When Iva Toguri moved to Chicago in 1956, she was determined to lead a quiet life. Her desire for anonymity was understandable.
Toguri’s name had been intertwined with the notorious label “Tokyo Rose” since World War II. The American-born daughter of Japanese immigrants was charged with broadcasting propaganda on Tokyo’s airwaves that toyed with the morale of American military personnel. When she became the second woman convicted of treason in the United States, she was also labeled a traitor, stripped of her citizenship and sent to federal prison.
To others, however, Toguri was a scapegoat. Though many were involved in the broadcasts, only she would be prosecuted for them. No written or electronic recording of her supposedly subversive shows was presented at her trial. Testimony against her was weak. The Tribune said she was “the victim of the greatest post-war travesty on justice.”
Born July 4, 1916 in Los Angeles, the bobby sox and saddle shoe-wearing University of California at Los Angeles graduate enjoyed swing music and wanted to become a doctor. Life took a precarious turn, however, in early 1941. An aunt in Japan was dying. Toguri’s mother was too sick to make the journey, so the 25-year-old daughter went on the hastily planned trip (sans passport) instead — though she spoke no Japanese, had never been to Japan and had never met this relative. When the Japanese military bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Toguri was trapped with no identification to secure a passage home. She wouldn’t be with her own mother when she died in 1942 nor with her family when they were forced into an internment camp. Toguri had to find work, food and safety on her own.
Ronald Yates knew nothing about Toguri when he was tasked as a young Tribune reporter in 1971 with answering a question from a reader: “What ever happened to ‘Tokyo Rose?'” He was shocked to learn Toguri lived in Chicago and worked in her father’s mercantile store near Clark Street and Belmont Avenue.
“So I went up there hoping to talk with her and she wouldn’t see me. She wouldn’t talk to anybody,” he said in an interview this week. “But I started a file and just thought I’d hold onto it. Then, in 1974, I was called into the office and they said they wanted me to become the Tokyo bureau chief and the Tribune’s Far Eastern correspondent.”
While chatting with a colleague at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan a few years later, he was given the names of two American-born men who had worked with Toguri and testified against her — Kenkichi Oki and George Mitsushio.
“If you handle this right, you’re gonna get yourself a really big story,” the friend told Yates.
Almost 30 years after Toguri’s conviction, Oki and Mitsushio revealed to Yates they were forced by the U.S. government to lie about her involvement and were scared of potential repercussions if they didn’t. They said Toguri remained a proud, patriotic American throughout the war and often thwarted attempts to air content that would degrade or discourage the troops from her homeland. Yates’ groundbreaking reporting for the Tribune would lead to vindication for Toguri — and a presidential pardon in January 1977.
Years later, when Yates was a professor then dean at the University of Illinois College of Media, he used Toguri’s story as an example of how journalism can reach back into the past and rectify wrongs.
“That’s one thing I always told my students — history is never dead. There’s always some connection to the past, present or even to the future,” he said. “Journalism is a great conduit. If you report accurately, then it really can have an impact on people’s lives.”
Chicago history | More newsletters | Puzzles & Games | Today’s eNewspaper edition
More Top Picks Apple Airpods Max
Job prospects in Japan were limited for Toguri since she didn’t speak the native language. After working at Domei News Agency, where she met her husband, she found work at Radio Tokyo. She was quickly put on the air for an English-language show. “Zero Hour” was operated by Australian and U.S. prisoners of war under the direction of the Imperial Japanese government. Toguri was one of several female disc jockeys on the program — who were nicknamed collectively by U.S. forces as “Tokyo Rose” — but the only American citizen. She went by “Orphan Ann” — Ann was short for announcer and orphan conveyed her situation.
“All she did was play records and make small talk,” a former “Zero Hour” sound engineer told Yates in 1976. “She was very popular with American GIs.”
Copycat shows followed and were transmitted until the end of the war. “Zero Hour” was considered a mostly ineffective form of propaganda, but Toguri was detained by U.S. intelligence for questioning.
Toguri’s arrest was a surprise to her siblings and father, who had moved to Chicago from Los Angeles and operated a “combination fish market and grocery” at 1012 N. Clark St. and a mercantile company at 1128 N. Clark St. on the Near North Side. They told the Tribune no correspondence had been delivered from Toguri since 1944 and were resolute in their belief that she “must not have done it of her own accord.”
By October 1946, Toguri had been released after the FBI discovered “Tokyo Rose” was actually six to 20 people — though she was the only one born in America — and failed to establish that Toguri was spreading discontent to American troops.
“Our belief in her innocence has been substantiated,” said Jun Toguri, her father, when told of the development.
Aug. 17, 1948: U.S. changes face — decides to try Toguri for treason
But two years later, as Toguri attempted to secure a passport to return home, the Justice Department chose to prosecute her for treason. Shortly afterward, she delivered a baby that was stillborn.
Toguri boarded a ship in Yokohama, which took her to San Francisco to sit before a grand jury. Her father and a sister met her there and “she embraced them both thru tears,” the Tribune reported in September 1948. She was indicted on eight acts of treason that had a maximum punishment of death and a minimum of five years’ imprisonment and $10,000 fine.
