Iva Toguri DAquino

Iva Toguri D'Aquino 1916-2006, American citizen of Japanese descent, best-known of some dozen women who, during World War II, made English propaganda broadcasts to American troops on Radio Tokyo; b. Los Angeles as Iva Ikuko Togura. Seductive-voiced, playing popular American tunes, and attempting to demoralize the troops, the women were collectively nicknamed "Tokyo Rose" by their American listeners. The daughter of Japanese immigrants, she was visiting an aunt in Tokyo and stranded there after the attack on Pearl Harbor (1941), and from 1943 to 1945 she worked as a radio announcer. After the end of the war, she was arrested, but was released from U.S. custody without being charged in 1946. Her case was reopened in 1948, and she was tried and convicted of treason in 1949, becoming the only woman convicted of treason in the United States. After serving six years in prison she was released on parole. D'Aquino denied any disloyalty during her trial, and no evidence was presented of any treasonous broadcast; critical testimony against her was later shown to be false and coerced. She was pardoned by President Gerald Ford in 1977.

Bibliography: See studies by M. Duus (1979) and R. W. Howe (1990).

Tokyo Rose (1916–) radio propagandist. Born Ikuko Toguri in Los Angeles, California, Iva Toguri graduated from UCLA in 1941 and ended up stranded in Japan after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor (1941) and the United States entered World War II. The Japanese government regarded her as an “enemy alien” after she refused to become a Japanese citizen. Married to Felipe d'Aquino, Iva Toguri d'Aquino found a job as an announcer at Radio Tokyo, where she met two prisoners of war (one Australian, the other a U.S. citizen) who were forced to write Japanese propaganda intended to demoralize Allied soldiers. However, they planned to subvert the project and convinced her to work as the announcer and she made her first broadcast in November 1943. When she was able to return to the United States in 1947, people demanded she be put on trial, which began in 1949. Found guilty, she was sentenced to ten years in prison and fined $10,000, but she served only six years of her sentence and was released in 1956 for good behavior. Many years later, the truth of her circumstances during World War II came to light, and she was pardoned by President Gerald Ford in January 1977.

Tokyo Rose the name given by American servicemen in the Second World War to a woman broadcaster of Japanese propaganda; the name in fact covered a number of women broadcasting Japanese propaganda, although one Japanese-American, Iva Toguri, was tried and convicted of treason after the war. Later evidence suggested that she and others had in fact tried to subvert the propaganda effort, and in 1977 she was pardoned by President Ford.