THE PROPAGANDISTS

Rambling Rose

Allied troops in the South Pacific during World War II were bombarded with propaganda dished out over the airwaves by English-speaking women in Japan, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Although these broadcasters had different on-air names and personas, their coordinated campaign to demoralize soldiers—and the soldiers’ families back home—earned the women almost mythical powers in the American news media and the nation’s collective psyche. The troops, who craved the music served up by the propagandists but dismissed the taunts directed at them, came to refer to this sorority of shills for the Japanese Empire with one iconic name: Tokyo Rose.

But if Tokyo Rose was the wartime equivalent of a multiple personality disorder, there was one woman who emerged as the public face of this scorned clique: Iva Toguri, who had been born in Los Angeles to Japanese parents. Following her graduation from UCLA in 1941, Toguri traveled to Japan to visit a sick aunt, only to get stranded there following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Months later Radio Tokyo hired Toguri to type scripts for the propaganda programs directed at American GIs, and it soon asked her to host such a show. And so the gravelly voiced “Orphan Ann” took the microphone for , although with ulterior motives: The show’s producer, an Australian prisoner of war, schemed to sabotage it with sarcasm too subtle for the Japanese