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Idle eyes tokyo rose
Tokyo Rose (alternative spelling Tokio Rose) was a fabricated name given by Allied troops in the South Pacific during World War II to all female English-speaking radio broadcasters of Japanese propaganda. The programs were broadcast in the South Pacific and North America to demoralize Allied troops abroad and their families at home by emphasizing troops' wartime difficulties and military losses. Several female broadcasters operated under different aliases and in different cities throughout the Empire, including Tokyo, Manila, and Shanghai. The name "Tokyo Rose" was never used in any Japanese radio program, but it first appeared in U.S. newspapers in the context of these broadcasts in 1943.
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During the war, Tokyo Rose was not any one individual, but rather a group of largely unconnected women working similarly within the same propagandist effort throughout the Japanese Empire. In the years shortly following the war, the figure of 'Tokyo Rose' – whom the FBI now avers to be "mythical" – became an important symbol of Japanese villainy for the U.S. American cartoons, films, and propaganda videos between 1945 and 1960 tend to portray her figure as highly sexualized, manipulative, and deadly to American interests in the South Pacific, particularly by deliberately leaking intelligence of American losses in radio broadcasts. Similar rumors surround the propaganda broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw and Axis Sally, and in 1949 the San Francisco Chronicle described Tokyo Rose as the "Mata Hari of radio."
Tokyo Rose ceased to be merely a symbol in September of 1945 when Iva Toguri D'Aquino, an American-born Japanese disc jockey for a propagandist radio program attempted to return to the United States. Toguri was accused of being the 'real' Tokyo Rose, arrested, tried, and became the seventh person in U.S. history to be convicted of treason. Toguri's conviction was eventually overturned due to lack of evidence and she was released from prison in 1956, but it was more than 20 years before she received an official presidential pardon for her role in the war.
Iva Toguri and The Zero Hour
Although she broadcast under the name "Orphan Ann," Iva Toguri has been known as "Tokyo Rose" since her return to the United States in 1945. An American citizen and the daughter of Japanese immigrants, Toguri traveled to Japan to tend to a sick aunt just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Unable to leave the country when war broke out with the United States, unable to stay with her aunt's family as an American citizen, and unable to receive any aid from her parents who were placed in internment camps in Arizona, Toguri eventually took a job as a part-time typist at Radio Tokyo (NHK). She was quickly recruited as a broadcaster for the 75-minute propagandist program The Zero Hour, which consisted of skits, news reports, and popular American music.
According to studies conducted in 1968, of the 94 men who were interviewed and who recalled listening to The Zero Hour while serving in the Pacific, 89% recognized it as propaganda, and less than 10% felt "demoralized" by it. 84% of the men listened because the program had "good entertainment," and one GI remarked, "[l]ots of us thought she was on our side all along."
After World War II ended in 1945, the U.S. military detained Toguri for a year before releasing her for lack of evidence. Department of Justice officials agreed that her broadcasts were "innocuous". But when Toguri tried to return to the US, a popular uproar ensued because Walter Winchell (a powerful broadcasting personality) and the American Legion lobbied relentlessly for a trial, prompting the Federal Bureau of Investigation to renew its investigation of Toguri's wartime activities. Her 1949 trial resulted in a conviction on one of eight counts of treason. In 1974, investigative journalists found that key witnesses claimed that they were forced to lie during testimony. U.S. President Gerald Ford pardoned Toguri in 1977.
Tokyo Rose
Walter Kaner (May 5, 1920 – June 27, 2005) was a journalist and radio personality who broadcast under the name Tokyo Mose during and after World War II. Kaner aired on US Army Radio, at first to offer comic rejoinders to the propaganda broadcasts of Tokyo Rose and then as a parody to entertain U.S. troops abroad. In U.S.-occupied Japan, his “Moshi, Moshi Ano-ne” jingle was sung to the tune of “London Bridge is Falling Down" and became so popular with Japanese children and GIs that the army paper called it “the Japanese occupation theme song.” In 1946, Elsa Maxwell referred to Kaner as “the breath of home to unknown thousands of our young men when they were lonely.”
Popular culture
Tokyo Rose has been the subject of songs, movies, and documentaries: