IVA TOGURI: Unraveling the Wartime Myth of “Tokyo Rose”

by Anne Carr

As early as 1943, reports from Allied troops stationed in the Pacific during the Second World War began to weave a sensational tale of a phantom siren terrorizing servicemen about everything from fake Axis victories to their own personal woes. [1] The disembodied voice supposedly taunted troops with knowledge of their adulterous wives, and in some renditions of the rumor, lured one unnamed soldier to his own death over the voice’s insistence of his girlfriend’s infidelity. [2] This alleged seductress exploited the Allies’ worst fears and seemed to know more about the war they were fighting than they did, announcing Japanese military strikes before they happened. Most impressively, she did it all over broadcast radio. [3]
By the war’s end, homebound soldiers and eager journalists were equally as captivated by the mystery of the Japanese propagandist they came to know as “Tokyo Rose.” Almost immediately, however, it became clear that recollections of “Tokyo Rose” and her crimes against Allied morale varied wildly from person to person, especially in their beliefs that a crime had been committed at all.
    Simply, “Tokyo Rose” did not exist, at least not in the way she had been imagined for nearly half a decade. Some troops even claimed that the only thing “Tokyo Rose” was guilty of was improving Allied morale. [4] Still, this did not deter ambitious reporters Harry Brundidge and Clark Lee from tracking down the Domei News Agency in Japan to find a broadcaster that matched the inconsistent memories of Pacific-stationed soldiers. With Zero Hour announcer Iva Toguri, Lee and Brundidge found their “Tokyo Rose,” forever tying her to the alluring, traitorous myth.

Courtesy of the National Archives, Unrestricted Access: IVA TOGURI

Born on July 4, 1916 in Los Angeles, California to Japanese migrants, Jun and Fumi, Iva Ikuku Toguri grew up with memories of her parents’ elation and celebration that she shared a birthday with the United States. [5] She was the first of her siblings to be born in the Americas, and due to prejudiced migrant laws that plagued the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she was the first in her family to have American citizenship, which could only be obtained by Japanese-descended individuals through birthright law. [6]
    Anti-Asian racism loomed over every aspect of the Toguris’ lives in the US, as it did for most other Chinese and Japanese families living on the West Coast. Jun’s livelihood, a grocery store he managed, could not even be legally owned by him due to discriminatory laws that were passed with the support of hostile exclusion leagues all over the state of California. [7] Despite attempts to prevent Japanese assimilation by labeling them “unassimilable,” Iva cherished her quintessentially American childhood playing baseball, spending weekends with friends, and attending dances. [8] Although Fumi and Jun tried to share their culture with Iva and her siblings, they did so sparingly, and Iva was usually the most dismissive of their efforts. By the time she reached her teen years, Toguri knew very little about Japan and the Japanese language. This made it all the more complicated when she was selected by her family to act as their representative in Japan after they received word of Fumi’s ailing sister. A year after she graduated from UCLA with a degree in zoology and aspirations to attend medical school, she set sail for a six-month stay in Japan.
    
