Tokyo Rose

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Eric Longley

During the fight with Japan in World War II, Allied (mostly American) fighting men in the Pacific were assailed with Japanese radio propaganda broadcast from radio stations throughout the Japanese empire. Many of the broadcasters were women, and they began to be known by the term "Tokyo Rose." The American Office of War Information (OWI), based on a study of the Japanese propaganda broadcasts, concluded that none of these women referred to herself as Tokyo Rose; the OWI considered the name "Tokyo Rose" to be "strictly a GI invention."

The various "Tokyo Rose" broadcasters spread different types of propaganda. Some of the woman broadcasters taunted the Allied soldiers by implying that their wives and sweethearts back home were being unfaithful to them. Although the United States Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) did not pick up any Japanese broadcasts which predicted specific military movements, some soldiers later claimed that "Tokyo Rose" announcers would identify Allied units, predict Japanese bombing raids, warn soldiers who were about to go into battle that they would be cut to pieces, and make otherwise demoralizing remarks.

Some of the Japanese broadcasts were less blatant than this. There was one Tokyo-based program, known as Zero Hour, which consisted of musical numbers, readings of letters from Allied POWs, and some news. A woman DJed the musical portions of the program; the woman interspersed the music with brief, and generally innocuous, commentary. The woman DJ on "Zero Hour" was an American named Iva Toguri (later d'Aquino). Though she never referred to herself as "Tokyo Rose" in her broadcasts--her moniker was "Orphan Ann"--she ended up being assigned the role of Tokyo Rose.

Iva Toguri was born in the United States to Japanese parents. In 1941 she was in graduate school, studying to be a doctor, but she left the country for Japan to take care of a sick aunt. Although she was a native of the United States, she had problems getting a passport and had to travel without one. After Pearl Harbor, the war stranded her in Japan. While seeking work to support herself in Japan, Toguri got a part-time clerical job at NHK, the government radio service. She was noticed by Charles Cousens, a POW who had served with the Australian army and who had been ordered by his Japanese captors to make radio propaganda aimed at the Allies. Cousens--who was later cleared of treason charges by Australian authorities--claimed that he was trying to sabotage the "Zero Hour" program by making it useless as propaganda. As part of that plan, Cousens claimed, he hired Iva Toguri because she was anti-Japanese and had a bad radio voice.

While she was working for Japanese radio, Toguri helped out many Allied POWs who were interned in the Tokyo area, giving them food and expressing pro-American sentiments. At the end of the war in 1945, the newly-married Iva Toguri d'Aquino did not seem to regard herself as a traitor, and she was willing to talk to the American press about her activities.

Following the war, two Hearst reporters looking for the famous "Tokyo Rose" were led to d'Aquino, who signed a contract with one of the reporters giving various Hearst enterprises the exclusive rights to her story. In return, d'Aquino was promised $2,000 (which for various reasons she never got). In the contract, d'Aquino identified herself as "the one and original 'Tokyo Rose'" and gave numerous autographs identifying herself as "Tokyo Rose." D'Aquino was stretching the truth, and it soon lead her into serious trouble.

American authorities held d'Aquino in a Japanese prison for nearly a year while investigators tried to determine whether her broadcasts on behalf of Japan amounted to treason. Released in 1946 for lack of evidence, she faced a renewed campaign to block her return to the United States in 1947. The American Legion and broadcaster Walter Winchell did not want the traitress Tokyo Rose to be a free woman in the United States, and they campaigned for a reopening of the case. In 1948, Attorney General Tom Clark directed that d'Aquino be tried for treason.

D'Aquino was brought from Japan to San Francisco, where she was tried in 1949. Of the eight charges against her, the jury found her guilty of only one charge. According to the jury, she claimed in one broadcast that the Japanese had won the battle of Leyte Gulf (which they had not) and she allegedly taunted Allied soldiers about this imagined defeat. D'Aquino received a ten-year sentence and, as a convicted traitor, she was stripped of her American citizenship. After spending eight years in prison, d'Aquino was released in 1956. The United States commenced deportation proceedings, but dropped them in 1958. D'Aquino went to work in her family's store in Chicago, which she was still running in 1998.

Beginning around 1974, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) took an interest in d'Aquino's case. The JACL believed that d'Aquino had been a loyal American who had done what she could to assist American POWs, who had taken a job as a disc jockey and made innocuous broadcasts, and who had been targeted by unscrupulous journalists and prosecutors who were trying to transform her into the mythical "Tokyo Rose." Media reports sympathetic to d'Aquino appeared in 1976. The jury foreman at her trial told 60 Minutes that he thought d'Aquino was innocent of all charges. Articles in the Chicago Tribune indicated that two of the witnesses against her had lied. (Later, documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act indicated that the two witnesses had made statements to the FBI in identical language, raising the inference that they had been coached.)