Reply #8: actually i read tokyo rose wasn't so bad... [View All]

Thursday February 21, 2002 Previous | Next

Dear Yahoo!:
Who was Tokyo Rose?
Radio Researcher
Garner, North Carolina

Dear Radio:
Tokyo Rose is something of an urban legend -- a fictional person cobbled together from scraps of real history. There's no proof that such a woman existed, although one woman was convicted of treason as Tokyo Rose.
During World War II, American soldiers dubbed the female broadcasters on Japanese radio, "Tokyo Rose." It was a name invented by the soldiers -- U.S. government research never found evidence of a person named Tokyo Rose in radio programs anywhere in the Pacific. The voice of Tokyo Rose was said to have taunted Allied forces during the war, hurting morale.

Iva Ikuko Toguri is the woman who was tried as Tokyo Rose. She is a first-generation Japanese-American who happened to be visiting a sick relative in Japan in 1941. When war was declared between Japan and the U.S., Toguri was trapped in Japan and pressured by Japanese military police to renounce her American citizenship. She refused. Instead, she learned Japanese and took two jobs to support herself while she sought a way to return home.

One of her jobs was as a typist for Radio Tokyo. There she met American and Australian prisoners of war who were being forced to broadcast radio propaganda. Toguri scavenged black-market food, medicine, and supplies for these POWs. When Radio Tokyo wanted a female voice for their propaganda shows, the POWs selected Toguri. She was one of many female, English-speaking voices on Radio Tokyo, and she took the radio name of "Orphan Ann." Her POW friends wrote her scripts and tried to sneak in pro-American messages whenever possible.