NHK’s drama The Man Who Carried the Voices of August won a Prix Italia award for Best TV Drama. The Award ceremony was held on October 2, 2026, in L’Aquila, Italy.
The film — produced by NHK/WOWOW to commemorate 80 years from the end of the Pacific War and based on the real life of journalist Akihiko Ito — also won multiple awards in Japan, as well as Best Television Film at the Venice TV Awards.
Set in 1972 during Japan’s intense post-war economic boom, the story follows a dedicated journalist named Tamotsu Tsujihara (played by Masahiro Motoki). As the rest of the nation looks forward and ignores the past, Tsujihara cuts his living expenses and carries a heavy, bulky reel-to-reel tape recorder across Japan. His singular, grueling mission is to record the “voices of August” — the raw, firsthand testimonies of 1,000 hibakusha (survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) — before they are lost to history.
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