    Upon her arrival in Yokohama around August of 1941, Toguri did not have possession of an American passport; instead, she carried with her a Certificate of Identification. Just a month into living with her relatives, the Hattoris, she applied for a passport to prepare for her return to Los Angeles. Iva had even asked her father to arrange for an early passage back home as she worried about escalating tensions between Japan and the US; Japanese assets had already been frozen stateside, and most of all, she missed California. [9] Jun encouraged her to wait out the rest of her allotted six months, especially as she waited for a verified passport. Their plans for Iva returning at all would be thwarted when Japan carried out an air raid on Pearl Harbor in the early hours of December 7, 1941, officially drawing the US into World War II.
    In the weeks following the attack, Iva endured countless drop-ins from police officers with recommendations for her to renounce her American citizenship and “pledge allegiance to Japan.” [10] Each time, Toguri refused, even as she remained trapped within the country because the US State Department inexplicably claimed it “doubted” her citizenship. Her last chance to leave Japan arose in the spring of 1942, when the final repatriation ship was readied for passage across the Pacific, but charged fees that Toguri could not afford. Her constant rejection of Japanese citizenship led to Toguri being labeled an “enemy alien” and increased harassment from police, eventually causing her to move from the Hattori residence into a cheap boarding house. As Iva’s circumstances in Japan became far more isolated, so did her family’s back home. Her unanswered requests for help were explained when she learned that they had been relocated to an internment camp in Gila River, Arizona, where their freedoms were severely restricted by government mandate.
    Iva became disentitled to receive rationed food, resulting in her contracting multiple illnesses caused by starvation, including the potentially fatal beriberi. [11] After months of applying and being denied, Toguri withdrew her application for a passport. Out of a need for support and income, she used her skills as a native English speaker to get work as a typist for the Domei News Agency in Tokyo. In the fall of 1943, Australian prisoner of war Charles Cousens approached Toguri with the proposition of becoming a broadcaster. Toguri’s initial hesitation to accept was assuaged by Cousens’ assertion that he, and another American POW Wallace Ince, intended to undermine the propaganda as much as possible by subtly sabotaging the broadcasts using humor, irony, and light content to dilute their effectiveness.
The POWs forced to work at Radio Tokyo trusted Toguri because she had made her allegiance to the US clear and had covertly provided them with food and vitamins. [12] Toguri’s loyalties were with the Allies so fervently that one of the first things she noted about her would-be husband, Portuguese citizen Philip d’Aquino, in her interview with John Leggett was that “his sympathies also lay with the US.” [13] Toguri then agreed to the broadcasts with the Zero Hour, as Cousens would write the scripts, and she was periodically replaced by numerous other English-speaking women on her days off.

Courtesy of the National Archives, Unrestricted Access: IVA TOGURI

For the majority of her time as “Orphan Ann,” as Cousens introduced her, the POWs did everything in their power to tamper with the efficacy of the broadcast. Toguri only mentioned the war in passing on her program, when she would refer to her listeners as the “fighting orphans of the Pacific.” [14] Otherwise, her job was no different than that of a disc jockey. Toguri and Cousens also made it no secret that the Japanese army’s goal was to make troops so homesick they would stop fighting. On one broadcast, Toguri quipped, “News and the zero hour for our friends…I mean, our enemies!...in Australia and the South Pacific…so be on your guard [...] O.K. here’s the first blow at your morale…the Boston Pops.” [15] Hardly subtle for a propaganda form that relied on the psychological manipulation of its targets, and as it would turn out, hardly successful.
After the war, newspapers and returned soldiers alike remarked on how the broadcasts of “Tokyo Rose” boosted their morale rather than lowered it, made evident when General Robert Eichelberger jokingly issued Toguri a fake citation for improving troops’ spirits. [16] Though this was the reality of Toguri’s broadcasting, what caused so many of the servicemen to believe in the “Tokyo Rose” myth still eludes many historians. Some speculated at the time that perhaps the imagined features of Toguri’s programs were actually the conglomeration of a few different broadcasts that more firmly aligned with the overall legend of “Tokyo Rose.” [17]

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A month after Emperor Hirohito surrendered, Brundidge and Lee tracked down Toguri for an exclusive interview with the notorious “Tokyo Rose.” Although they had already begun to deduce that most of the story was fiction, the two got Toguri, who was in dire need of income, to agree to her identification as “Tokyo Rose.” Toguri claimed that she was completely unaware that anything she had done would be seen as treacherous or illegal. Following this interview, Toguri was arrested by the US occupying forces under suspicion of treason and was detained at Sugamo Prison, which infamously held war criminals awaiting trial. Despite her citizenship making her eligible for the charge of treason, she was treated as a Japanese national due to her extended residence in Japan and marriage to d’Aquino, prohibiting her from sending letters to her family in the US and blocking her from attorney access. [18] During her time in confinement, she gained a reputation as a model prisoner and cultivated cordial relationships with guards. [19] Toguri was eventually released from Sugamo due to a lack of sufficient evidence.
The fact of her release did little to quell the American public’s distrust and indignation at her re-application for an American passport. Adding gasoline to the fire, Walter Winchell’s relentless campaign against her led to United States citizens becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the FBI dropping her case. In September 1948, seven years after she initially left for Yokohama, Toguri finally returned to California, only this time, she was traveling to be arraigned for crimes against the United States.

