THE
LEGEND OF TOKYO ROSE
By Ronald E. Yates
INTRODUCTION
During a 27-year career with the Chicago
Tribune, much of it as a foreign
correspondent in Asia and Latin
America, I encountered my share of remarkable and
unforgettable stories.
Some came out of the
horrendous suffering I witnessed while covering the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia,
and Afghanistan. Others were generated by the bloody revolutions in Guatemala and El Salvador.
Still others sprang from the wrenching political upheavals I reported on in places
like The Philippines,
Brazil,
China
and South Korea.
But there is one
story in my journalistic career that I treasure above all the others. That is
the story of a Japanese-American woman named Iva Toguri.
You probably don’t recognize the name and if you don’t, that is perfectly
understandable.
You and millions of
other Americans know her by another name: “Tokyo Rose.”
That’s right, “Tokyo Rose.” The
so-called “Siren of the Pacific” who sat before a microphone in Tokyo and told
GIs on a 25-minute show called “The Zero Hour” that their homes, their girl-friends
and even apple pie weren’t worth fighting for. Tokyo Rose, the legendary
“seductress of the short wave,” whose broadcasts between 1943 and 1945 for
Radio Tokyo were meant to demoralize the American fighting man and undermine
his will to fight.
Remember all those
World War II era movies with GIs gathered around short wave radios listening to
a sultry “Tokyo
Rose” intone such phrases as: “Come on
boys, give up. You haven’t got a chance against the Imperial Japanese Army. Why
throw your lives away?”
There’s just one
problem. There was no “Tokyo
Rose.” Nor were there ever any
treasonous broadcasts like the ones described above. At least not by Iva
Toguri.
Following is her
remarkable and poignant story and my involvement in it.
It was the
summer of 1941 and for a young California woman named Iva Toguri it was a time filled with promise and endless
possibilities.
The previous June Iva
had graduated from UCLA with a bachelor's degree in zoology, she had a shiny Chrysler, and she was planning on attending graduate school
in the fall so she could begin a career as a medical researcher or perhaps even
a doctor.
The daughter of hardworking Japanese
immigrants, Iva had been brought up to
be a confident, optimistic American. And why not? After all, she was born in Los Angeles on the 4th of
July--and you can't get more American than that.
But in the summer of 1941 the world was
not a place that could easily match the hopes and expectations of a 25-year-old
UCLA graduate.
In Europe,
a war was raging and the forces of Adolf Hitler's
Third Reich occupied or controlled most of the continent. In Asia,
Imperial Japan, under the leadership of a clique of hardcore militarists, was
in control of China,
the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan and a segment of the South Seas ceded to it after World War I.
Conflict and discord were the prevailing
truths of the day, and as Iva
Toguri stood on the brink of her
future an ominous cloud of world war hung in the warm summer air.
Thus it was not without some trepidation
that Toguri's ailing mother asked Iva to
represent the American side of the Toguri family at the bedside of a dying aunt
in Tokyo. It
was a bit risky, but someone had to go; and on July 5, 1941, one day after her 25th
birthday, Iva was on a slow boat to Japan. She
spoke no Japanese, had never been to Japan and had never met her aunt.
It would be a fateful journey, one that
would alter Iva Toguri's life forever and eventually introduce to the world one
of its most enduring and erroneous myths: The Legend of “Tokyo Rose.”
Less than five months after arriving in Japan and not
long after her sick aunt had recovered, Japanese warplanes swooped down on a
place called Pearl Harbor. For Iva Toguri
and millions of others, the future went from bright to black in a matter of
moments. And the lights would not come back on until August 1945, when Japan
surrendered.
But for Iva Toguri,
the war did not end in 1945 as it did for so many others. Four years later Iva Toguri
would stand in a San Francisco
courtroom, one of only a few American women ever convicted of treason. In the
minds of millions of Americans Iva Toguri was the one and only "Tokyo
Rose," the name American GIs in the Pacific had given to several women
radio announcers who played scratchy Glenn Miller
and Benny Goodman records during propaganda radio
shows broadcast in English from Tokyo
and elsewhere in Asia.
