In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there.<\/p>\n
She was \u201ca betrayer of her native land and a betrayer of her government in time of need,\u201d a federal prosecutor would call her. She was a \u201cturncoat and a female Benedict Arnold.\u201d<\/p>\n
D\u2019Aquino\u2019s defense: She had been slyly subverting the propaganda machine the whole time, entertaining Americans with facetious language no one could take seriously and introducing upbeat American music the GIs actually loved. (A postwar questionnaire found the vast majority of troops regarded \u201cZero Hour\u201d as harmless entertainment, rather than psychological poison.) <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
D\u2019Aquino confers with her attorneys in San Francisco on Sept. 30, 1949, after being found guilty on one of eight counts of treason. <\/p>\n
(Clarence Hamm \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
Tried for treason in San Francisco and sent to prison for six years, D\u2019Aquino became synonymous with the name \u201cTokyo Rose,\u201d inextricably linked to a lingering wartime myth even as she tried to lead a quiet life and reclaim her name.<\/p>\n
The case against her was threadbare, a product of postwar rancor, false testimony and manipulative journalists who had preyed on her naivete. Ironically, her stubborn patriotism also helped damn her; if she had renounced her American citizenship, as the wartime Japanese government demanded, she would not have been prosecutable. <\/p>\n
In reality, Japanese propaganda chiefs had pressed more than a dozen English-speaking women into radio service. The plan was to demoralize war-weary, homesick troops scattered around the Pacific theater. The women broadcast from Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul and Bangkok. Some spoke of the hopelessness of the fight against Imperial Japan. They urged American fighting men to quit. They stressed the certain unfaithfulness of wives and girlfriends back in the States.<\/p>\n
None of the women went by \u201cTokyo Rose\u201d \u2014 it was a composite, a nickname used by GIs who never knew how many there were. And it was in use before Iva Toguri D\u2019Aquino reached the broadcast booth herself.<\/p>\n
After Japan\u2019s surrender, journalists were eager to find three people: Emperor Hirohito, former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and the mythical broadcaster with the evocative name.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
D\u2019Aquino, right, stands with her husband Philip in Tokyo in August 1948.<\/p>\n
(Charles Gorry \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
\u201cThose are the three names that most Americans knew, even though there was no Tokyo Rose and nobody ever called themselves that,\u201d Ron Yates, a former Chicago Tribune reporter who covered the case, told The Times in a recent interview.<\/p>\n
Two American journalists found Iva Toguri D\u2019Aquino in Tokyo and promised her $2,000 for the exclusive rights to her story. Desperate for money, she signed a contract attesting that she was \u201cthe one and only Tokyo Rose.\u201d She never got the money; instead, she became a flash point for postwar anger.<\/p>\n
The American government in Japan threw her in prison for a year, before deciding there was no case against her. But rancor reignited when she tried to return to the States with her husband, a Radio Tokyo journalist whose name she had taken. She was pregnant and wanted their baby to be born in America.<\/p>\n
The Los Angeles City Council voted to bar her return, her child died at birth and Gold Star Mothers raised a furor at the prospect of her return. Walter Winchell, the feared and powerful gossip columnist, raged against her.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A group of Japanese people arrive in San Francisco from Tokyo on June 19, 1949, preparing to testify in the trial of Iva Toguri D\u2019Aquino.<\/p>\n
(Robert Houston \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
\u201cThey said, \u2018Here\u2019s Tokyo Rose coming back, and my son is not,\u2019\u201d Bill Kurtis, a longtime CBS journalist who covered her story and befriended her, said in a recent interview. \u201cSo they apply the pressure. The whole U.S. just hated Japan even after dropping the two bombs. She didn\u2019t have a chance because of the anti-Japanese feelings.\u201d He added: \u201cShe was the unluckiest person I\u2019d ever heard of.\u201d<\/p>\n
With pressure mounting on the Truman administration, D\u2019Aquino was hauled to federal court in San Francisco to face eight counts of treason in 1949, the same year another jury had convicted her supposed Nazi counterpart, the so-called Axis Sally, of treasonous broadcasts from Berlin.<\/p>\n
Testifying on D\u2019Aquino\u2019s behalf was Charles Cousens, a major in the Australian army who had been captured by the Japanese and forced to work at Radio Tokyo. He said she had smuggled food and medicine to Allied POWs. He had recruited her for \u201cZero Hour,\u201d he explained, because he thought her \u201cgin-fog\u201d voice would help create a \u201ccomplete burlesque\u201d of a propaganda show.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Maj. Charles Cousens, a witness who testified on behalf of D\u2019Aquino. <\/p>\n
(Barney Peterson \/ San Francisco Chronicle)<\/p>\n
Cousens had written her scripts, and offered a sample:<\/p>\n
Hello there, enemies. How are tricks? This is Ann of Radio Tokyo, and we\u2019re just going to begin our regular program of music, news and the \u201cZero Hour\u201d for our friends \u2014 I mean our enemies \u2014 in Australia and the South Pacific. So, be on your guard and mind the children don\u2019t hear! All set? Okay. Here is the first blow at your morale, the Boston Pops playing \u201cStrike up the Band.\u201d<\/p>\n
