|
he New York Times
September 27, 2006
D'Aquino, Linked to Tokyo Rose Broadcasts, Dies
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Photo: http://tinyurl.com/rpyfb
Caption: Associated Press
Iva Toguri D'Aquino was escorted from Federal Court on Sept. 29, 1949.
Court case: http://snipurl.com/xhfx
D'Aquino v. United States, 192 F.2d 338 (9th Cir. 1951)
Biography: http://tinyurl.com/zsbcc
Iva Toguri D'Aquino, the Japanese-American convicted of treason in
1949 for broadcasting propaganda from Japan to United States servicemen
in World War II as the seductive but sinister Tokyo Rose, died Tuesday
in Chicago. Mrs. D'Aquino, who served more than six years in prison
but steadfastly denied disloyalty and received a presidential pardon in
1977, was 90.
Her death, at a Chicago hospital, was confirmed by a nephew, William
Toguri, who said only that Mrs. D'Aquino had died of natural causes,
The Associated Press reported.
Tokyo Rose was a mythical figure. The persona, its origin murky, had
been bestowed by American servicemen collectively on a dozen or so
women who, seductive but sinister, broadcast for Radio Tokyo, telling
soldiers, sailors and marines in the Pacific that their cause was lost
and that their sweethearts back home were betraying them.
The broadcasts did nothing to dim American morale. The servicemen
enjoyed the recordings of American popular music, and the United States
Navy bestowed a satirical citation on Tokyo Rose at war's end for her
entertainment value.
But the identity of Tokyo Rose became attached to Mrs. D'Aquino, a
native of Southern California and the only woman broadcasting for Radio
Tokyo known to be an American citizen. She emerged as an infamous
figure in a rare treason trial.
Convicted in 1949 by a federal jury in San Francisco on one of eight
vaguely worded counts, she was sentenced to 10 years in prison and a
$10,000 fine. She served 6 years and 2 months, then lived quietly in
Chicago, running a family gift shop. On Jan. 19, 1977, she was
pardoned, without comment, by President Gerald R. Ford on his last full
day in office, restoring her citizenship.
"A mere wartime myth, Tokyo Rose was to become a disgrace to American
justice," Edwin O. Reischauer, the American Ambassador to Japan from
1961 to 1966 and a scholar at Harvard specializing in East Asian
affairs, wrote in his introduction to "Tokyo Rose: Orphan of the
Pacific," by Masayo Duus (Kodansha International, 1979).
The treason charges, Mr. Reischauer wrote, were "egged on by a public
still much under the influence of traditional racial prejudices and far
from free of the anti-Japanese hatreds of the recent war."
Iva Ikuko Toguri was born in Los Angeles on the Fourth of July 1916, a
daughter of Japanese immigrants who owned a grocery store. She
graduated from U.C.L.A. in 1940 with a degree in zoology, hoping to
become a physician.
In the summer of 1941, she visited an ailing aunt in Tokyo at the
request of her mother. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, she was
stranded in Tokyo, knowing virtually no Japanese, deprived of a food
ration card by the authorities after refusing to become a Japanese
citizen and hard-pressed to find work.
In 1942, she obtained a job with Japan's Domei news agency,
monitoring American military broadcasts, and late in 1943 she became an
announcer and disc jockey for Radio Tokyo's propaganda broadcasts,
playing American musical recordings on the "Zero Hour" program
beamed to American servicemen. She called herself "Ann" or
"Orphan Ann," short for announcer and a play on the Orphan Annie
character.
While continuing to work for Radio Tokyo in 1945, she married Felipe
D'Aquino, a Domei news agency employee with Portuguese citizenship
and Japanese ancestry.
When the war ended, several American reporters learned of Mrs.
D'Aquino's broadcasts and interviewed her in Japan. She said that
she was Tokyo Rose, evidently presuming that no great notoriety would
be attached to that and perhaps hoping to embellish an intriguing story
for American readers, having been paid for her account in a magazine
article. She subsequently denied ever having called herself Tokyo Rose
in her broadcasts, and no evidence was produced to the contrary.
As an outgrowth of the publicity, Mrs. D'Aquino was arrested and
questioned by American military occupation authorities and the F.B.I.
The United Press quoted her at the time as saying, "I didn't think
I was doing anything disloyal to America."
In the fall of 1946, Mrs. D'Aquino was released from custody in Japan
after the Army and the Justice Department concluded that there were no
grounds for prosecuting her. But the Justice Department reopened the
case in 1948. Loyalty issues were becoming a national political
flashpoint, although mainly in the context of the cold war, and the
American Legion and the powerful columnist and broadcaster Walter
Winchell had spoken out against Mrs. D'Aquino.
Mrs. D'Aquino, who had unsuccessfully sought permission from American
authorities to return to California, was arrested on charges of
treason, transported to San Francisco, held in a county jail for a
year, then put on trial in 1949.
Treason, the only crime outlined in detail in the Constitution, is
defined as "levying war" against the United States or giving "aid
and comfort" to its enemies. A defendant may be convicted only "on
the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession
in open court."
Up to the end of World War II, there had only been some 30 treason
cases in United States history. When Mrs. D'Aquino went on trial,
five Americans had been convicted of treason for actions in the war,
four having broadcast for Nazi Germany, most notably Millard Gillars,
known as Axis Sally.
Tom DeWolfe, a special assistant attorney general, told the jury that
Mrs. D'Aquino had engaged in "nefarious propagandistic
broadcasts" without being under duress. Former supervisors for Radio
Tokyo testified that she had made propaganda broadcasts willingly, and
a few broadcast tapes were played for the jury, though none were
identified as containing Mrs. D'Aquino's voice.
Testifying at the 12-week trial, Mrs. D'Aquino denied that she had
ever made any disloyal statements on Radio Tokyo. She was supported in
testimony from former Allied prisoners of war who had worked in the
Japanese broadcasting operation. In a statement that she had given to
the F.B.I. in Japan and that was entered in the court record, she said
that she had sought to reduce the programs' effectiveness as
propaganda by inserting double meanings in some of her broadcasts.
Mrs. D'Aquino was convicted on a single count of treason, relating to
a broadcast she was alleged to have made to American servicemen in
October 1944, referring to the loss of their ships. According to
prosecution testimony, she said: "Orphans of the Pacific, you really
are orphans now. How will you get home now that all your ships are
lost?"
After serving her sentence at the federal penitentiary for women in
Alderson, W. Va., Mrs. D'Aquino fought government efforts to deport
her. She ran an Asian grocery store and gift shop on Chicago's North
Side that family members had opened after their release from a wartime
internment camp in Arizona. Her husband returned to Japan after her
trial, and she never saw him again.
President Ford pardoned Mrs. D'Aquino after she had appea
|
| |
| |
|
