Discover

'Iva Toguri D'Aquino' (July 4, 1916 – September 26, 2006), a Japanese-American, was most identified with "Tokyo Rose", a generic name given by Allied forces in the South Pacific during World War II to any of approximately a dozen English-speaking female broadcasters of Japanese propaganda.
Identified by the press as Tokyo Rose after the war, she was detained for a year by the U.S. military before being released for lack of evidence. Regardless, upon return to the U.S., the Federal Bureau of Investigation began an investigation of her activities and she was subsequently charged by the United States Attorney's Office with eight counts of treason. Her 1949 trial resulted in a conviction on one count, making her the seventh American to be convicted on that charge. In 1974, investigative journalists found key witnesses had lied during testimony and other serious problems with the conduct of the trial. She was pardoned by U.S. President Gerald Ford in 1977, becoming the only U.S. citizen convicted of treason to be pardoned.Adam Blenford, Death ends the myth of Tokyo Rose, BBC News, 28 September 2006

Contents

Early life

''Zero Hour''

Postwar arrest and trial

Arrest

Treason trial

Presidential pardon

Later life

Legacy

Depiction in film and media

See also

References

External links

Early life

She was born in Los Angeles, the daughter of Japanese immigrants. Her father, Jun Toguri, had come to the U.S. in 1899, and her mother in 1913. Ikuko, who went by the name Iva, was a Girl Scout as a child, and raised as a Methodist. She attended grammar schools in Calexico, California, and San Diego before returning with her family to Los Angeles. There she finished grammar school, attended high school, and graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a degree in Zoology. She then worked in her parents' shop.
On July 5, 1941, she sailed for Japan from Los Angeles' San Pedro area, to visit an ailing relative and to possibly study medicine. The U.S. State Department issued her a Certificate of Identification; she did not have a passport. That September in Japan, Toguri applied to the U.S. Vice Consul for a passport, stating she wished to return to her home in the U.S. Her request was forwarded to the State Department, but the answer had not returned by the attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) and was stranded in Japan.

''Zero Hour''

With the beginning of American involvement in the Pacific War, Toguri, like a number of other Americans in Japanese territory, was pressured by the Japanese central government under Hideki Tojo to renounce her United States citizenship, which she refused to do. Toguri was subsequently declared an enemy alien and refused a war ration card.^[1] "A tiger does not change its stripes" is a quote attributed to her..
To support herself she gained work as a typist at a Japanese news agency and eventually worked in a similar capacity for Radio Tokyo.
In November 1943, Allied prisoners of war forced to broadcast propaganda selected her to host portions of the one-hour radio show ''The Zero Hour''. Her producer was an Australian Army officer, Major Charles Cousens, who had pre-war broadcast experience and had been captured at the fall of Singapore. Cousens had been tortured and coerced to work on radio broadcasts, as had his assistants, U.S. Army Captain Wallace "Ted" Ince and a Philippine Army Lieutenant, Normando Ildefonso "Norman" Reyes. Toguri had previously risked her life smuggling food into the nearby Prisoner of War (POW) camp where Cousens and Ince were held, gaining the inmates' trust. After she indicated her refusal to broadcast anti-American propaganda, Toguri was assured by Major Cousens and Captain Ince that they would not write scripts having her say anything against the United States.
Under the stage names "Ann" (for "Announcer") and later "Orphan Anne" and possibly "Your Favorite Enemy, Anne", reportedly in reference to the comic strip character Little Orphan Annie, Toguri performed in comedy sketches and introduced newscasts, with on-air speaking time of generally about 20 minutes. True to the word of the two prisoners of war that Toguri worked under, no anti-Allies propaganda was found in her broadcast. Though earning only 150 yen, or about $7, per month, she used some of her earnings to feed P.O.W.s^[2] smuggling food in as she did before.
Toguri aimed most of her comments toward her fellow Americans ("my fellow orphans"), using American slang and playing American music. In one of the few surviving recordings of her show, she refers to herself as "your 'Number One' enemy." In contemporary American slang (especially that used by US Marines and Naval forces in the Pacific), she was telling them that she was their "best enemy" (in other words, their friend), while the Japanese thought this meant that she was their greatest enemy.
At no time did Toguri call herself "Tokyo Rose" during the war, and in fact there was no evidence that any other broadcaster had done so. The name was a catch-all used by Allied forces for all of the women who were heard on Japanese propaganda radio.
She married Felipe D'Aquino (last name sometimes given only as Aquino), a Portuguese citizen of Japanese-Portuguese descent, on April 19, 1945. The marriage was registered with the Portuguese Consulate in Tokyo, with Toguri declining to take her husband's citizenship.

