Tokyo Rose: Victim of Propaganda (film)

Television documentary for A&E network's "Biography" series that sympathetically tells the story of Iva Toguri d'Aquino and the myth of "Tokyo Rose."

Telling the story in conventional documentary style, Tokyo Rose: Victim of Propaganda features an uncredited narrator and interviews with journalists and historians including Russell Warren Howe, author of one of the books on the case. It moves chronologically from Toguri's childhood and all-American upbringing, her education at UCLA, and going to Japan to visit a sick relative and ultimately getting trapped there. After continuing on to cover the radio broadcasts she did for Radio Tokyo and her postwar prosecution and conviction of treason, the film ends with her pardon by President Gerald Ford in 1976. The interviews and narration are augmented with archival footage, photographs, and audio, perhaps highlighted by clips from a 1945 film Toguri agreed to make for the US Army in which she recreates the work she did in Tokyo as a broadcaster. Neither Toguri, her lawyer Wayne Collins, Jr., nor anyone else involved in her trials or the movement to seek a pardon for her, is interviewed. Though not an emphasis of the film, it does mention the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans including Toguri's family and notes that she did find out about her family's incarceration and her mother's death in a concentration camp until after the war.

Tokyo Rose: Victim of Propaganda was produced for A&E by Greystone Communications, Inc. and aired as part of the "Biography" series on August 9, 1995.

Might also like Nisei Stories of Wartime Japan (2011); Calling Tokyo: Japanese American Radio Broadcasters During World War II (2002); Out of Infamy: Michi Nishiura Weglyn (2010)