Zero Hour

Iva Toguri
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

This is a photo of Iva Toguri D'Aquino. After WWII, she was accused of being the infamous Tokyo Rose and charged with--and wrongly convicted of--treason. Though found guilty, she was later pardoned and released--but not before having spent six years in prison. The government later admitted that they knew prior to charging her with treason that she was not, in fact, Tokyo Rose.

In fact, Iva Toguri (her maiden name) was an American, born and raised in the US, educated at UCLA. She made the mistake of traveling to Japan to visit an ailing relative and became trapped in Tokyo when war broke out. Unable to speak but the barest bones Japanese, she eventually found a job as an English speaking announcer at Radio Tokyo. She was featured on a show called "Zero Hour" under the name "Ann" (for "Announcer," though she later became known as "Orphan Ann"), where her role as a propagandist was not as evident as the US government later wanted the American public to think it was.

Her story has been told several times, including one 1946 movie called Tokyo Rose. Now another movie about her life--also called Tokyo Rose--is in the works (via angry asian man, a blog I read quite often).

Tokyo Rose is, of course, the name from which David devised my blog name "Tokyo Rosa." I liked the name immediately for several reasons. I thought clever the shift from the English "Rose" to the Spanish "Rosa." I was moving to Tokyo. I was fascinated by the story of her wrongful prosecution and by the grace with which she dealt with her imprisonment. And, too, the whole matter reminded me of a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's novel Mother Night (which also featured a main character who was a radio broadcaster wrongly accused of treason) that I had long loved:

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.