Iva Toguri D'Aquino

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Image:IvaToguri.jpeg Iva Toguri D'Aquino (born July 4, 1916) is frequently identified with "Tokyo Rose". Born Ikuko Toguri in Los Angeles, California, she was raised and schooled within the United States and graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a degree in Zoology. Through high school and college, she was popular and generally held in high esteem as a loyal American, a registered Republican and active voter.

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Orphan of the Pacific

After school, she worked in her parents' shop until July, 1941. That July she decided to go to the Empire of Japan in order to visit an ailing relative. Unfortunately for Toguri, who had little time to prepare for her trip, the State Department was unable to issue her a passport in time, instead giving her a Certificate of Identification. As war tensions increased, she had to apply to the US Vice Consul who forwarded her request to the Continental United States. The answer had not returned by the Attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), thus trapping her as an enemy alien in Japan.

Following the outbreak of American involvement in the Pacific War, Toguri (as were other Americans in Japanese territory) was pressured by the Japanese central government under Hideki Tojo to renounce her United States citizenship, which she refused. She did take a job as a typist at a Japanese news agency and eventually worked in a similar capacity for Radio Tokyo.

In November 1943, Allied Prisoner of wars forced to broadcast propaganda selected her to host portions of a radio show called The Zero Hour, which broadcast from 6pm–7pm Tokyo time. Toguri's radio name was "Orphan Anne", possibly in reference to Little Orphan Annie. She reportedly addressed in alternate as "Your favorite enemy, Anne" and "Orphan Annie". Her radio program was intermixed with music and her total on air speaking time was generally about 20 minutes. This radio program earned Toguri an unimpressive 150 yen or about $7 per month. Her selection was mainly due to her inexperience in broadcasting and soothing voice. The prisoners of wars felt she would do little harm to morale.


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Postwar trials

After the Victory over Japan Day (August 15, 1945), Toguri was arrested on September 5, 1945 in Yokohama and was tried for treason after attempting to re-enter the United States in 1948, supposedly due to a media uproar. By this time she had married Felipe d'Aquino, a Portuguese citizen of mixed Portuguese and Japanese descent.

Iva Toguri D'Aquino stood trial for eight "overt acts" of treason at the Federal District Court in San Francisco in July 1949. Neither Toguri nor any of the other women called herself Tokyo Rose: the name was invented by GIs and applied by them to any female Japanese announcer. During what was at the time the costliest trial in the History of the United States (over half a million dollars), the prosecution presented 46 witnesses, including two of Toguri's former supervisors at Radio Tokyo (both of whom later admitted to having committed perjury) and a few soldiers who could not distinguish between what they had heard on radio broadcasts and what they had heard by way of rumour.

Toguri, for her part, denied during the trial that she had committed treason. Ordered to make propaganda broadcasts along with other prisoners of war, Toguri claimed she and her associates subtly sabotaged the Japanese war effort. The American and Australian prisoners of war who wrote her scripts assured her she was doing nothing wrong and immediately after the war General Douglas MacArthur's staff and the United States Justice Department cleared her of wrongdoing.

Her former supervisors at Radio Tokyo under government pressure gave perjured or otherwise distorted testimony that was instrumental in her conviction. Count VI (the only count on which she was convicted) claimed, "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." The supervisor at Radio Tokyo gave the following evidence:

"I said to Toguri I had a release from the Imperial General Headquarters giving out results of American ship losses in one of the Leyte Gulf battles, and I asked that she allude to this announcement, make reference to the losses of American ships in her part of the broadcast, and she said she would do so."

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?"

Toguri was fined US$10,000 and given a 10 year prison sentence, of which she served more than six years.

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Presidential Pardon

D'Aquino appealed her case to the public on the television program 60 Minutes, and was pardoned by outgoing President of the United States Gerald Ford on January 19, 1977.

Iva currently lives in Chicago, Illinois. She never saw her husband again after being arrested and taken to America for trial.

In 2004, actor George Takei announced he was working on a film titled Tokyo Rose, American Patriot, about Toguri's activities during the war [1].

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See also

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References

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External links

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