Iva Toguri D'Aquino

Radio broadcaster

• Born: July 4, 1916
• Place of Birth: Los Angeles, California
• Died: September 26, 2006
• Place of Death: Chicago, Illinois

Iva Toguri D’Aquino was an ordinary woman devoted to the United States when circumstances during World War II trapped her in Japan. She was coerced into becoming a radio broadcaster for the Japanese, which led to a terrible postwar debacle in which she was convicted of treason and served a six-year prison term in the United States.

Birth name: Iva Ikuko Toguri

Areas of achievement: Radio and television

Early Life

Iva Ikuko Toguri was born in the United States to Japanese immigrants Jun Toguri and Fumi Imuro, who sought to fully assimilate themselves into American society even though American laws prevented them from becoming citizens. They avoided Japanese communities as they moved around California, though Toguri’s father’s business sold imported Japanese goods. Toguri and her younger sisters were American citizens by birth. They learned English rather than Japanese, grew up in an American lifestyle, and ate typical American food. Toguri attended the University of California Los Angeles, earning generally good grades and a degree in zoology; she hoped to study medicine in the future.

In the summer of 1941, Toguri’s maternal aunt in Japan became ill. Although Toguri did not speak Japanese, the family sent her to care for her relative. She had no passport, but did have a Certificate of Identification. She brought many gifts, as well as trunks of American foodstuffs to reduce her need for unfamiliar Japanese food. (Later, her visit and the large amount of luggage would be used against her during her court case.) When Japan attacked the United States in December of 1941, Toguri found herself increasingly under pressure as an enemy alien. She often had no ration card and was frequently malnourished, suffering bouts of scurvy and beriberi. Toguri faced extreme pressure to become a Japanese citizen but always refused. She had no contact with her family, who were interned with other Japanese Americans until late 1943. Her mother died in 1942 while interned. As her presence created difficulties for her relatives, Toguri left them and got clerical work in 1942, first translating American broadcasts at the Domei News Agency and then at NHK (commonly called Radio Tokyo) in 1943.

Japan attempted to demoralize Allied forces using short-wave radio broadcasts. Some of their broadcasters were women, and early on Allied forces came to refer to these broadcasters broadly as Tokyo Rose. In late 1942, Japanese forces began coercing captured Allied radio professionals to help with their broadcasts. One such group, led by Australian Major Charles Cousens and American Captain Wallace Ince, started a radio show called Zero Hour. The participating prisoners of war (POWs) secretly sought to sabotage the Japanese goal. In November 1943, Cousens hired Toguri as an announcer. She used her improved situation to supply much-needed fresh vegetables to prisoners of war at the NHK camp.

At the Domei News Agency, Toguri met Felipe D’Aquino, a Portuguese national of Japanese and Portuguese descent; they married in 1945.

Life’s Work

Toguri D’Aquino introduced her broadcasts as Orphan Annie, her on-air persona, a friendly enemy of American sailors and soldiers. Over time, Toguri D’Aquino recorded several hundred broadcasts and became popular among listeners. The propaganda content of her broadcasts would become the subject of some debate, as the effect on Army troops appeared to be positive rather than negative. General Robert Eichelberger of the US Army, for instance, arranged for an airdrop of additional records, and near the end of the war the Navy issued a mock citation honoring Tokyo Rose for helping to improve the morale of listeners. Toguri D’Aquino played popular music of the day and spoke in American slang. For several months Cousens wrote her scripts, but illness forced him to stop writing, leaving Toguri D’Aquino and others to write new material (she reported herself ill with increasing frequency as well).

In 1945, and with the end of the war, the mysterious Tokyo Rose was a popular target for interviews, and NHK workers pointed reporters to Toguri D’Aquino. Two reporters offered her $2,000 for an exclusive interview in which she falsely identified herself as the only Tokyo Rose. She had been pregnant at the time and desperate for money to return home. Toguri D’Aquino, whose child later died, never received the money, and in other interviews she correctly identified herself as one of many women broadcasters. She was arrested by the US Army and held for over a year while her case was considered. Deciding that there was no case against her, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and army intelligence released Toguri D’Aquino but refused to let her return to the United States. Her efforts to return, however, came to the attention of the American Legion and radio broadcaster Walter Winchell, who denounced her and demanded that she be tried for treason.

In the election year of 1948, Attorney General Tom Clark placed political expediency over justice and ordered her trial. She was sent to San Francisco, where anti-Japanese prejudice was strong, rather than the relatively multiracial region of Hawaii, since laws required that she be tried in the region she reached first. After another year spent in jail Toguri D’Aquino was tried, and on October 6, 1949, she was convicted of treason on a single count. She was sentenced to ten years in prison and required to pay a fine of $10,000.

After the trial, Toguri D’Aquino was sent to a federal women’s prison in Alderson, West Virginia, where she worked in the infirmary and became a model prisoner. Released in 1956, she moved to Chicago to work in her family’s business. For a time, she was threatened with deportation, but eventually the government allowed her to stay, although not as a citizen. In 1976, after Chicago Tribune reporter Ron Yates investigated the case and exposed the massive perjury that had secured her conviction, an effort began to pardon Toguri D’Aquino. The effort paid off in 1977, when President Gerald Ford, at the end of his term, finally granted her a pardon and thereby restored her citizenship. She continued with the family business, taking over its management after her father died. She and her husband Felipe D’Aquino, who had been deported from the United States in 1948, were never able to meet again; they divorced in 1980.

Significance

Iva Toguri D’Aquino, an American citizen, was forced to participate in Japanese propaganda broadcasts during World War II, and was charged with treason in a case that unfairly dubbed her as the Japanese broadcaster “Tokyo Rose,” a popular moniker among Allied forces. Over the years, and with the help of President Gerald Ford’s pardon, Toguri D’Aquino’s struggle has become representative of the injustices perpetrated against Asian Americans in the United States during World War II. On January 15, 2006—less than a year before her death—the World War II Veterans Committee honored Toguri D’Aquino’s patriotism and courage with the Edward J. Herlihy Citizenship Award.

Bibliography

Duus, Masayo. Tokyo Rose: Orphan of the Pacific. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1979. Print.

Howe, Russell Warren. The Hunt for “Tokyo Rose.” Lanham: Madison, 1990.

Nakaoka, Susan. "Iva Toguri D'Aquino." Densho Encyclopedia, 19 Dec. 2023, encyclopedia.densho.org/Iva‗Toguri‗D%27Aquino/. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.