Tokyo Rose
Jennifer Wilding

World War Two saw the rise of radio propaganda and the emergence of several broadcasters who became infamous. Among the most widely known and remembered was "Tokyo Rose".

The Japanese effort to demoralize enemy soldiers was rather more subtle than that of other nations using radio propaganda, but equally ineffective. It attempted to stimulate homesickness, and anger at the "bosses" who sent young men to war. Female broadcasters were used to make suggestive comments about what the wives and sweethearts left behind were up to, and with whom, while the "Orphans of the Pacific" were out fighting for them. The most well-known of these broadcasters was called, by the soldiers she broadcast to, "Tokyo Rose". She was the evil seductress, a spy who knew the locations of American ships and installations, the temptress who inspired both lust and homesickness in GI's, who urged them to desert the hopeless effort of trying to defeat the Imperial Japanese war machine.

"Tokyo Rose" did not, in point of fact, exist. She was a composite being rather than a discrete individual and, oddly enough, there was not actually a female broadcaster using that particular handle on the airwaves. There was "Nanking Nancy", "Radio Rose", "Madam Tojo" (who was not in any way related to the Japanese Minister of War), and "Orphan Ann", among others. There were at least eight women who broadcast from Radio Tokyo, and quite possibly more. The occupying forces under MacArthur identified five women as possibly being "Tokyo Rose" within days of entering Tokyo.

The woman who was finally identified as "Tokyo Rose" by the American press (civilian and military) was Iva Toguri D'Aquino, an American born to Japanese immigrant parents. She was a graduate of UCLA and had not left the United States at any time prior to her being sent to Japan to care for an ailing aunt just before the outbreak of the Pacific War. For a number of reasons, largely ignorance and misinformation from the State Department, she left the US without proper travel documents and found it impossible to return home when war was declared. She was trapped in Japan, unable to speak or read the language.

Iva's family did not speak Japanese in the home, nor did they adhere to Japanese customs or eat Japanese food. Iva was as American as it is possible to be, she was more a stranger in Japan than she would have been in Sweden, she looked like a native but was constantly running into difficulties because she could not act the part. Despite pressure by the secret police, problems finding a job and a place to live, Iva refused to relinquish her American citizenship. All she wanted was for America to win the war so she could go home, to her family and a life she understood.

Eventually Iva Toguri ended up working as a typist at Radio Tokyo. As a native English speaker it was her job to edit the scripts being prepared for broadcast for grammar and syntax errors. In the beginning these errors were numerous and, by all accounts, some of the broadcasts were nothing short of hilarious because of them. However, as the military officers in charge of this particular branch of propaganda gained some expertise in their jobs the quality of the broadcasts improved. They become professional when Prisoners of War with radio experience, notably Australian and American, were coerced into writing and producing the shows. Iva was tapped to be one of the announcers. She did not want to do it, but in wartime Japan one did not disobey direct orders from the army, not if one wanted to stay out of the labor camps or even (in extreme cases) keep one's head.

Most of the shows followed similar formats. There was music, both popular and classical, but always Western, introduced by a (usually) female disc jockey, POW messages, news from America gleaned from American sources, and jibes at the Allied war effort. The news from home was generally in the line of natural disasters, American ships sunk, Allied battle losses, anything that would demoralize the troops. It could be unnerving and, until Midway, it often was. After Midway the news portions had little to do with reality and the shows became almost a burlesque.

Iva Toguri's regular show was called "Zero Hour". She had a light, witty, comic style of delivery that proved to be immensely popular with the GI's and her show quickly became the most popular radio show in the Pacific theater. She would introduce herself as "your favorite enemy, Orphan Ann."

It may seem odd that a professed American patriot would do a propaganda program aimed at demoralizing her nations army, but in fact it had quite the opposite effect. Her comical delivery was deliberate, and took any of the 'sting' out of her words. Instead of lowering morale, she boosted it. Indeed, she received much praise from American troops during the war and in the post war period for her role in amusing and entertaining them. Iva herself said she was waging a small war in her own way against the Japanese, with the only means she had available. Rather than being an evil propagandist, this "Tokyo Rose" was a fifth columnist.

Iva Toguri D'Aquino was arrested and tried for treason. It was the most expensive trial in US history up to that time and possibly the most unfair, Iva's real crime was being ethnically Japanese in a postwar America that wanted revenge on Japan. She was convicted, sentenced to ten years in prison and subject to a massive fine. She was also stripped of her precious, carefully guarded, US citizenship.

As the anti-Japanese sentiment of the postwar years began to recede it became clear that Iva Toguri had been framed. She received a Presidential pardon in 1977, and her citizenship was restored.

Tokyo Rose never really existed, but her myth lives on, the ultimately unobtainable woman.