Iva’s conviction on just one of eight
counts of treason came despite the testimony of G.I.s who called the Radio
Tokyo "Zero Hour" broadcasts she made morale boosters and despite
evidence which showed she was just one of 13 English-speaking
women announcers broadcasting from Tokyo at the time. Another 14 women had
broadcast from cities throughout Asia and the
Pacific that were occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army. Interestingly, not one of them called herself
“Tokyo Rose.” (The
only radio alias Iva
Toguri ever used during her
15-minute segment of popular music was the name "Orphan Ann" because, as she often said during her
broadcasts, she was an announcer who had been orphaned in Tokyo by the war.)
Not even the absence of a written record
or an electronic recording of the single "treasonous" broadcast she
was supposed to have made stopped her conviction. That broadcast came after a
crushing U.S. Naval victory in Leyte Gulf of the Philippines in which she
allegedly said:
"Orphans of the Pacific, you really
are orphans now. How will you get home now that all your ships are sunk?"
Most Americans listening to that would
have seen through the facetious tone of those words, no matter who said them,
and understood that it was a broadcast meant more for members of the defeated
Imperial Japanese Navy than for the victorious U.S. Navy. Even more important,
however, was the fact that Iva never
said those words.
Nevertheless, in 1949 in a San Francisco
Federal courtroom as she, her family and her corps of defense attorneys led by
the late Wayne Mortimer Collins looked on, Iva was sentenced to 10 years in
prison and a $10,000 fine. She served six years and two months of her sentence
in the Alderson Federal Reformatory in West
Virginia which would much later house Martha Stewart.
But more importantly her conviction sentenced Iva Toguri
to a life of disgrace and deep inner pain that only those falsely accused and
convicted can ever understand.
Some vindication came in a series of
exclusive stories I reported and wrote in 1976 while serving as the Chicago
Tribune's Tokyo Bureau Chief and Chief Asia Correspondent.
Two key prosecution witnesses, after 27
years of silence, wanted to ease their consciences. They admitted to me that
they were forced by U.S. Justice Department and FBI officials to lie, tell
half-truths and withhold vital information at the trial. It was on the basis of
their coerced and false testimony that the jury had found Iva
guilty. (Article 3 of the Constitution
states that treason shall consist only in levying war against the United States
or in giving aid and comfort to its enemies and that conviction may be had only
on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act or on confession in
open court).
The two witnesses, Kenkichi Oki
and George Mitsushio—both California-born
Japanese-Americans—were Iva's
superiors on Radio Tokyo's "Zero Hour" radio program. Oki was the
show's production manager and Mitsushio was program director. Oki and Mitsushio
testified they had heard Iva make the
so-called "Orphans of the Pacific" broadcast about Leyte
Gulf in October 1944 when in fact she never did.
The "Zero Hour" was produced
under coercion by Allied prisoners of war, and while the Imperial Japanese
government saw it as a way to broadcast propaganda to American GIs fighting in
the Pacific, the POWs and Iva saw it
as a way to sabotage the Japanese war effort.
That's the way the occupation forces of
Gen. Douglas MacArthur saw it too when on April 17, 1946, following 11 months
of Iva's incarceration in Tokyo's Sugamo prison along with such Class A
Japanese war criminals as former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, the U.S. Army
Legal Section issued the following report:
"There
is no evidence that Iva
Toguri ever broadcast greetings to
units by name and location, or predicted military movements or attacks,
indicating access to secret military information and plans."
Then, in October 1946 a U.S. Justice
Department investigation of Iva
concluded:
"Iva
Toguri's activities, particularly in view of the innocuous nature of her
broadcasts, are not sufficient to warrant prosecution for treason."
It was obvious that the U.S.
authorities in Tokyo
were willing to let bygones be bygones. And they were willing to accept the
reasons for Iva
Toguri's voluntary participation
in the Zero Hour show: that like most of the 10,000 Japanese-Americans stranded
in Tokyo during
the war, she had taken the job to sustain herself while she was basically a
hostage in a hostile environment.
