIE KNEW NOTHING OF THE DEATH OF THE BIRD. WHEN the bodies were found on Mount Mitsumine, he was in Holywood, faling to pieces. He was drinking heavily, slipping in and out of flashbacks, screaming and clawing through nightmares, lashing out in fury at random moments. Murdering the Bird had become his secret, fevered obsession, and he had given his life over to it. In a gym near his apartment, he spent hours slamming his hatred into a punching bag, preparing his body for the confrontation that he believed would save him. He walked around every day with murder in his head.

Throughout 1947 and 1948, Louie jumped headlong into scheme after scheme to raise the money to get back to Japan. When Cynthia’s brother Ric visited, he found Louie encircled by fawners and hangers-on, al trying to exploit him. One of them talked Louie into investing $7,000 in a plan to purchase and resel earthmoving equipment in the Philippines, promising to double his money. Louie signed the check, and that was the last he saw of either the investor or his money. He formed a Tahitian passenger-boat company in partnership, but creditors took the boat. A deal to found a movie production company in Egypt met a similar end. He even considered working as a mercenary bombardier in an attempted coup in a smal Caribbean country, and was stil thinking it over when the coup was cal ed off. He and a partner made a verbal agreement with Mexican officials, giving them sole authority to issue fishing licenses to Americans. As his partner drove down to ink the deal, a truck hit him head-on, and the deal died with him. Each time Louie got some money together, it was lost in another failed venture, and his return to Japan had to be put off stil longer.

Drinking granted him a space of time in which to let it al go. Slowly, inexorably, he’d gone from drinking because he wanted it to drinking because he needed it. In the daytime, he kept sober, but in the evenings, as the prospect of sleep and nightmares loomed, he was overcome by the need. His addiction was soon so consuming that when he and Cynthia went to Florida to visit her family, he insisted on bringing home so much liquor that he had to take out his Chevy’s back seat to fit it al in.

He had become someone he didn’t recognize. One night at a bar on Sunset Boulevard, he parked himself on a stool, drank al evening, and wound up stinking drunk. A man passed behind him, ushering his date past. Louie swung around, reached out, and groped the woman’s bottom. The next thing Louie knew, he was on his feet, outside, being half-carried by a friend. His jaw was thumping with pain, and his friend was chewing him out. He slowly came to understand that the woman’s boyfriend had knocked him unconscious.

On another night, he left Cynthia at home and went to a restaurant in Hol ywood with two friends from his running days. Sometime in the early evening, after drinking what he would remember as only a single beer, he felt oddly light and excused himself to step outside. Then time broke into disconnected segments. He was in his car, driving, with no idea where he was or how he’d gotten there. He wove through the streets, disoriented, and came into a hil y neighborhood of mansions and broad lawns. His head spun round and round. He stopped the car and rol ed out. There was a tree in front of him, and he relieved himself against it.

When he turned back for his car, he couldn’t find it. He stumbled along in a soupy darkness and mental fog, searching in vain for something familiar. He walked al night long, scared, lost, and vainly grasping at lucidity.

As sunrise lit up his surroundings, he realized that he was standing in front of his apartment building. Opening the door, he saw Cynthia, frantic with worry. He toppled into bed. When he woke up and dressed, he had no memory of the night before, and couldn’t understand why the heels of his new shoes were worn down. He went outside and looked around, but he couldn’t find his car, so he cal ed the police and reported it stolen. Two days later, the police cal ed to tel him that they’d found the car in a wealthy neighborhood in the Hol ywood Hil s. He went up to where they had found it, and memories of his night came back to him, carrying the ethereal quality of a nightmare.

Cynthia Zamperini. Frank Tinker

Cynthia pleaded with Louie to stop drinking. It did no good.

——

The further Louie fel , the less he could hide it. Ric Applewhite noticed that he was manical y germophobic, washing his hands over and over again, and each time, scouring the faucet and handles on the sink. Some of Louie’s friends spoke to him about his drinking, but their words had no impact. When Payton Jordan saw Louie, he recognized that he was in trouble, but couldn’t get him to talk about it. Pete, too, was worried about Louie, but knew only of his financial woes. He had no idea that Louie had slid into alcoholism, or that he had hatched a wild scheme to kil a man.