Postwar arrest and trial

Toguri being interviewed by the press in September 1945

Arrest

After Japan's unconditional surrender (August 15, 1945), reporters Henry Brundidge and Clark Lee offered $250 — an act considered unethical checkbook journalism by press associations and journalism professors — for the identity of "Tokyo Rose."
In need of money, and still trying to get home, Iva stepped forward to claim the money, but instead found herself arrested, on September 5, 1945, in Yokohama. She was released after a year in jail when neither the FBI nor General Douglas MacArthur's staff had found any evidence she had aided the Japanese Axis forces.² As well, the American and Australian prisoners-of-war who wrote her scripts also assured her (and the Allied headquarters) that she had committed no wrongdoing.^[3]
The case-history at the FBI's website states, "The FBI's investigation of Aquino's activities had covered a period of some five years. During the course of that investigation, the FBI had interviewed hundreds of former members of the U.S. Armed Forces who had served in the South Pacific during World War II, unearthed forgotten Japanese documents, and turned up recordings of Aquino's broadcasts". Investigating with the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps, they "conducted an extensive investigation to determine whether Aquino had committed crimes against the U.S. By the following October, authorities decided that the evidence then known did not merit prosecution, and she was released".
However, upon her request to return to the United States to have her unborn child born on American soil, the influential gossip columnist and radio host Walter Winchell lobbied against her. Her baby was born in Japan but died shortly after. After her child's death, D'Aquino, forcibly separated from her husband (whom she never saw again), was brought to San Francisco, on September 25, 1948, where she was charged by federal prosecutors with the crime of treason for "adhering to, and giving aid and comfort to, the Imperial Government of Japan during World War II".

Mugshot during Toguri's first detention in Japan

Treason trial

Her trial on eight "overt acts" of treason began on July 5, 1949, at the Federal District Court in San Francisco. During what was at the time the costliest trial in American history, totaling more than half a million dollars, the prosecution presented 46 witnesses, including two of Toguri's former supervisors at Radio Tokyo, and soldiers who testified they could not distinguish between what they had heard on radio broadcasts and what they had heard by way of rumour. Although boxes of tapes were brought by prosecutors to the courthouse and rested near the prosecution table, none were entered into evidence and played for the jury. Toguri claimed she and her associates subtly sabotaged the Japanese war effort.
The supervisor at Radio Tokyo testified that:
Another co-worker testified that Toguri said, "Now you fellows have lost all your ships. Now you really are orphans of the Pacific. How do you think you will ever get home?"
On September 29, 1949, the jury found Toguri guilty on a sole count, Count VI, which stated, "That on a day during October, 1944, the exact date being to the Grand Jurors unknown, said defendant, at Tokyo, Japan, in a broadcasting studio of The Broadcasting Corporation of Japan, did speak into a microphone concerning the loss of ships." She was fined US$10,000 and given a 10-year prison sentence. Her attorney, Wayne Collins, citing the gross unfairness of it, called the verdict "Guilty without evidence". She was sent to the Federal Reformatory for Women at Alderson, West Virginia. She was paroled after serving six years and two months, and released January 28, 1956 and moved to Chicago, Illinois. The FBI's case history notes, "Neither Brundidge nor the witness testified at trial because of the taint of perjury. Nor was Brundidge prosecuted for subornation of perjury."

Presidential pardon

In 1976 an investigation by ''Chicago Tribune'' reporter Ron Yates discovered that Kenkichi Oki and George Mitsushio, who delivered the most damaging testimony at Toguri's trial, lied under oath.^[4] They stated they had been threatened by the FBI and U.S. occupation police and told what to say and what not to say just hours before the trial. This was followed up by a Morley Safer report on the television news program ''60 Minutes''
Due to these revelations, U.S. President Gerald Ford pardoned Mrs. D’Aquino on January 19, 1977, his last full day in office, after she had appealed to him in writing. The decision was supported by a unanimous vote in both houses of the California State Legislature, the national Japanese-American Citizens League, and S. I. Hayakawa, then a United States Senator from California.

