Mutsuhiro Watanabe

In 2014, Japanese musician Miyavi played Watanabe in Angelina Jolie's Unbroken, the film adaptation of Hillenbrand's book. David Sakurai portrays Watanabe in Harold Cronk's Unbroken: Path to Redemption, a "spiritual successor" to Jolie's film, released in 2018.

Accounts of Watanabe's abusive behavior are given in Laura Hillenbrand's book about Zamperini titled Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (2010). Watanabe also appears in Dr. Alfred A. Weinstein's memoir, Barbed Wire Surgeon, published in 1948.

Prior to the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, the CBS News program 60 Minutes interviewed Watanabe at the Hotel Okura Tokyo as part of a feature on Louis Zamperini who, four days before his 81st birthday, was returning to carry the Olympic Flame torch through Naoetsu en route to Nagano, not far from the POW camp where he had been held. In the interview, Watanabe acknowledged beating and kicking prisoners, but was unrepentant, saying, "I treated the prisoners strictly as enemies of Japan." Zamperini attempted to meet with his chief and most brutal tormentor, but Watanabe, who had evaded prosecution, refused to see him.

However, Watanabe went into hiding and was never prosecuted. In 1952, all charges were quietly dropped. In 1956, the Japanese literary magazine Bungeishunjū published an interview with Watanabe, titled "I do not want to be judged by America." He later became an insurance salesman.

In 1945, General Douglas MacArthur included Watanabe as number 23 on his list of the 40 most wanted war criminals in Japan.

Mutsuhiro Watanabe (Japanese: 渡邊睦裕, 18 January 1918 – 1 April 2003) – nicknamed "the Bird" by his prisoners – was a known war criminal and Imperial Japanese Army soldier in World War II who served in a number of military internment camps. After Japan's defeat, the US Occupation authorities classified Watanabe as a war criminal for his mistreatment of prisoners of war (POWs), but he managed to evade arrest and was never tried in court.