Throughout World War II, English-speaking broadcasters delivered Japanese propaganda on the airwaves across the South Pacific and even in North America, with the intent of demoralizing troops and their families and supporters back home. Among these were many female disc jockeys and announcers, referred to by American soldiers using the collective name, “Tokyo Rose”.
Tokyo Rose was never any one person, however. Instead, the name represented an amalgamation of several different and largely unaffiliated broadcasters and personalities, though this “mythical” figure was often treated as a real individual in American propaganda both during and after the war—such as in the 1946 film Tokyo Rose, in which New Jersey-born actress Lotus Long plays a fictionalized version of the composite character.
If any one person became the “face” of Tokyo Rose, however, it was Iva Toguri D’Aquino, an American trapped in Japan during the war who was forced to make propaganda broadcasts and later faced accusations of treason when she tried to return home.
On a Wavelength Far from Home
Iva Toguri was born in Los Angeles in 1916, the daughter of recent Japanese immigrants. In 1941, at the age of 25, she sailed to Japan to visit a sick relative. Without a passport, she traveled instead with a Certificate of Identification issued by the U.S. State Department.
D’Aquino had only been in Japan a few months when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941. Though she had already requested a passport so that she could return to her home in America, the State Department refused to certify her citizenship in the wake of the attack, and she found herself trapped in Japan for the duration of the war.
Like many other Americans in Japanese territory once war broke out, Iva Toguri D’Aquino was declared an enemy alien when she refused to renounce her United States citizenship. She worked as a typist in order to support herself, and risked her own life and relative freedom by smuggling rations into a nearby prisoner of war camp.
Allied prisoners of war were frequently forced to broadcast propaganda on behalf of the Japanese government, and D’Aquino was among those selected to host portions of an English-language radio show called The Zero Hour, produced by Australian Army Major and prisoner of war Charles Cousens.
Together, Cousens and D’Aquino worked to ensure that the propaganda avoided outright criticism of the United States, and attempted to make a farce of the broadcasts, using subtleties and double entendres that would not be caught by their overseers.
Calling herself “Orphan Annie,” D’Aquino directed her broadcasts to other Americans, who she called “my fellow orphans,” hosting roughly 340 broadcasts of The Zero Hour before Japan’s surrender in August of 1945.
The War Ends, But Not for “Tokyo Rose”
D'Aquino being interviewed by the press in September 1945.
Photo Credit: WikipediaWith the war over, D’Aquino hoped to return home, but she needed money to do so. When reporters offered a $2,000 payout for an exclusive interview with “Tokyo Rose,” she saw her chance. Rather than receiving the promised payment, however, she found herself arrested, and the “interview” used as evidence against her.
Spending a year behind bars, D’Aquino was investigated by the FBI under accusations that she had “committed crimes against the U.S.,” despite the fact that the Allied prisoners of war who wrote the scripts that she read on air vouched that she had done nothing wrong. In fact, some Americans who had been serving overseas testified that if anything, she had raised their wartime morale with her broadcasts.
Eventually, the FBI came to the same conclusion. After an “extensive investigation” in collaboration with the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps, “authorities decided that the evidence then known did not merit prosecution,” according to the FBI’s website, and D’Aquino was released.
During the war, Iva met and married Felipe D’Aquino, a Portuguese citizen, but had retained her own American citizenship. After her release, and expecting her first child, she once more petitioned to return home; according to Tokyo Rose, Orphan of the Pacific, she “desperately wanted her child to be born as a natural citizen in the United States.”
A Tragic Homecoming
Not everyone was as convinced as the FBI, however. By then, right or wrong, D’Aquino was inextricably associated with the persona of the mythical Tokyo Rose in the minds of many, and her return to the United States was vehemently opposed on these grounds. One of her most powerful enemies was the sensational and popular gossip columnist and radio personality Walter Winchell, who led public opinion against her.
D’Aquino had her baby in Japan, but the infant died shortly thereafter. Her subsequent return to U.S. soil was likely far different than how she had imagined it: she was detained in Japan and brought to the U.S. under military escort, where she was arrested by the FBI. This time, she was charged with eight counts of “overt treason” for her role in “adhering to, and giving aid and comfort to, the Imperial Government of Japan during World War II.”
At the time, it was reportedly the longest and costliest trial in American history. The trial was fraught with difficulties, and likely had less to do with D’Aquino’s own conduct during the war than with the fact that she had become, in the public eye, virtually synonymous with the figure of Tokyo Rose.
“The evasion of our laws in this case,” read one letter from the Native Sons of the Golden West, an organization with a history of racism which had supported Japanese internment during the war, “would be a dastardly slur upon the countless thousands of American women who stood faithfully by their men in service, who were defending the flag in the South Pacific, while Tokyo Rose was pouring forth her venomous propaganda from her chosen place – Japan.”
Despite her attorney decrying the verdict as “guilty without evidence,” D’Aquino was eventually found guilty on a single count: “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.”
Parole and Pardon
Following her trial, D’Aquino was fined $10,000, stripped of her U.S. citizenship, and sentenced to ten years behind bars at the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia. She served six years before being paroled in 1956.
However, that was not the end of D’Aquino or the story of Tokyo Rose. Continuing investigations into her trial found that several of the most damning testimonies against her had been coerced perjuries. “The FBI and the US occupation police told us we would have to testify against Iva or else Uncle Sam might arrange a trial for us too – or worse,” one of the witnesses told journalist Ronald Yates in 1976, two decades after D’Aquino’s parole, further adding that “we was told what to say and what not to say two hours every morning for a month before the trial started.”
These revelations and other irregularities eventually led President Gerald Ford to grant Iva Toguri D’Aquino a full and unconditional pardon in 1977, finally reinstating her U.S. citizenship and clearing her name—an act that he undertook on his last full day in office, thereby making D’Aquino “the only U.S. citizen convicted of treason and pardoned by her country,” according to the BBC.
Even then, her suffering was not entirely over. Despite numerous attempts, her husband Felipe D’Aquino had been consistently denied admission to the United States, and Iva reportedly reluctantly divorced him in 1980. She lived the rest of her life in Chicago, reaching the age of 90 before dying of natural causes in a Chicago hospital in 2006—the same year that the World War II Veterans Committee awarded her its Edward J. Herlihy Citizenship Award, citing her “indomitable spirit, love of country, and the example of courage she has given her fellow Americans.”
Sources: FBI.gov