The star prosecution witnesses were Kenkichi Oki and George Mitsushio, two California-born men who had become Japanese citizens and supervised her at Radio Tokyo. With implausibly identical language, they testified that they had heard her speak of sunken Allied ships after a naval battle in October 1944:<\/p>\n
\u201cOrphans of the Pacific, you are really orphans now. How will you get home now that all of your ships are sunk?\u201d<\/p>\n
On the stand, D\u2019Aquino vehemently denied ever saying it, and no recording of the transmission existed. It was the sole count on which jurors found her guilty, after a 13-week trial. Years later, Judge Michael J. Roche remarked, \u201cI always felt there was something peculiar about that girl\u2019s going to Japan when she did. I always thought she might have been up to something.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Iva Toguri D\u2019Aquino in Chicago in January 1977. <\/p>\n
(Charles Knoblock \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
On her release, six years later, a Chicago Tribune headline read: \u201cTokyo Rose Quits Jail, Shows No Repentance.\u201d She fended off deportation proceedings and went to work at the family gift store in Chicago. (During the war, her parents had been wrenched from their home and imprisoned in the Gila River Camp in Arizona, where her mother died.)<\/p>\n
In the mid-1970s, the Tribune reporter Ron Yates, then working in Tokyo, looked into the case.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt hit me how flimsy the evidence was against her,\u201d Yates said. He tracked down the government\u2019s two star witnesses. They admitted that the FBI had pressured and coached them. They recanted their damning testimony about the sunken-ship broadcast.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were told what to say,\u201d Yates said. \u201cShe never said anything like that, they told me. They told me that straight out \u2026 These guys were convinced they would be hanged themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
D\u2019Aquino filed a petition for a presidential pardon, to restore her stripped U.S. citizenship. \u201cAge is creeping up on me and I can\u2019t wait forever,\u201d she said. \u201cAmerica is my home. It will always be my home.\u201d The state of California belatedly lent its support. President Ford granted the pardon in 1977.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
D\u2019Aquino hands a petition to San Francisco postmaster Lim P. Lee during a news conference Nov. 17, 1976. The petition was to be mailed to President Ford asking for a presidential pardon on her treason conviction. <\/p>\n
(JP \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
Yates asked her if she could ever forgive the two men who testified against her.<\/p>\n
\u201cNever,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
At one point, Yates said, he and D\u2019Aquino planned to write a book about her experience. He told her she should go on Oprah. \u201cShe was terrified of that,\u201d Yates said. \u201cShe was terrified people would throw bombs into her store.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yates said that his own father, a former serviceman, remembered hearing Japanese propaganda broadcasts during his time in the Pacific during World War II. <\/p>\n
\u201cMy father said, \u2018I listened to her and she said terrible things.\u2019 I said, \u2018There were 14 of them.\u2019 I had to disabuse him of this. I said, \u2018Dad, it was a lie.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
When D\u2019Aquino\u2019s husband came to the United States to testify for her at her trial, the U.S. government demanded that he promise never to return. This effectively kept her from her husband for the rest of her life. He found another woman. Until her death at age 90 in 2006, she did not remarry.<\/p>\n
She never got over him, said Barbara Trembley, a film producer who has tried to make a film about D\u2019Aquino\u2019s life.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a terribly tragic love story \u2014 she was really in love with him,\u201d Trembley said. \u201cShe felt she\u2019d brought him very bad luck.\u201d<\/p>\n
In an article in Reason magazine, the historian James J. Martin described the case as a \u201cglittering press agent\u2019s spectacle aimed at trying the personification of a World War II soldier\u2019s legend, not a person with civil and constitutional rights.\u201d It was an illustration, he argued, \u201cthat the word \u2018treason\u2019 is far more a political term than it is anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n
Long after she went free, D\u2019Aquino lived with the stigma \u2014 and carried the peculiar allure \u2014 of the moniker history had saddled her with. For years, letters poured in, threatening death and offering marriage.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery time the case is recalled in the papers,\u201d she would say, \u201cI seem to hear from every maniac in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As World War II ended in the summer of 1945, journalists went looking for the siren of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63720,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[38354,1436,38351,38355,24822,38353,48,52,51,47,50,49,1554,1602,38356,315,38352,4001,38357,72,38358],"class_list":["post-63719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-bombed-out-tokyo","tag-case","tag-daquino","tag-imperial-japan","tag-journalist","tag-l-a-woman","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-name","tag-pacific","tag-radio-tokyo","tag-time","tag-tokyo-rose","tag-world-war-ii","tag-yates","tag-year","tag-zero-hour"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63719\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}