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1.04.2008

"tokyo rose" movie in the works



It looks like the story of Iva Toguri D'Aquino, aka "Tokyo Rose," is going to be made into a movie, from screenwriter Christopher Hampton and director Frank Darabont: DARABONT PICKS A TOKYO ROSE.

I admit, I don't know more than the general facts about this case, but it would definitely make a great movie.

According to Wikipedia, Tokyo Rose was a generic name given by Allied forces in the South Pacific during World War II to any of approximately twenty English-speaking female broadcasters of Japanese propaganda.

The name was most closely associated with Toguri, a Japanese American U.S. citizen who was visiting a sick relative in Japan at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Unable to leave the country, she refused to renounce her American citizenship and was forced to work for Japanese radio alongside captured Australian, American and Filipino military men.

Throughout the war, despite being at the mercy of the Japanese, Toguri refused to say or write anything that was anti-American. However, when she returned to the United States at the end of the war, she was charged and subsequently convicted of treason by the U.S. government, and sentenced to eight years in prison. She was completely innocent. Much later, in 1977, she was pardoned by President Gerald Ford, who also restored her citizenship. And that's just the short of it.

It's a fascinating, amazing story that deserves to be told on the silver screen. Hopefully Hampton and Darabont will craft a movie that does the story justice.