Iva Toguri D'Aquino

On January 15, 2006, the World War II Veterans Committee awarded Toguri its annual Edward J. Herlihy Citizenship Award, citing "her indomitable spirit, love of country, and the example of courage she has given her fellow Americans". According to one biographer, Toguri found it the most memorable day of her life.

Toguri died of natural causes in a Chicago hospital on September 26, 2006, at the age of 90.

In 1980, she reluctantly divorced Felipe, as a result of him being repeatedly denied admission into the United States.

US President Gerald Ford granted a full and unconditional pardon to Iva Toguri D'Aquino in 1977 based on these and earlier issues with the indictment, trial, and conviction,—on January 19, his last full day in office. The decision was supported by a unanimous vote in both houses of the California State Legislature, by the national Japanese American Citizens League, and by S. I. Hayakawa, then a United States senator from California. The pardon restored her US citizenship, which had been abrogated as a result of her conviction.

In 1976, an investigation by Chicago Tribune reporter Ron Yates discovered that Kenkichi Oki and George Mitsushio, who had given the most damaging testimony at D'Aquino's trial, had perjured themselves. They stated that FBI and US occupation police had coached them for over two months about what they were to say on the stand, and had been threatened with treason trials themselves if they didn't cooperate. This was followed up by a Morley Safer report on the television news program 60 Minutes.

She was subsequently charged by the US Attorney's Office with eight counts of treason. Her 1949 trial resulted in a conviction on one count, for which she spent more than six years out of a ten-year sentence in prison. Journalistic and governmental investigators years later pieced together the history of irregularities with the indictment, trial, and conviction, including confessions from key witnesses who had perjured themselves at the various stages of their testimonies. Toguri received a pardon in 1977 from then-US President Gerald Ford.

D'Aquino was charged by federal prosecutors 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 on eight "overt acts" of treason began on July 5, 1949, at the Federal District Court in San Francisco. It was the costliest and longest trial in American history at the time. D'Aquino was defended by a team of attorneys led by Wayne Mortimer Collins, a prominent advocate of Japanese-American rights. Collins enlisted the help of Theodore Tamba, who became one of D'Aquino's closest friends, a relationship which continued until his death in 1973. One of the defense witnesses was Charles Cousens, who himself had been acquitted of treason by Australian authorities in November 1946.

On September 29, 1949, the jury found D'Aquino guilty on a single charge: Count VI, which stated, "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." She was fined $10,000, given a 10-year prison sentence, and stripped of her citizenship, with Toguri's attorney Collins lambasting the verdict as "Guilty without evidence". She was sent to the Federal Reformatory for Women at Alderson, West Virginia. She was paroled after serving six years and two months, released January 28, 1956, and moved to Chicago, Illinois.

She requested to return to the United States to have her child born on American soil, but influential gossip columnist and radio host Walter Winchell lobbied against her. Her baby was born in Japan but died shortly after. Following her child's death, D'Aquino was rearrested by the US military authorities and transported to San Francisco on September 25, 1948.

In April 1945, Toguri married Felipe D'Aquino, a Portuguese citizen of part-Japanese descent she had met at the radio station, and became Iva Toguri D'Aquino.

After Japan's surrender (August 15, 1945), reporters Harry T. Brundidge of Cosmopolitan Magazine and Clark Lee of Hearst's International News Service (INS) offered $2,000 (the equivalent of a year's wages in Occupied Japan) for an exclusive interview with "Tokyo Rose".

Toguri was in need of money and was still trying to get home, so she stepped forward to accept the offer, but instead found herself arrested on September 5, 1945, in Yokohama. Brundidge reneged on the interview payment and tried to sell his transcript of the interview as Toguri's "confession". She was released after a year in prison when neither the FBI nor General Douglas MacArthur's staff found any evidence that she had aided the Japanese Axis forces. The American and Australian prisoners of war who wrote her scripts told her and the Allied headquarters that she had committed no wrongdoing.

In November 1943, Allied prisoners of war were forced to broadcast propaganda, and she was selected to host portions of the one-hour radio show The Zero Hour. Her producer was Australian Army Major Charles Cousens, who had pre-war broadcast experience and had been captured at the Fall of Singapore. Cousens had been coerced to work on radio broadcasts, and worked with assistants US Army Captain Wallace Ince and Philippine Army Lieutenant Normando Ildefonso "Norman" Reyes. Toguri had previously risked her life smuggling food into the nearby prisoner of war camp where Cousens and Ince were held, gaining the inmates' trust. Toguri refused to broadcast anti-American propaganda, but she was assured by Major Cousens and Captain Ince that they would not write scripts having her say anything against the United States. True to their word, no such propaganda was found in her broadcasts. In fact, after she went on air in November 1943, she and Cousens tried to make a farce of the broadcasts. The Japanese propaganda officials had little feel for their nuance and double entendres.

Toguri performed in comedy sketches and introduced recorded music, but never participated in any newscasts, with on-air speaking time of generally about 2–3 minutes. She earned only 150 yen per month, or about $7, but she used some of her earnings to feed POWs, smuggling food in as she did before. She aimed most of her comments toward her fellow Americans ("my fellow orphans"), using American slang and playing American music. At no time did Toguri call herself "Tokyo Rose" during the war, and there was no evidence that any other broadcaster had done so. The name was a catch-all used by Allied forces for all of the women who were heard on Japanese propaganda radio and was in general use by the summer of 1943, months prior to Toguri's debut as a broadcast host. Toguri hosted about 340 broadcasts of The Zero Hour under the stage names "Ann" (for "Announcer") and later "Orphan Annie", in reference to the comic strip character Little Orphan Annie.

On July 5, 1941, Toguri sailed for Japan from the San Pedro, Los Angeles area, to visit an ailing relative. The US State Department issued her a Certificate of Identification; she did not have a passport. In August, Toguri applied to the US Vice Consul in Japan for a passport, stating she wished to return to her home in the US. Her request was forwarded to the State Department, but following the attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), the State Department refused to certify her citizenship in 1942.

Iva Ikuko Toguri D'Aquino (Japanese: 戸栗郁子 アイバ; July 4, 1916 – September 26, 2006) was a Japanese-American disc jockey and radio personality who participated in English-language radio broadcasts transmitted by Radio Tokyo to Allied troops in the South Pacific during World War II on The Zero Hour radio show.

Toguri was born in Los Angeles, and was a daughter of Japanese immigrants. Her father, Jun Toguri, had come to the US in 1899, and her mother, Fumi, in 1913. Iva was a Girl Scout, and was raised as a Christian. She began grammar schools in Mexico and San Diego before returning with her family to complete her education in Los Angeles, where she attended Compton High School. Toguri graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1940 with a degree in zoology. In 1940, she registered to vote as a Republican.