During the 12-week trial, Toguri’s husband Felipe D’Aquino testified that two American reporters — Clark Lee and Harry Brundidge — promised his desperate wife $2,000 for an interview about her work on “Zero Hour.” They reneged on their mutually signed contract and turned over her words to the U.S. government.
Officials secured 14 witnesses for the prosecution including Oki and Mitsushio. Yates said they were coached hour after hour, day after day about what to say. Though they had renounced their U.S. citizenship, the pair were still scared what could happen to them if they didn’t cooperate.
Toguri was convicted on one count of treason. It was for a statement concerning the loss of American ships made on the radio show that Japanese witnesses attributed to her, but in the absence of evidence. The prosecution labeled Toguri an “arch traitoress” and a “female Benedict Arnold.”
Her only comment: “I can’t understand it.”
Oct. 6, 1949: ‘I couldn’t believe they would send me to jail’
Toguri was sentenced to 10 years in prison, fined $10,000 and stripped of her American citizenship, then sent to the federal prison camp in Alderson, W.Va. It’s the same facility where Martha Stewart, jazz singer Billie Holiday and former Ald. Sandi Jackson later served time.
March 3, 1954: Husband says, ‘Iva was forced to broadcast during the war in fear of her life’
One year after his wife became eligible for parole, D’Aquino told the Tribune that she had been intimidated by a Japanese propaganda officer. The unnamed officer was never tried as a war criminal.
Toguri and D’Aquino would never see each other again. After the trial, D’Aquino returned to Japan and was forbidden from entering the U.S. again.
Jan. 27, 1956: Freed from prison — and arrival in Chicago
Toguri was released in January 1956 after serving 6 1/2 years in prison as the government threatened to deport her.
She tried to maintain a low profile though newspapers printed the addresses where she lived and worked.
Late 1960s-early 1970s: Renewed interest in case
“Branded a traitor, she thinks of herself as a patriot,” WBBM-Ch. 2’s Bill Kurtis said during a landmark interview with Toguri. It was the first time she decided to share her side of the story. The pair strolled through Lincoln Park as she told him that food was scarce during her time in Japan and though she married a Portuguese national, she was American and didn’t want to be anything else.
The government sought payment of her $10,000 fine and she paid $4,745 of it in 1969.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Tribune
More Top Picks Best Dress Shoes With Jeans
reexamined Toguri’s case.1976: ‘She never did anything treasonable’
Yates revealed to the world that Oki and Mitsushio told him they were forced to tell half-truths and withhold vital information during Toguri’s trial.
“Even though I was a government witness against her, I can say today that (Iva Toguri) was innocent — she never did anything treasonable,” one of the men said.
Even the jury foreman was quoted as saying he wished he “had a little more guts to stick with my vote for acquittal.”
Shigetsugu Tsuneishi, the former lieutenant colonel in charge of radio propaganda for the Imperial Japanese Army, told Yates that more than 200 Japanese Americans were employed by Radio Tokyo and no one except Toguri was prosecuted.
Yates’ reporting caused California Gov. Mervyn Dymally and the California state legislature to ask President Gerald Ford to pardon her. By November 1976, Toguri sent Ford a petition to restore her citizenship.
“I’ve lived on this merry-go-round for almost 30 years, and it’s time to get off,” she told reporters.
Jan. 19, 1977: Pardon granted by President Ford
Twenty-seven years after her conviction for treason, Toguri was pardoned by the departing president.
“I hope now that the whole thing is really over and that I can go back to my simple life and work,” she said during a news conference at the Japanese American Citizens League, 5415 N. Clark St. “The difference now is, however, that I have regained my American citizenship, a rights and a privilege I have always cherished.”
She attributed the act’s timing to a changing social atmosphere.
“Three decades ago, people feared to express support for me. It wasn’t popular … little by little, true things were separated from mythology. Young people, free thinkers, got down to facts,” she said.
Toguri seldom spoke of her past and remained intensely private throughout her 50 years in Chicago.
In January 2006, the World War II Veterans Committee presented Toguri with the Edward J. Herlihy citizen award, which is named after the World War II newsreels announcer. The committee had earlier printed Toguri’s story in its newsletter, drawing an outpouring of support from veterans, said its president, James Roberts.
“Not one said they were demoralized in any way by the broadcasts,” Roberts said. “She remained loyal to the U.S., when many others may have turned on it, or given up.”
She accepted her medal during a luncheon ceremony at Yoshi’s Cafe on Halsted Street in Lakeview, having declined an invitation to a larger gala three months earlier in Washington, D.C.
Toguri requested that there be no memorial or funeral. She is buried in Montrose Cemetery.
Want more vintage Chicago?
Become a Tribune subscriber: It’s just $12 for a 1-year digital subscription
Follow us on Instagram: @vintagetribune
And, catch me Monday mornings on WLS-AM’s “The Steve Cochran Show” for a look at “This week in Chicago history.”
Thanks for reading!
Join our Chicagoland history Facebook group and follow us on Instagram for more from Chicago’s past.
Have an idea for Vintage baiduhai? Share it with Ron Grossman and Marianne Mather at [email protected] and [email protected].
interactive_content