The Times
London
September 28, 2006

Iva Toguri
July 4, 1916 - September 26, 2006

American citizen who was falsely accused of being the notorious Japanese
propagandist 'Tokyo Rose'

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.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...378109,00.html