Toshiko Tokuyama was 14 years old when she found out that her uncle had been a spy, and that he had just died in a prison in Tokyo. It was 1943 then, and she was too young to really know what the word "spy" meant, let alone allow it to alter her impression of the man she respected like a father.

Of course, for most people around her, and most of the Japanese population, in fact, the knowledge that between 1933 and 1941 Yotoku Miyagi had spied for the Soviet Union against Japan, and that he had been a member of one of the most successful spy rings in history, meant only one thing: that this Okinawa-native was a traitor to be despised.

But Tokuyama, who is now 81, could never bring herself to doubt her uncle. For the last two decades, in fact, she and a small group of supporters have worked, and to a large extent succeeded, in reversing history's appraisal of Miyagi.