American citizen who was falsely accused of being the notorious Japanese propagandist 'Tokyo Rose'
Iva Toguri behind bars in Japan after having been arrested in Yokohama in October 1945 (Bettmann/Corbis)
SHE was, they said, the Lord Haw-Haw of the Pacific. Born in Los Angeles of Japanese parents, she renounced America and spent the war years taunting American servicemen on the radio, assuring them that their cause was lost and that their country’s defeat was inevitable.
She became the most notorious traitor produced by America during the Second World War. In the eyes of the world she was the despicable “Tokyo Rose”.
When she was finally tracked down in occupied Japan and brought home to the US to stand trial, the furore was immense. The tabloids and the airwaves were filled with hatred for a young woman who had commited the worst of crimes — that of being publicly and flagrantly anti-American in time of war.
The trial, in which the FBI and the American military, as well as the fourth estate, invested considerable time and energy, ended up with a price tag of nearly three quarters of a million dollars — a huge sum and a record for the period. When the accused was fined $10,000 and sentenced to ten years in prison, it was widely felt that too much leniency had been shown.
“Tokyo Rose”, described at her trial as being the nom de guerre of the 30-year-old Iva Toguri, promptly disappeared into the US prison system and, in due course, was forgotten.
That was the legend. The truth, when it emerged, was very different. Indeed, it was so different that if a new trial were to be held today, those in the dock would mostly be journalists, agents and officials of the US Government.
For it was a combination of these three that whipped up the story of Tokyo Rose and then pinned the blame on Iva Toguri. Her story and the one concocted by them were separated by more than culture and language and the need, in the immediate postwar period, for traitors to be seen to pay for their crimes. They were separated by politics and cynicism and, most of all, by the intense desire of an unprincipled group of American reporters to secure the scoop of a lifetime.
The real story of Ikuko (Iva) Toguri did not emerge for many years. Her father, Jun Toguri, had arrived in the US from Japan in 1899. Her mother, Fumi, did not make the trip until 1913. The two were married and Iva was born (with some irony in the light of what was to transpire), on the Fourth of July, 1916.
The Toguris — one among thousands of JapaneseAmerican families in Southern California — were Methodists, and Iva was raised as a Christian. She attended schools in Calexico and San Diego, and then in Los Angeles, before enrolling as a zoology student at UCLA, from which she graduated in 1940.
She was well liked and had many friends. No one at the time saw her as anything but a loyal American. Among her favourite radio shows were The Shadow and Little Orphan Annie. She also enjoyed sport.
All the while, war was brewing between the US and Imperial Japan. One morning in the early summer of 1941 Iva’s mother received news that her sister had fallen seriously ill in Tokyo. As her mother suffered from diabetes and could not easily travel, it fell to Iva, then 25, to make the long journey to Japan to be at her aunt’s bedside.
Iva Toguri did not possess a passport and there was no time to get one. Instead, she secured from the State Department an identity certificate, which, she was assured, would guarantee her readmission into the country of her birth. Certainly, her intention as she set out aboard the steamship Arabia Maru on July 5, 1941, was to pay her respects, and those of her mother, to her ailing relative and then, after a suitable time, to return to Los Angeles to pursue a career in medicine.
But while she was paying her visit, on December 7, 1941, aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the US base at Pearl Harbor, destroying many ships and initiating three years and nine months of conflict.
Iva Toguri found that, like hundreds of other Japanese-Americans, she was stranded in what had suddenly become enemy territory. There was no means for her to make her way back to Los Angeles and she was forced to remain in Tokyo and somehow make a life for herself. She did not speak Japanese and she was a Christian in a Shinto society. More than that, she believed firmly in the American way of life and had no sympathy with either emperor worship or Japanese expansionism.
From the point of view of the Japanese authorities, individuals such as Toguri were of some slight practical importance. They knew the enemy and they knew the enemy’s language. Thus it was that Iva, while refusing to renounce her US citizenship, was encouraged to study Japanese and to adapt to the culture of her ancestors. In 1942 she was recruited as a typist by the Domei News Agency, and then, a year later, by Radio Tokyo, the propaganda arm of the Japanese state broadcasting system.
Ironically, she was not taken on directly by the Japanese station bosses, but by an Australian prisoner of war, Major Charles Cousens, who had been forced by his captors to develop an English-language news and music service. Cousens, like Toguri, was no creature of the Japanese and sought to convey in his daily schedule a mixture of information and entertainment that would cause as little offence as possible to Allied soldiers while still not bringing down on his head the wrath of his superiors.
There were at the time a number of English-speaking Japanese women broadcasters who specialised in playing up Japanese military victories and pouring scorn on their enemies, especially the Americans. They were chosen for their sexy-sounding voices and their presumed ability to undermine the morale of their target audience. GIs took to calling these women by the generic name, Tokyo Rose.
But Iva Toguri was not one of these. Her broadcasts, scripted by Cousens, and put out under the name “Orphan Ann” were bland and almost factual. She used the money she earned to help to feed and clothe Allied prisoners, and she even managed to insert into her broadcasts subtle indicators that the war was not in fact going Japan’s way. In April 1945 she married a Portuguese citizen of Portuguese-Japanese ancestry, Felipe d’Aquino.
At the Japanese surrender tabloid reporters combed the country in the search for “Tokyo Rose” and eventually, through bribes, secured the name of Iva Toguri. The press, backed by various radio stations, now “revealed” that Toguri was the infamous Tokyo Rose. At first, the accusations did not seem to warrant prosecution and she was released after questioning. But a growing public furore led to her re-arrest and she was brought back to the US for trial.
The FBI, under pressure from Washington, was only too glad to back the allegations, even to the extent of paying Japanese “witnesses” to perjure themselves in court. The trial was a sensation. The evidence was either scant or false. Witnesses said whatever they thought was expected of them. In the end, the only surprise was that the prisoner was not jailed for life, or even executed.
After serving six years of her ten-year sentence, Tiguri, a model prisoner, was freed. She joined her father, who had settled in Chicago, and continued to work in the family import business there until well into her eighties.
In 1976, after a second media campaign led by Bill Kurtis, of CBS, the news anchor Morley Safer produced an item about Iva Toguri on the mass-audience 60 Minutes show. This revealed not only the true nature of Toguri’s enforced wartime occupation, but the extent of the perjury and tabloid feeding frenzy that had led to her arrest and conviction.
Toguri was pardoned by President Ford as his last act on leaving office in January 1977. She went to her grave without uttering a word of criticism against those who had persecuted her. The fine she paid was never returned.
Toguri’s husband was never allowed to join her in the US, and they reluctantly divorced in 1980. He died in 1996.
Iva Toguri, the wartime “Tokyo Rose” of legend, was born on July 4, 1916. She died on September 26, 2006, aged 90.
