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Tokyo Rose

© Jennifer L. 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.