Furthermore, she had been assured by the
American and Australian POWs who wrote the scripts she read, that she was doing
nothing unpatriotic--and indeed that what they were doing might even help the
allied war effort.
That was especially important to Iva,
because unlike all the other Japanese-Americans who participated in the Zero
Hour broadcasts, she had steadfastly refused to give up her American citizenship,
despite being threatened and pushed to do so by Imperial Japan's dreaded
"kempeitai" secret police. In fact, her pro-American sentiments often
got her into arguments with Japanese members of the Zero Hour staff. On several
occasions she risked arrest and even death to smuggle food and medical supplies
to Allied POW’s in Tokyo.
In 1948, Iva petitioned to return to the
United States and Chicago, where her family had resettled following the war.
When word leaked out that the notorious
"Tokyo Rose" was trying to reenter the United States, much of the U.S. press took
exception. Radio columnist Walter
Winchell unleashed a series of
broadcasts attacking then U.S. Atty. Gen. Tom Clark
for "laxness" in dealing with "Tokyo Rose." Pressure
steadily built on the Truman administration
to "make an example" of somebody. That "somebody" was to be
Iva Toguri.
It made no
difference that Iva
Toguri bore no resemblance in
appearance or deed to the fictitious and seductive Oriental woman American
G.I.s fantasized about while sitting in their jungle foxholes. Nor did the fact
that U.S. Occupation forces already had investigated Iva
and cleared her of any activity that could be construed as treasonous.
It was an election year and the
administration of President Harry
S Truman
could not afford to be seen as being soft on alleged wartime spies and
turncoats. Atty. Gen. Clark
dispatched investigators to Tokyo
to look into the Tokyo Rose case. They found that Iva Toguri
was the only person associated with the "Zero Hour" show who was
still an American citizen and hence, still subject to U.S. law. So
Clark began to build a case against Iva and told justice department attorney
Tom de Wolfe to "prosecute it vigorously."
In 1945 Iva
had married Filipe
J. d'Aquino,
who was born in Yokohama
of a Portuguese father and a Japanese mother. In 1948 the couple's child, who Iva desperately wanted to be born in the United States,
died at birth. The two remained together until her conviction and then,
following decades of forced separation, they divorced in 1980. After Iva's
release from prison, she could not get a U.S. passport to travel and d'Aquino,
while in San Francisco for the trial, had been told by the FBI never to return
to the United States, "or else."
The case against Iva Toguri
was flimsy at best. Something had to be done to strengthen it. So FBI agents in
Tokyo rounded
up all of those involved in the "Zero Hour" broadcasts and applied
the kind of pressure that most any Japanese-American at the time could understand.
"We had no choice," Oki told me in
1976 after I had convinced him and Mitsushio to meet me in Tokyo. "The FBI
and U.S. Occupation police told us we would have to testify against Iva or else they said Uncle Sam might arrange a trial
for us too—or worse. We were flown to
San Francisco from Tokyo and along with other government witnesses, we were
told what to say and what not to say two hours every morning for a month before
the trial started.
"Even though I was a government
witness against her, I can say today that Iva Toguri
was innocent: she never did anything treasonable…she never said the words that
got her convicted," Oki said. "It was all a lie. Iva never had a chance. And all I can say now is that
I am truly sorry for my part in her conviction. I hope she can find it in her
heart to forgive us."
My stories containing details of Oki and
Mitsushio’s confession of perjury, as well as interviews with her former
husband Phil d’Aquino and others who
had worked with Iva on the Zero Hour,
appeared in March 1976 and were carried around the world.
On January 19, 1977, President Gerald Ford, in his last official act in office,
granted Iva Toguri a full and unconditional pardon.
While the historic pardon was an attempt to correct the injustice done to Iva Toguri,
the individual, it also served to raise awareness of the unfair treatment
Japanese-Americans received at the time from the federal and some state
governments.
