An Ode to Tokyo Rose

A while ago, maybe a couple years now, I worked on a book that involved interviewing people about how food influenced, intersected in their life. At one time, I interviewed a woman I will call Amaya for now, at Superfine in Dumbo. She grew up in Chicago and had a story about Tokyo Rose, who died today.
Here's Amaya's story.

Amaya and Tokyo Rose

*Amaya* met Tokyo Rose when she was 15. On a quiet, cool Chicago fall night, this woman who had come into her parent’s restaurant regularly and who had become friends with her family, suddenly had a story, a legendary one. But Amaya couldn’t tell anyone about it. Her father forbade that. It wasn’t until she was flipping through a Lucky Magazine when she was 30, feeling a bit lost in life, that she was able to choke out the Tokyo Rose story to an unknowing Mac Cosmetics employee.
Amaya grew up in a restaurant family. She bussed tables, cleaned the kitchen, scooped out Udon and spent a lot of time alone and with babysitters at home while her parents were working. One of her earliest memories was pushing over the plates and linens underneath the counter of her parent’s restaurant on Division Street in Chicago and making a place to lie down and sleep.
Her father used to cook for the royal family in Japan. But when he emigrated to Chicago he struggled and worked at Benihana’s and finally opened his own Japanese restaurant on Division Street and served sushi and udon before the masses caught on. The restaurant was modeled on the ramen shops in Japan, casual and packed with intensely fresh ingredients. With fresh noodles made and hung along the kitchen daily to dry, the smell of the flour burrowed into her nostrils and Amaya set off to shop with her father at the markets. She can truthfully say that she has seen a chicken run around with his neck cut off at a butcher shop in Chicago’s Southside.
She did her homework under the counter of the restaurant, slept under the counter on a heaping pile of tablecloths and watched people come in from all over the city for what was then an exotic cuisine. Her mother made sure to pack her sandwiches after she had an embarrassing moment trying to explain her bento box at a privatge school on Chicago’s North Side.
Besides packs of men and women from the Southside coming into the restaurant for chicken wings (they were barbecued and tangy, sweet and sour, crunchy—better than anything they could find on the South side) so did the city’s Japanese community.
“They were so quiet and intense,” Amaya says.
One night she was finally struck by the oddity of growing up in a restaurant.

“I was clearing off a table one night when my dad came up to me and asked me if I knew who Tokyo Rose was.
“And I knew the name but nothing else. So, he pointed to this woman who I knew only as Iva. She was a friend of the family and a regular at the restaurant and my dad whispered to me, ‘that’s Tokyo Rose.’ And there’s this woman that I knew and that I just thought was this quiet, small, pretty woman who owned this Japanese import shop on Belmont. It was like the whole place took on this quiet sophistication and you get that feeling when you work and live in a restaurant. Everyone--all these strangers--have an aura of secrecy or something. We are just feeding them. Personal questions usually don’t come up right away. But you can tell a little bit about them by the way they eat or what they order or even how often they come in and with whom. It’s simple but so complicated. And you can’t help but just try to stand back and let it sink in for a second.”
Amaya was told not to tell anyone who Tokyo Rose was. She looked up the Tokyo Rose story in the Encyclopedia, researched it in the library and left the story buried in her head. Secrecy and indiscretion was a credo in her house. So the myth and the memory of Tokyo Rose stayed stuck in Amaya’s head. But she identified with her.
“We are both Nissei or Nikkei-jin which means second generation Japanese and since Iva and me were both born here with parents who grew up in Japan we have seen both the evolution of Japanese food and being Japanese but in completely different decades. After I learned her story it became a part of my history as I grew up and it always connected to food with me.”
Tokyo Rose, at least as she has been perceived, never actually existed. Legends never seem to really exist. She is a myth spawned by U.S. servicemen listening to female disc jockeys on wartime radio in the Pacific. But myth has melted into memory, memory into myth. Memory that became distorted, twisted, glorified and finally a fiction for a life that never really existed.
The real story of the woman who became known as Tokyo Rose, is Iva Toguri’s story. Iva was sent to Japan, a place she had never been, in 1941 to care for a sick aunt. Because of anti-Japan sentiment and because Iva left before she could get a passport, the United States prevented her return. She was also an outsider in Japan because of her American citizenship and even got sick from the Japanese food she wasn’t used to eating.
She was sent to Japan by her family who wanted her to care for a sick aunt. She worked as a typist at Radio Tokyo and was selected to read scripts during the Zero Hour, a program that played popular music and gave war reports. The Zero Hour was organized and presented by Allied prisoners of war under the supervision of Japanese military intelligence, and the broadcasts were cleverly sabotaged by the POWs. Iva — her on-air name was Orphan Ann — was chosen for the program because she had no broadcast experience and did not have a smooth and compelling voice. She was homesick the whole time and wanted to return home, to California. When the war in the Pacific ended and the United States occupied Japan, Iva was thrilled that she would finally be allowed to return home. She spoke freely to reporters about the job she had had during the war, never dreaming that she had done anything wrong or that her broadcasts could be misconstrued. But these conversations sparked a media blitz that led to her trial and conviction of treason, despite lack of any evidence. Iva was sentenced to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine, and she served more than 6 years of her sentence. In the 1970s, a Chicago Tribune journalist took up the story. His investigations and articles eventually resulted in Iva's pardon by President Gerald Ford — his last official act as president — in 1977.
Iva Toguri is still alive. But with the exception of a couple of unauthorized biographies, a few television interviews and a smattering of newspaper articles written over the last twenty years, her story is all but dead and forgotten.
So, when Amaya was flipping through a magazine in her New York apartment and saw a blurb for Tokyo Rose blush by Mac, the restaurant and her encounter with Iva came back to her. She called up the manufacturer and asked them, if they knew who Tokyo Rose was and if they thought of the meaning of their blush and wasn’t it inappropriate and did they know that they have a large Asian consumer base that might be offended?
“I was freaking out and it all came back then, the nights under the counter, the meals laid out with the simplest, freshest ingredients. The lunches I ate that were so different from my classmates. Me and Iva are both second generation and here I was not doing anything with my life and I saw that ad and it was like a little opportunity. The blush was taken off the market soon after I called. I don’t know if it was because of my call. But I called Tokyo Rose and told her and we had a nice long talk.”

CHICKEN YAKITORI

For the marinade
1/2 cup soy sauce (preferably dark Japanese style)
1/2 cup dry Sherry
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon minced peeled fresh gingerroot
1 garlic clove, minced
1/4 teaspoon salt

12 wooden skewers for skewering the chicken and vegetables
8 skinless boneless chicken thighs, cut into thirty-six 1 1/2-inch pieces
2 bunches of scallions (about 10), the white and pale green parts cut into twenty-four 1 1/2-inch lengths
24 canned whole water chestnuts, rinsed and drained

To Make the marinade:
In a saucepan whisk together the soy sauce, the Sherry, the sugar, the gingerroot, the garlic, the salt, and pepper to taste and bring the mixture to a boil over moderate heat. Simmer the mixture for 5 minutes, or until the sugar is dissolved, and let the marinade cool.

On each skewer alternate 3 pieces of chicken with 2 scallion lengths and 2 water chestnuts, skewering the water chestnuts carefully so that they do not split and beginning and ending with the chicken. In a large shallow baking dish arrange the kebabs and marinate for 30 minutes. Arrange the kebabs, reserving the marinade, in one layer on an oiled rack of a broiler pan and broil them under a preheated broiler about 4 inches from the heat, basting them with the marinade for the first 6 minutes, for 10 to 15 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked through. Discard any remaining marinade.