Tokyo Rose January 1945, With American troops hot on the heals of the Japanese, and the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa closing in, Tokyo Rose steps up her demoralizing propaganda. Many GIs considered her a godsend. A familiar American voice keeping them company far from home. But, in a celebrated post-war trial, prosecutors portrayed her as an American devil, a siren who knowingly worked for the enemy, luring soldiers and sailors, then undermining their fighting spirit. In 1948, the woman who twice signed her name the one and original Tokyo Rose, was brought back from Japan to face a grand jury. The war had ended, but her battle had just begun. Tokyo Rose, whose real name was Iva Toguri, was an American-born Japanese woman who hosted a Japanese propaganda radio program aimed at U.S. troops during World War II. Iva Toguri was born in Los Angeles on July 4, 1916. After college, she visited Japan and was stranded there after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Forced to renounce her U.S. citizenship, Toguri found work in radio and was asked to host “Zero Hour,” a propaganda and entertainment program aimed at U.S. soldiers. In 1942, the U.S. government rounded up Japanese-Americans and put them in internment camps. Iva’s family was relocated to such camps, but she didn’t know about it. The letters between her and her parents stopped, and she was suddenly isolated without information about their lives. She needed a job, so she went to an English-speaking newspaper and got a position listening to short-wave-radio newscasts and transcribing them. Iva then got a second job with Radio Tokyo as s typist, helping to type out scripts for programs broadcast for GI’s in Southeast Asia. Then, she was unexpectedly asked to host a show called the “Zero Hour,” an entertainment program for U.S. soldiers. Her feminine, American voice was meant to reach the U.S. soldiers. The idea was to demoralize the soldiers, to tell them that their girls back home were seeing other women. She did call the troops “boneheads,” but she never dispersed much propaganda, as was the main goal of the broadcasts. Iva never called herself Tokyo Rose on the air. She called herself Ann and later Orphan Ann. Tokyo Rose was a term created by the lonely men out in the South Pacific who were delighted to hear what they imagined as an exotic geisha-type woman. Iva created 340 broadcasts. The irony was that Iva wished desperately to return to the U.S. She worked as a radio personality for three years, during which time she fell in love with a Japanese-Puerto Rican man. They were married in 1945. In August of that year. She became Iva Ikuko Toguri DAquino. She was arrested in occupied Japan on October 17, 1945, released on October 25, 1946, when the Justice Department expressed doubts on the charge of treason against her, but re-arrested on August 28, 1948, in Tokyo. She was brought back to the United States to stand trial in San Francisco, California. In the anti-Japanese climate of postwar California, Toguri had to struggle to find lawyers to represent her, but finally Wayne M. Collins, George Olshausen, and Theodore Tamba agreed to take her case for free. The prosecutors were Thomas DeWolfe, Frank J. Hennessy, John Hogan, and James Knapp. The trial began on July 5, 1949 with Judge Michael J. Roche presiding. Before an all-white jury, Toguri pleaded innocent to the eight treason charges against her. Despite Roches bias in favor of the prosecution and the prevailing public sentiment against Toguri, the trial lasted for nearly three months and the jury was deadlocked. On September 29, 1949, the jury returned a guilty verdict against Iva Ikuko Toguri. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. After serving just over six years in a federal womens prison in West Virginia, Toguri was released early for good behavior. On January 18, 1977, and after decades of debate over the fairness of her trial, President Gerald Ford pardoned Toguri. Toguri was thus officially exonerated, and her U.S. citizenship was finally restored. Toguris trial was one of only seven American treason trials following World War II. She died Sept. 26 2006 at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago. No cause of death was reported. She was 90 years old.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 02:06:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015