On Yellow (Menace) Journalism

Two dolls changed my life a great deal as a child. Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, Hanoko and Sachiko, my favorites.

They were Japanese dolls in kimonos, bought from a nice Japanese lady behind the counter at J. Toguri Mercantile Company, in Chicago. It was a magical store in my mind for many reasons, not the least of which were the dolls. To my young eyes, it was the kind of place you might have found a gremlin in a box, or the most pungent incense you've ever smelled, or ... just the world's most gigantic wok. They sold everything. Tools, dry goods, books, kimonos and little odds and ends. It was like no place else in the white midwestern world -- where geisha was pronounced geesha, and fortune cookies and egg foo young were "authentic".

But that store meant also the reinstatement of a life that had gone through hell and back, and come to rest for a time. And I did not know until many years later. It was kept quiet, in typical Japanese manner.

Today, the life that went up and down and up like a wave in the worst of storms, went out like tide and rolled away from us.

Her ghost ended up on the news again. TOKYO ROSE DIES AT 90...
That awful name again even in death. Tokyo Rose, propagandist traitor.

I had to write an angry e-mail tonight to my local newscaster, since to me, one of my friends had been slandered. It was the lady who sold me Miss Happiness and Miss Flower.

My e-mail reads:

"I would like to protest STRONGLY the unfairly biased tone of the report which Brian Williams just announced on the nightly news here in Los Angeles concerning the late Iva Toguri.

I knew the full story of Iva Toguri's history, and note that even on your own MSNBC website you display a fully fair reporting of Iva's story.

SO MR. WILLIAMS, WHY DID YOU DECIDE, ON THE DAY OF HER DEATH, TO DEFAME HER YET AGAIN? You portrayed this woman as a traitor once more, without telling the whole story, and added her pardon by the President of our country as only a buried footnote in the inflammatory soundbites of your report.

The words that were never spoken on her in your nightly announcement were the key phrases I quote from Reuters, which appears to be the last even-handed source:

"Born July 4, 1916, in Los Angeles, the young college graduate was visiting a sick relative in Japan when she became trapped there as [World War II] broke out. Starving and sick, unable to speak Japanese, she answered an ad to become an English-language typist for Radio Tokyo."

"Toguri did work as an announcer for the “Zero Hour” program on Radio Tokyo, but mostly played jazz records and uttered facetious comments meant to bolster, not weaken, American resolve, say historians."

I find it incredible that you could be so callous and so clearly disrespectful of a woman who lived through a life of hiding from people like you, who refuse to see the truth when it is proven and even certified by our government as such. It seemed that all that was important about this woman's life to you and your news show was that she was once accused of being a traitor -- and in the eyes of middle America, still remained so. You allowed misinformation (yes, incomplete reporting is misinformation) to perpetuate hatred.

I am asking to see a restatement of this situation in your public airtime.

Please make a restatement of this, and don't continue the "yellow menace" thinking that ruined this woman's life.

Sincerely, etc."

Facts about Iva Toguri can be found at Wikipedia
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iva_Toguri_D'Aquino ),
which will give you a better picture of the real woman who ran the store that still warms my memory.