Will the ‘Real’ Tokyo Rose Please Stand Up

By Tom Morrow

The moniker Tokyo Rose was a 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 to the South Pacific designed to demoralize Allied forces and their families back home, emphasizing war time difficulties and military losses.

Several female broadcasters operated using different aliases and in different cities throughout the Japanese Empire, including Tokyo, Manila, and Shanghai. The name “Tokyo Rose” was never used by the Japanese. It was a moniker dubbed by American troops.
During the war, Tokyo Rose was not any one individual, but rather a group of largely unassociated women working for the same propagandist effort throughout the Japanese Empire. In the years immediately after the war, “Tokyo Rose,” whom the F.B.I. determined to be “mythical,” became an important symbol of Japanese war-time villainy.
It was American-born Iva Toguri D’Aquino, born July 4, 1916, who ultimately was identified as “the” Tokyo Rose.
An American citizen and the daughter of Japanese-American immigrants, Aquino had traveled to Japan to tend to a sick aunt just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Unable to leave Japan when war began, as an American citizen, she also was unable to receive any aid from her parents who had been placed in an Arizona internment camp, Aquino took a job as a part-time typist at Radio Tokyo. Japanese authorities quickly recognized her distinctive American dialect and recruited her as a broadcaster for a propaganda program aimed at U.S. troops called The Zero Hour. It consisted of skits, mostly fake news reports, and popular American music.
Between 1945 and 1960 U.S. movies and propaganda videos have tended to portray Aquino as a sexualized, manipulative, and deadly voice broadcasting to Allied forces fighting in the South Pacific. The programs in particular revealed supposed American losses. Similar German propaganda broadcasts of British-born Lord Haw-Haw and American-born Axis Sally were beamed to Allied troops in Europe and North Africa. In 1949 the San Francisco Chronicle described Tokyo Rose as the “Mata Hari of radio.”

Tokyo Rose ceased to be merely a symbol during September 1945 when D’Aquino attempted to return to the United States. She 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 was eventually paroled from prison in 1956, but it was more than 20 years later she received an official presidential pardon for her role in the war.
After World War II ended in 1945, the U.S. military detained Toguri for a year before releasing her due to lack of evidence. Department of Justice officials agreed that her broadcasts were “innocuous.” But when Toguri tried to return to the United States, an uproar ensued because Walter Winchell (a powerful broadcasting personality at that time) as well as the American Legion lobbied relentlessly for a trial, prompting the FBI to renew its investigation of Toguri’s wartime activities.
Like Mildred “Axis Sally” Gillars, who did propaganda broadcasts for Germany before her, D’Aquino’s 1949 trial resulted in a conviction on one of eight counts of treason. She served six years in prison before being released.
According to a 1968 journalism investigation, some 94 former G.I.s who were interviewed recalled listening to The Zero Hour while serving in the Pacific. About 89 percent recognized the program as “propaganda”, and less than 10 percent felt “demoralized,” yet 84 percent of the men listened because “Tokyo Rose” was “good entertainment,” and one G.I. remarked, “… lots of us thought she was on our side.”
In 1974, another investigation discovered D’Aquino’s trial witnesses who said they were forced to lie during the trial. They said FBI and U.S. occupation police had coached them what they should say on the witness stand. The witnesses were reportedly threatened with treason trials of their own if they did not cooperate. In 1977, as a result of the investigation, U.S. President Gerald Ford pardoned D’Aquino based on these revelations and earlier issues with her indictment. 

During and after the War, journalist and radio personality Walter Kaner broadcast to Armed Forces troops using the name Tokyo Mose. Kaner mocked the Japanese war-time broadcasts and later he entertained U.S. troops occupying Japan. Kaner did a parody of the Japanese language (Hello, Hello, How are you) singing “Moshi, Moshi Ano-ne,” a jingle he sung to the tune of “London Bridge is Falling Down.” The jingle became so popular with Japanese children as well as U.S. troops the Stars & Stripes newspaper called it “the Japanese occupation theme song.” In 1946, New York socialite and entertainment celebrity hostess Elsa Maxwell referred to Kaner as “… a breath of home to unknown thousands of our young men when they were lonely.”
Iva Toguri D’Aquino died of natural causes in Chicago on Sept. 27, 2006, at the age of 90.