I know neither faithful reader is old enough to remember Tokyo Rose, but it’s an interesting story — and probably worth doing some serious thinking about given the environment we’re living in today.
During World War II, the Japanese broadcasted anti-American propaganda. One of the most famous broadcasters of the propaganda was a woman by the name of “Tokyo Rose.”
When I was growing up, there were lots of stories about Tokyo Rose – supposedly a sexy-sounding woman that spoke to American troops over the airwaves in an attempt to demoralize the Americans by broadcasting things like the latest U.S. military losses, and them being so far away from home.
Those broadcasts did take place, but there really was no Tokyo Rose. That propaganda was broadcast by a radio program called “The Zero Hour,” and the program used multiple female broadcasters that could speak English. The name itself, “Tokyo Rose,” was never actually used by any of the broadcasters. It was a name created by American servicemen and it stuck throughout the war. In reality, there was not just one Tokyo Rose, but several, all of whom could speak English and worked for the Japanese-produced radio program, “The Zero Hour.”
That’s interesting, but the story doesn’t end there….
After the war and the Japanese surrender, American troops started searching for Japanese leaders and others who may have committed war crimes. The press started looking too, sometimes reporting what the military found and sometimes beating the military to the punch. Two reporters (Henry Brundidge and Clark Lee) set out to find “Tokyo Rose,” the notorious siren who tried to demoralize American soldiers and sailors during the war by highlighting their hardships and sacrifices. They managed to identify one young American woman that was born in Los Angeles, Iva Ikuko Toguri D’Aquino, who had made propaganda broadcasts. (D’Aquino sailed to Japan in 1941 without a U.S. passport supposedly to visit a sick aunt and to study medicine.)
Brundidge and Lee offered her a lot of money (which they later reneged on paying) for exclusive rights to interview her. D’Aquino agreed — signing a paper that identified her as Tokyo Rose. Of course, if you’ve been paying attention, Tokyo Rose wasn’t an actual person. It was the fabricated name given by soldiers to a series of American-speaking women who made propaganda broadcasts (under different aliases.)
It turns out that as a result of her interview with the two reporters, D’Aquino was seen by the public (not by the Army and FBI investigators) as the mythical character Tokyo Rose. That image defined her in the public’s mind in the post-war period and it continues to stir debate about her role in World War II even today.
In September of 1945, after the press had reported that D’Aquino was Tokyo Rose, U.S. Army authorities arrested her. The FBI and the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps conducted an extensive investigation to determine whether D’Aquino had committed crimes against the U.S. But the authorities decided that the evidence did not merit prosecution, and she was released.
After being released, D’Aquino requested a U.S. passport. American veterans groups and famous broadcaster Walter Winchell learned about that and became outraged that the woman they thought of as “Tokyo Rose” wanted to return to this country. They demanded that the woman they considered a traitor be arrested and tried — and not welcomed back.
The public furor grew so much it convinced the Justice Department that the matter should be re-examined, and the FBI was asked to turn over its investigative records on the matter. The FBI’s investigation of D’Aquino’s activities had covered a period of five years. During the course of that investigation, the FBI had interviewed hundreds of former members of the U.S. Armed Forces who had served in the South Pacific during World War II, unearthed forgotten Japanese documents and turned up recordings of D’Aquino’s broadcasts. But, many of those recordings were destroyed following the initial decision not to prosecute D’Aquino. So the Department of Justice initiated further efforts to acquire additional evidence that might be sufficient to convict D’Aquino.
With new witnesses and evidence, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco convened a grand jury, and D’Aquino was indicted on a number of counts. She was detained in Japan and brought under military escort to the U.S. She was immediately arrested by FBI agents, who had a warrant charging her with the crime of treason for adhering to, and giving aid and comfort to, the Imperial Government of Japan during World War II.
Her trial began on July 5, 1949, one day after her 33rd birthday. On September 29, 1949, the jury found her guilty on one count in the indictment. The jury ruled that: “…on a day during October, 1944, the exact date being to the Grand Jurors unknown, said defendant, at Tokyo, Japan, in a broadcasting studio of the Broadcasting Corporation of Japan, did speak into a microphone concerning the loss of ships.”
This made D’Aquino, who had gained notoriety as Tokyo Rose, the seventh person to be convicted of treason in the history of this country. On October 6, 1949, D’Aquino was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment and fined $10,000 for the crime of treason.
On January 28, 1956, she was released from the Federal Reformatory for Women at Alderson, West Virginia, where she had served six years and two months of her sentence. She successfully fought government efforts to deport her and returned to Chicago, where she worked in her father’s shop until his death. President Gerald Ford pardoned her on January 19, 1977. She passed away in 2006.
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