Zero Hour: Tokyo Rose’s Last Tape by Miwa Yanagi (review)

The numerous 2015 memorials, performances, and special exhibitions for the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II demonstrate a strong desire to bring events from the past into the present. Yet, as this past recedes further and further away with the loss of the war generation, younger generations oscillate among return, revision, and reassessment in acts of commemorating a war to which they have little connection. The North American tour of Zero Hour: Tokyo Rose’s Last Tape staged this complex relationship to the now-distant war. Written, directed, and designed by Japanese visual and theatre artist Miwa Yanagi, the performance introduced audiences in five cities to what is now a relatively unknown incident to complicate public knowledge of the war and challenge its portrayal in the present.

Zero Hour is named after and loosely based on events surrounding the World War II Japanese state-run radio program. Broadcast throughout the South Pacific, Zero Hour attempted to lower Allied troop morale; in between popular Western songs, female radio announcers spoke in English about the loss of Allied ships and cheating girlfriends. After the war Japanese American Iva Toguri emerged as the face of the program. Despite the fact that she shared the announcer role with other women, she alone received notoriety, and after her return to the United States she alone was convicted of treason in 1949 for her involvement in the radio program.

Zero Hour features a similar character, Annie Oguri, a Japanese American who, like Toguri, becomes an announcer for the program after she is trapped in Japan in 1941 while visiting relatives. In the same way in which Yanagi changes the name of her main character from Iva Toguri to Annie Oguri, Zero Hour shifts from known historical facts to a fictional detective story. Parallel to Oguri’s story, Zero Hour follows Japanese American soldier Daniel’s attempts to identify the most mysterious announcer of the Zero Hour program, Tokyo Rose. During the US Occupation of Japan after the war Daniel questions the female announcers, matching their voices with the radio personas from Zero Hour, but fails to locate the woman who plays Tokyo Rose. While this becomes his lifelong quest, partway through the performance Zero Hour reveals to its audience that Tokyo Rose is the station’s male sound engineer, Shiomi, who creates the character by manipulating a recording of his own voice.

Radio announcers in Zero Hour: Tokyo Rose’s Last Tape. (Photo: Naoshi Hatori, courtesy of Aichi Triennale 2013.)

By following Daniel’s relentless investigation Zero Hour traces how we become preoccupied with concrete, sometimes arbitrary questions about the past. At times, however, Zero Hour falls prey to this very tendency, and the performance becomes singularly interested in the identity of Tokyo Rose and Daniel’s crusade to find her. In more compelling moments this storyline illustrates how male figures construct Tokyo Rose: Shiomi creates her, Daniel searches for her, and Allied soldiers—represented by voices projected over theatre speakers—fantasize about her. These men emerge as agents of history and the women as their creations—and, as we witness with Oguri’s conviction, their casualties. Illustrative of the women’s position as pawns, chess is a recurring motif: Daniel challenges Shiomi to a hundred games, which the men continue well after the Occupation. In contrast Zero Hour reveals little about what happens to Oguri after her conviction.

At the same time, a chorus of five women, all in identical costumes, undermined any hope that locating the true Tokyo Rose would offer answers about the past. With cloche-like hats obscuring their faces, the identities of these women blended into one another; distinguishing among them initially seemed impossible. Ever present, the members of the chorus played all of the female characters, introduced historical details of Oguri’s trial, and punctuated scenes with movement sequences—for instance, when Daniel talks about his love of chess they brought out five...