Later life

After the pardon, resisting efforts at deportation, Toguri moved to Chicago, where her father had opened the Japanese-import retail store J. Toguri Mercantile before the war. She worked there until her death, her former notoriety all but forgotten. The store is still run by the family.
Toguri never reunited with or again saw her husband, who had returned to Japan after her trial. Toguri divorced him in 1980; he died in 1996.
Toguri died in a Chicago hospital, of natural causes, on September 26, 2006, at the age of 90.^[5][6]

Legacy

★ The FBI case-history cited under References, below, states: "As far as its propaganda value, Army analysis suggested that the program had no negative effect on troop morale and that it might even have raised it a bit". ''The New York Times'' in her obituary noted, "The broadcasts did nothing to dim American morale. The servicemen enjoyed the recordings of American popular music, and the United States Navy bestowed a satirical citation on Tokyo Rose at war’s end for her entertainment value."^[7]

★ On 15 January 2006, the World War II Veterans Committee, citing "her indomitable spirit, love of country, and the example of courage she has given her fellow Americans", awarded her its annual Edward J Herlihy Citizenship Award.^[8] According to one biographer, Toguri found it the most memorable day of her life.

Depiction in film and media

★ Iva Toguri has been the subject of two movies and four documentaries:

★
★ 1946: ''Tokyo Rose'', film; directed by Lew Landers; Blake Edwards played Joe Bridger.

★
★ 1969: ''The Story of "Tokyo Rose"'', CBS-TV and WGN radio documentary written and produced by Bill Kurtis.

★
★ 1976: ''Tokyo Rose'', CBS-TV documentary segment on 60 Minutes by Morley Safer, produced by Imrel Harvath.

★
★ 1995: ''U.S.A. vs. "Tokyo Rose"'', self-produced documentary by Antonio A. Montanari Jr., distributed by Cinema Guild.

★
★ 1995: ''Tokyo Rose: Victim of Propaganda'', A&E Biography documentary, hosted by Peter Graves, available on VHS (AAE-14023).

★
★ In 2004, actor George Takei announced he was working on a film titled ''Tokyo Rose, American Patriot'', about Toguri's activities during the war.^[9]

★
★ A scene in the 2006 movie ''Flags of Our Fathers'' of American servicemen listening to a radio broadcast, ascribed to "Orphan Ann" and done in a style previously attributed to "Tokyo Rose" that conflates the two, is a complete fabrication, with no basis in fact.

★
★ 2008: ''Tokyo Rose'', film; in development with Darkwoods Productions, the only entity granted life story rights by Iva Toguri, Frank Darabont to direct. Christopher Hampton, is the screenwriter for ''Tokyo Rose''.

★ The first registered rock group using the name Tokyo Rose was formed in the summer of 1980. They are most known for their video which tells the story of the war time Tokyo Rose. Tokyo Rose is also the name of an emo/pop band hailing from New Jersey.

★ ''Tokyo Rose'' is a 1989 album by Van Dyke Parks. The album attempts to reflect an intersection between Japanese and American cultures, a common concern during the 1980s.

★ The Canadian group Idle Eyes had a hit in 1985 in Canada with the song "Tokyo Rose" from their self-titled debut from WEA Music Canada.

See also

★ Lord Haw Haw

★ Hanoi Hannah

★ Seoul City Sue

★ Baghdad Bob

★ Axis Sally

★ Hanoi Jane

★ Azzam the American

★ Stuttgart traitor

★ Philippe Henriot

★ Jihad Johnny

References

1. From the 1995 A&E program "Tokyo Rose: Victim of Propaganda"
2. Siemaszko, Corky. ''New York Daily News'' (July 4, 2006): "Still not Tokyo Rose: Long free, at 90, she's imprisoned by a myth"
3. National Public Radio: "Iva Toguri D'Aquino Dies at 90"
4. Death ends the myth of Tokyo Rose
5. Woman tried as ‘Tokyo Rose’ dies in Chicago
6. Obituary of Iva Toguri
7. D’Aquino, Convicted as Tokyo Rose, Dies at 90
8. Setting the Record Straight, ''World War II Chronicles'', Issue 33 (Winter 2005), pp. 28-29
9. Chun, Gary C.W. "''Star Trek'' 's Lt. Sulu plans to make his film, ''Tokyo Rose: American Patriot'', in Hawaii", ''StarBulletin.com'', April 12, 2004.

External links

★ "Orphan Ann" Home Page

★ Mug shots of D'Aquino, thesmokinggun.com
;Dated articles and reports

★ Ex-'Tokyo Rose' suspect dies in Chicago, Associated Press via Times-Leader, 27 September 2006

★ Richard Goldstein, D’Aquino, Linked to Tokyo Rose Broadcasts, Dies, New York Times, 27 September 2006

★ Remembrances: Iva Toguri D'Aquino Dies at 90, All Things Considered on National Public Radio, 27 September 2006

★ Woman tried as ‘Tokyo Rose’ dies in Chicago, MSNBC, 27 September 2006

★ Obituary: Iva Toguri, Daily Telegraph (London), 28 September 2006