Tokyo Rose—Zero Hour: A Japanese American Woman’s Persecution and Ultimate Redemption After World War II

A firecracker of a subject helps propel this graphic biography of Iva Toguri D’Aquino and her incredible double life as “Tokyo Rose” past a certain lack of visual polish. The story opens at D’Aquino’s 1949 treason trial, with reporters and rubberneckers scrambling for a glimpse of the Japanese American woman accused of producing anti-American propaganda for Japan. Flash back to 1941, when young Iva is sent to Tokyo to help care for relatives, only to be trapped there when Japan declares war on the U.S. Refusing to renounce her American citizenship, Iva has her passport revoked and is drafted into work for the “thought police” at Radio Tokyo. There, she secretly helps POWs and teams up with other forced conscripts, including her future husband Felipe, to produce an irreverent version of Radio Tokyo’s propaganda broadcasts that relays secret messages of hope to Allied troops. Back in the U.S., however: her parents are among the thousands of Japanese Americans interned in detention camps, and the U.S. doesn’t believe she acted as a double agent. Frattino’s script, though sometimes overly wordy, captures Iva’s saucy, rat-a-tat dialogue as heard in her broadcasts, and Kasenow’s scratchy black-and-white drawings of Iva express the same attitude, but other characters often seem hurriedly sketched in. Still, this is a well-researched history of an unjustly maligned woman and a crackling espionage adventure story, to boot. (Sept.)