| 29 September 2006
Tokyo Rose
I was reading the National Intelligence Estimate on the war in Iraq this week. It wasn't the whole thing, just the key judgment section, but trust me, these things are dry as dust.
The controversy made it interesting though, and I have never seen anything go from Tippy-top secret to the office e-mail so fast! The last judgment in the NIE is one you might not have heard about, since it is not nearly so easy to translate into a headline.
It says the Bad Guys are using the internet for training, recruitment and propaganda. Since the world-wide web was originally developed by the Department of Defense, it is one of Life's delicious ironies.
We live at breathtaking speed these days. Getting propaganda out used to be hard. I thought about that when I heard that the famous Tokyo Rose had passed away this week at her home in Chicago.
Like the racy pin-up of Betty Grable, Tokyo Rose was an icon to the American and Australian kids who went to the big war in the Pacific. She was a seductive siren with big-band tunes, her broadcasts intended to sap the will of the Allied fighting men.
She was more famous than her Nazi sister, Axis Sally. But there was a problem with all that. She didn't really exist. “Tokyo Rose” was a eponymic name dreamed up by GIs to describe the bull-pen of young English-speaking women who were on the radio.
The woman who wound up as Tokyo Rose was named Iva Toguri. She was a Nisei- a first generation American- who had been dispatched from Los Angeles to Japan in 1941 to care for an ailing aunt. She was a Methodist, and did not care for the taste of rice.
I lived in Japan for a while, long after the war, and I can only imagine how strange it must have been for her after Pearl Harbor. The last boat left her behind and she became an enemy alien in the land of the rising sun.
She was pressured- almost tortured- to give up her US citizenship. She refused. She cheered that April day in 1942 when the Doolittle Raiders sprinkled their symbolic bombs over Tokyo.
There were no rations for enemy aliens. To feed herself, she worked at the government-owned radio network- the Nippon Hoso Kyokai. She transcribed American news broadcasts to stay alive, and in late 1943 she was forced on the air involuntarily as a disc jockey for "The Zero Hour" propaganda show.
Her stage name was Orphan Ann, incidentally. The whole "Tokyo Rose" thing was an Allied fantasy. She tired to subvert the broadcasts, and smuggled food to Allied POWs.
After V-J Day, an interview with the elusive Tokyo Rose was worth some money, and Iva needed it. She hoped to make $10,000 bucks and go home, and gave an interview as the oriental temptress.
What the admission got her was a bogus trial and six years in the Federal slammer. They could only convict her on one of eight charges, the vague charge of revealing shipping information. Iva became prisoner 9380-W.
1977 was the year I joined the Navy and headed off to Japan, It was the same year President Ford recognized she had been railroaded and gave her a full pardon.
It is interesting to consider, on the day Congress is going to send the President another version of a military tribunals act. I have only contempt for murderers, but I'm queasy about the restriction of habeus corpus. The law will probably be overturned on judicial review, but it is more about elections than it is about justice.
They say that history repeats itself, but I wouldn't know about that. I have enough trouble living in this edition.
Iva Toguri's birthday was the 4th of July. You really can't get any more American than that, can you?
Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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