The fact Iva Toguri
became the first person in American history to be pardoned following a treason
conviction, speaks volumes about her own indomitable spirit and the
determination of those who supported her crusade for justice, say leaders in
the Japanese-American community.
Others say the pardon also says something
about the deeply-ingrained sense of fair play that permeates American society
and which manifests itself, albeit sometimes belatedly, in the media, the
courts and, in Toguri's case, the White House.
July 4, 2006 marked Iva Toguri’s 90th birthday and for almost 65 of
those 90 years she had to live with the myth that she was “Tokyo Rose.”
Some vindication came in January 2006 in a
quiet, private ceremony held in a restaurant on Chicago’s north side when Iva
received the Edward J. Herlihy Citizenship Award from the World War II Veterans
Committee. (Herlihy was a radio broadcaster who was known as the “Voice of WW
II” for his narration of Universal Newsreels). It was a twist of irony not lost
on those in attendance.
I was privileged to be one of those
invited to the ceremony, along with members of Iva’s family and a handful of
close friends like former CBS news anchor Bill Kurtis, who has known Iva since
the late 1960s, and Hollywood producer Barbara Trembley, who is working to
produce a major feature film about Iva and her struggles.
Iva pushed back tears as she accepted the
award.
“This is such a great honor,” she said.
“For so many years I wanted to be positive about this whole thing. I wanted to
honor my father and my family. They believed in me through all the things that
happened to me. I thank the World War II Veterans Committee for making this the
most memorable day of my life.”
In 1991 Iva and I met in the same
restaurant. She had invited me to dinner to thank me for the series of stories
I had written that resulted in the Presidential pardon. Incredibly, even though
Iva and I were linked by the stories I
had written we had never met face to face.
"You know, if it hadn't been for your
stories I never would have received my pardon," Iva told me. "I would
still be a criminal. You started the ball rolling. And now, after all this
time, I just want to say thank you. It’s long overdue."
I hadn't come to dinner in search of any
recognition or thanks. I just wanted to meet the woman whose story had
fascinated me years before and sent me on a search for the truth. I wanted
finally to separate the woman from the myth; to detach Iva Toguri
the person from "Tokyo Rose" the World War II caricature. I wanted to
meet the woman that fertile G.I. imaginations had turned into some torrid kimono-clad
Mata Hari.
The woman sitting across from me was
certainly no Mata
Hari. Here was a woman with kind
eyes, a gracious smile and an admirable ability to put things into perspective.
"I've put all that behind me
now," Iva said, speaking of her ordeals in wartime Tokyo, in San
Francisco's federal court, and in prison.
"I'm only sorry that my father never
lived to see me pardoned. He died in 1972. But he believed in me until the end.
"'I'm proud of you Iva,' he used to tell me. You were like a tiger...you
never changed your stripes...you stayed American through and through.'”
"Am I bitter? No, what good does it
do to be bitter?" Iva said. Then
she thought for a moment. There were exceptions to that blanket forgiveness.
"In your stories Oki and Mitsushio
asked for my forgiveness. But how could I ever forgive them for what they did
to me?"
Both Oki and Mitsushio are dead now, as is
Iva, who passed away in 2006 at the age of 90.
During one of our many meetings, Iva told
me that her biggest wish was to have her story told accurately someday in a
film or play. There have been a few books written—most of them
unauthorized—about Iva’s ordeal, but they have done little to set the record
straight.
“People tend to remember a story when it
is dramatized and told in a theatrical way,” she said. “As for a book, I would
like to tell my story in my own words.”
Iva may finally get her wish. A play about
the Legend of Tokyo Rose is currently in the works and I plan to write a book
using Iva’s first person narrative based on hundreds of hours of recorded
interviews and my personal notes.
Finally, after years of disappointment and
heartbreak, Iva’s story will be told the way she wanted it told—truthfully and
conscientiously.
But most important, the Legend of Tokyo
Rose will finally be put to rest along with other historical myths and
deceptions such as Big Foot, the Piltdown man, and the Loch Ness Monster.
My only regret is that Iva will not be
here to experience her vindication.
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