This is actually a difficult question to address and needs a bit of background in order to adequately approach. First, it must understood that the characterizing traits of the Japanese POW administration were incompetence, negligence, and disinterest. Operating a POW camp was a hated job, often held by outcast officers, those men passed over for promotion to general ("permanent" colonels) or seen as unfit for front line command. While these men were ostensibly managed by higher ranking officers in the Military Affairs bureau (Army office), in reality, such oversight was few and far between. Far more common was the POW camp managed by one officer, and his subordinates, operating as an independent entity. This lead to spectacular diversity in conditions at each camp.

The "regular" POW camps (i.e. those managed directly by the Army office) were characterized by relatively high living conditions, communication of prisoner name and condition to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and payment of an officer salary to those imprisoned. In such a situation, where some mutual respect can be assumed to exist between captor and captive, it is possible that prisoners improved their status in camp through such collaboration. I was unable to find any sources though, outside of Unbroken (a problematic source), that record specific instances of prisoners becoming actors in Japanese propaganda. There were, however, certain cases where prisoners greatly improved prison living conditions, for themselves and their fellow prisoners, by applying knowledge and skills from previous occupations. One shining example is of Sir Norman Alexander, a Professor of Physics and prisoner at Changi prison in Singapore, who designed and built a salt evaporation plant and small industrial plant capable of producing surgical spirit for the prison hospital.

The horror stories, such as the labor camps of the Burma-Thailand Railway and those associated with the Bataan death march, are found with the "irregular", independently-managed camps. It is extremely unlikely that prisoners in these camps, weakened by routine beatings, starvation rations, disease and injury, would have had the capability, never mind the opportunity to collaborate with their captors. These places were unpredictable and brutal, managed by mob rule, more than any military hierarchy. Low ranking Japanese soldiers, hearts hardened by the constant corporeal punishment dealt out on them by their superiors, were overjoyed to have someone lower on the totem pole than themselves. In some ways, punishing POWs became an outlet for the frustration and anguish contained, pressurized, within these soldiers. This is not to say that some irregular camp supervisors or government officials did not try to improve camp conditions. However, the lack of a dedicated, coordinated effort to improve and standardize POW camps resulted in far too many camps run under deplorable conditions. Such a situation, amidst the miasma of the Showa period, resulted in the deaths of nearly 1 in 3 prisoners. I sincerely hope that some of the prisoners in these irregular camps were able to improve their conditions, through collaboration or some other method, because otherwise their outlook was grim.

Sources: http://japanfocus.org/-Utsumi-Aiko/1790/article.html http://www.us-japandialogueonpows.org/Nelson.htm Havers, R. P. W. Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience: The Changi POW Camp, Singapore, 1942-5. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. Print.

Did the U.S. run a similar program broadcasting the voices of Axis prisoners? If so, how effective were these programs?

Im actually reading the book right now and both book and movie detail the extraordinary circumstances of the capture, interrogation and release of Louis Zamperini. You can read more here in a transcript of a late 1987 interview of Zamp.

Zamperini is relatively well known because of his and Allen Phillips' record for being afloat on an inflated raft for 47 days.

Side question on this - was there a major difference in treatment between Caucasian POWS and Asian POWs? Anecdotally, I understand there were but curious about real sources