Unbroken: The Life Of Miné Okubo

Some would say being abused mentally, physically and objectified daily would eventually break a person, but not for Louie Zamperini and Miné Okubo. In the novel, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, Louie's military plane crashes and then is taken in by the Japanese after afloat at sea for months. Louie is beaten, starved and mentally abused while trapped in three different Japanese POW camps. In the article, “The Life of Miné Okubo” by Expeditionary Learning, Miné, an American citizen was forced into a Japanese internment camp inside the U.S because she had Japanese heritage. Louie and Miné were treated as invisible through dehumanization and isolation while inside the camps. During WWII, Louie Zamperini was sent to three different POW camps

Louie and Phil also were injected with chemicals; However, “Both men survived, and as terrible as their experience had been, they were lucky. All over their captured territories, the Japanese were using at least ten hundred POWs and civilians, including infants, as test subjects for experiments in biological and chemical warfare. Thousands died” (Hillenbrand 187). Louie and Phil were treated as if they were lab rats. At Louie’s second camp, Ofuna, he and all the other captives were beaten for, “... folding arms, for sitting naked to help heal sores, for cleaning their teeth, for talking in their sleep. Most often they were beaten for not understanding orders, which were almost always issued in Japanese” (Hillenbrand 193-194). The japanese punished them for everything just for their own pleasure. The guards took away their ability to take care of themselves. The japanese even deprived them of food and water and tortured them by drinking and eating slowly and joyfully in front of them. When Louie was taken into a room with Japanese, the officers, “...took long draws on their cigarettes and sighed the smoke toward Louie. Periodically, one of them would open a bottle of cola, pour it into

They can un-human like living conditions and cramped environment. The article describes Miné’s living conditions as, “A swinging half door divided 20-by-9-ft stall into two rooms… Both rooms showed signs of hurried whitewashing. Spider webs, horse hair, and hay had been whitewashed with the walls” (EL).This displays Miné and other Japanese-Americans being treated as animals living inside horse stalls, they were treated with no respect even though most were American citizens. The internees were also crowded so tight they slept in unsanitary places. The crowded camp was described as, “Inadequate and dangerous conditions were common in the camps. Some internees reported being housed in cafeterias and bathrooms because the camps were overcrowded” (EL). This is just another example of the conditions in the camp and internees being treated with no respect, they were treated as invisible. Also, the internees were treated as invisible when they lacked human needs like privacy and interaction. The article states, “As as Tanforan, Miné experienced isolation from the outside world, a near-complete lack of privacy and the feeling of being reduced to a number” (EL). The Internees in the Japanese internment camps were treated as invisible, treated as objects and deprived of humanly needs. There was no sympathy or respect inside the camps for the Internees. Although, much as Louie had, Miné resisted the isolation and