Louie Zamperini: An Uncorrectable Child Of Unbroken

Louie Zamperini was an uncorrectable child in Unbroken. As a teen, he channeled all his defiance into running, which carried him to the Berlin Olympics. However, when WWII began, Louie became an airman. When his Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean Louie survived with two others. Louie, against all odds survived the months on the raft along with Phil, however his other friend, Mac, did not survive for this long. Louie and Phil were soon met with a Japanese ship, who captured the two of them, taking them as prisoners. The first group wasn’t too bad and they helped the two recover, however they were shipped to multiple different camps throughout their time at the camps. Louie was quickly stripped of his humanity and dignity as

beatings got worse and worse as he was held in the Japanese POW camps. Miné was a Japanese-American, she was a creative and curious child.

She was an US citizen at birth, and chose to reject learning the Japanese language. She applied to Berkeley, earning a scholarship. While earning degrees, she earned a fellowship to travel Europe and study art. However, her trip was cut short when her mother had fallen gravely ill in 1938. After Pearl Harbor happened Japanese-Americans were placed into intern camps. In the fall of 1941, Miné Okubo and her brother Toku were moved to an assembly area in downtown Berkeley. Miné was given tags with “No. 7” printed on it, reducing her family name to only a number. While Louie, the American soldier POW at a Japanese internment camp, and Miné, a Japanese-American in an American internment camp, were both stripped of their dignity and dehumanized, however they both bounced back and resisted the attempts that people brought upon them to make them

invisible.

While in camp, both Louie and Miné are forced under into invisibility not only by the world, but also their families. They were also dehumanized and stripped of their dignity while in the camps. In Unbroken Louie was forced into invisibility by the Japanese. ”The Japanese were abundantly clear about one thing. In this secret place, they could, and did, do anything they wanted to their captives, and no one would ever know… “They can kill you,” Louie was told. “No one knows you’re alive” (Page 199). When Miné was placed into the American camp she was “When Miné and Toku arrived at the assembly center… on April 26, they saw guards at every entrance and surrounding the building. “A woman seated near the entrance gave me a card with No. 7 on it told me to go inside and wait… the feeling of being reduced to a number…”We were close to freedom, and yet far from it… Streams of cars passed by all day...” (The Life Of Miné Okubo). Louie was forced into being invisible since he was captured. Louie had been placed into a camp, where no one knew where he was. Miné had gone to the camp under the fact that the citizens and the government no longer trusted those of Japanese heritage because of the Pearl Harbor attack. Not only that, but in the camps, since the guards there could do anything they wanted, the POWs were beaten beyond anything they could handle, stripping them of their dignity as they were stripped of their strengths. “A tyrant was born. Watanabe beat POW’s every day, fracturing their windpipes, rupturing their eardrums, shattering their teeth, tearing one man’s ear half off… He tied a sixty-five-year-old POW to a tree and left him there for days” (Page 242). Even though Miné and Louie were forced into being invisible and stripped of their dignity and dehumanized, they bounced back, resisting the attempts.

Louie and Miné both resisted dehumanization and invisibility that they were placed under by doing multiple different activities.

“Defiance took on a life of its of own. Men would smiles and address the guards in friendly tones, cooing out insults filthy enough to curl a man’s hair. One captive convinced a particularly dim witted guard that a sundial would work at night if you used a match. A fragrant favorite involved saving up intestinal gas, explosively voluminous thanks to chronic dysentery, prior to tenko. When the men were ordered to bow towards to the emperor, the captives would pitch forward in concert and let thunderclaps fly for Hirohito” (Page 210). “She also taught an art class to children in the camp and illustrated the front cover of Trek, a magazine created by the internees. She took a chance by entering a Berkeley art contest through the mail, and she won” (The Life Of Miné Okubo). Both Louie, Miné, and the other captives all had their different ways of bouncing back, however they all fought their way to become bigger than their enemy. For example, with the acts of the American POWs in the Japanese camp, “As dangerous as these acts were, for the POWs they were transformative. In risking their necks to sabotage their enemy, the men were no longer passive captives. They were soldiers again” (Page

249).

Both Miné and Louie had their dignity taken away and had been dehumanized while in the two different camps. However, they both bounced back, retaliating in multiple ways. While Louie had retaliated by doing some “fragrant favorites” and saying insults to the guard in a friendly way that were “filthy enough to curl a man’s hair”, Miné however, retaliated in a more peaceful way by signing up for an art contest while in the camp, winning, and getting out of camp. Miné and Louie’s experiences show how it's natural for humans to bounce back even in the darkest of situations, and overcoming it, gaining not only their dignity back, but also the humanity they had been stripped of.