I understand that you are a relative of Iva Toguri, the woman known as Tokyo Rose.
Probably, although not a very close one. When I was a girl I met her several times and was told that I was her "niece once removed," whatever that would be. But she was kind to me, and I have taken an interest in her tragic life. I have been thinking of writing about her story.
Have you considered doing that here at the university—perhaps teaching about her?
No, but I could some day. Mostly I offer courses in American literature and some on the English novel. Everyone wants to read Jane Austen these days. Every other year, I also do a creative writing course.
You teach Twain and Melville and ...
And we do Sinclair, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway and on to Roth, a bit of Saul Bellow, Updike, Morrison, and so forth.
I'm jealous. I majored in literature in college.
I can see that. I gather your friend thought Huckleberry Finn was the Great American Novel. Actually I was quite interested in what you sent me to read, though I will also tell you that how he describes his mission, with so many memories and flashbacks, Our First Atom Bomb presents the reader with challenges regarding perspective and tense.
But that is the way he wanted to tell it.
That is as it may be, but you are the one writing it down. Perhaps some form of an omniscient narrator would encourage the development of a more straightforward narrative.
I appreciate that.
Perhaps. Not many people value criticism of what they write.
I think what he was trying to get at was how it really was for him that morning, strapped into that front seat and knowing only what he did then—all that was going through his head.
He certainly seemed honest enough about that, perhaps a little too honest for everyone's taste. He often seemed confused too, which in one sense is fair enough, though I do have another suggestion for you. Since dropping an atomic bomb on a whole city of innocent people is really too horrible to contemplate, why do you not tell us much more directly what should have been done?
I was trying ...
Or if readers are in any way being put in his position, they should not be left in any doubt. In the end as many as two hundred thousand people could have died because of that bomb. If you like, just imagine me as some other alter ego telling you this.
Yes, though I heard him trying to imagine ways it could have been different and then seeing if there was any way he could act on those ideas.
The narrative does show some knack for blending facts and storytelling.
I have to admit, I think all life is experienced as a form of storytelling—what we tell ourselves we think is happening to us. Different people can describe the same incident quite differently.
Of course. We can regard all life as a form of fiction if we want. But I am no full-blown postmodernist. Nor do I think most of our readers are. There are more or less objective ways of telling about reality.
I don't disagree.
Granted, this topic can get rather complicated, or at least mysterious. What I think we can agree on is that the bomb should never have been used. But I realize that you did not come here thinking I would be talking about all of this with you. You really wanted me to tell you about Aunt Iva, did you not?
Well, yes; that too. Tokyo Rose was one of those people he sometimes recalled, and I had heard that you met her.
As you know, there were several young women who were pressed into the role that servicemen called Tokyo Rose.
He said that she sometimes called herself Orphan Ann, probably trying to remember the comic strip character Little Orphan Annie.
She was a kind of orphan and no doubt a frightened young woman who did not speak much Japanese. She was born in this country and had just graduated from UCLA. She was as American as you and I. Did you know she was born on the Fourth of July?
I didn't.
You probably know the outline of her story well enough. She had gone to Japan to help care for an aunt and was trapped by the war. She was either forced or cajoled by the Japanese—it does not make any difference—into doing those short "Zero Hour" broadcasts and playing the sentimental music described in the story.
Evidently the soldiers and sailors pretty much laughed it off .
Yes. But there was still quite a bit of war hysteria, and suspicions of anyone of Japanese ancestry. Immediately after the war, she was badly used by a couple of journalists. Testimony was given against her claiming that she had broadcast secret messages for the Japanese.
People sometimes have different versions of the same events.
You can say that again. Later the journalists admitted they had made it all up. War, as you know, generates a lot of fiction about the enemy—"slants," as the Japanese were sometimes called—or worse in order to dehumanize them.
You weren't interned with other Japanese-Americans during the war?
Of course not. How old do you think I am? I am actually one of your baby boomers, but my father was in one of the camps and both sets of grandparents were interned as well. It was a rotten and unfair business. My grandparents lost their homes and businesses while they were in Arizona and had to start all over again with the help of a few friends. My father enlisted before he was eighteen and lost part of his leg just as the war was ending. Before that, he had helped liberate at least one of the prisoner camps in Germany. You have probably heard the stories about GIs being rescued from the German camps by Japanese-American soldiers and the GIs at first thinking Japan must have won the war or invaded Germany. It was apparently that hard to think of Japanese-Americans as loyal, patriotic Americans.
People are frightened of anyone that seems foreign to them during wartime, especially after Pearl Harbor and all.
You certainly proved that.
I was only a child too.
You get my point. After Ms. Toguri was released from her first year-long imprisonment, all the so-patriotic Americans would not let up on her. Your wonderful Walter Winchell, the American Legion, and the Daughters of the Golden West saw to it that she was stripped of her citizenship, sent to prison for ten more years and fined $10,000. Her Filipino husband could not come to this country, and the $10,000 fine was seized from her father's estate when he died. My God!
President Ford did pardon her.
Thirty years after the war ended.
Sometimes it takes that long for the truth to come out.
Certainly in this case it did. Remarkably, she lived out the rest of her life with dignity, without becoming bitter. She was a gentle lady, but we can only imagine the feelings she kept to herself. I tried to get her to talk, but she mostly wished to forget.
When was the last time you saw her?
In Chicago. That is where I was born and raised.
Me too.
It was several years before she died there. She was not well.
Will you someday try to tell her story from the perspective of an omniscient narrator?
Very clever, my friend. You finally make me want to laugh just a little. This story is about a terrible event with unending consequences. I hope people will read it.