Courtesy of the National Archives, Unlimited Access: IVA TOGURI

Courtesy of the National Archives, Unrestricted Access: IVA TOGURI

Toguri’s trial was long and arduous, regardless of the little evidence against her. Both Ince and Cousens delivered testimonies in her favor. Her superiors at Domei, George Mitsushio and Kinkichi Oki, similarly proclaimed her innocence during their investigative interviews. However, at some point before the trial, Mitsushio and Oki turned against Toguri and claimed to be witnesses of her broadcasting falsified information about sunken Allied ships, becoming key figures for the prosecution. Their accusations met the standards of conviction, and she was sentenced to ten years in a West Virginia penitentiary. During the hearing and the initial indictment, Toguri was rejected by Asian American advocacy groups because the media-driven image of Toguri had been completely taken over by the infamous, perfidious “Tokyo Rose,” leaving little room for her to be prioritized by organizations already challenging postwar anti-Japanese sentiment. [20] It was not until years after her sentencing that the depth of her trial’s unfairness was revealed. In the 1940s, a treason conviction required at least two witnesses to corroborate the alleged treacherous act. [21] In the case of Mitsushio and Oki, they later admitted that they had perjured themselves to avoid their own indictments. FBI documents indicated that their testimonies had been coached to incriminate Iva. [22]
    Toguri was eventually vindicated with a presidential pardon and reinstated citizenship in 1977, this time supported by groups like the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). She was honored with the Edward J. Herlihy Citizenship Award a few months before her passing in 2006. Iva and Philip d’Aquino divorced in 1980; the last time they ever saw each other was in Japan before Iva was arrested in the fall of 1948. Toguri served six years of her decade-long sentence, was released early for good behavior, and she paid her $10,000 fine in total (equivalent to around $130,000 in 2025, adjusted for inflation). She lived out the rest of her life surrounded by family in Chicago. [23]
Iva Toguri’s story mattered because of what it revealed about prejudice and the cost of prosecuting an idea rather than a person. Part of the reason Toguri became trapped in Japan was due to anti-Asian sentiments in the US; the denial of her citizenship verification, and then her family’s financial support being taken away due to Japanese internment. She was later exonerated via the pardon, but the trial, perjured testimony, and accusations of treason followed her for decades.

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Sources:
[1] “Tokyo Rose Giving Hope Competition.” The Ypsilanti Daily Press, November 4, 1943. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn97063183/1943-11-04/ed-1/seq-7/.
[2] Frederick P. Close. Tokyo Rose/An American Patriot: A Dual Biography. Scarecrow Professional Intelligence Education Series, Vol. 7 (2010): 41.
[3] Naoko Shibusawa. Femininity, Race, and Territory: How ‘Tokyo Rose’ Became a Traitor to the United States After the Second World War (2010): 169.
[4] Associated Press. “‘Tokyo Rose’ Is Back on Radio, Faded and With Thorns Plucked.” The Sunday Star, August 19, 1945. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1945-08-19/ed-1/seq-18/#date1=1756&index=0&rows=20&words=Rose+Tokyo&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=&date2=1963&proxtext=Tokyo+Rose&y=0&x=0&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1.
[5] Close. Tokyo Rose. 1.
[6] Lesley Solomon. “Japanese Exclusion and the American Labor Movement: 1900 to 1924.” 2012.
[7] Sara Rimer. “California’s Alien Land Laws.” Equal Justice Initiative, June 3, 2025. https://eji.org/news/californias-alien-land-laws/.
[8] John Leggett. “Tokyo Rose: Traitor.” New York Times, December 5, 1976. https://www.nytimes.com/1976/12/05/archives/tokyo-rose-traitor-or-scapegoat-after-world-war-ii-an-american-girl.html.
[9] Close. Tokyo Rose. 69.
[10] Close. Tokyo Rose. 83.
[11] Close. Tokyo Rose. 135.
[12] FBI Records. 45. https://vault.fbi.gov/tokyo-rose.
[13] Leggett. “Tokyo Rose.”
[14] FBI Records. Part Two. 6.
[15] Close. Tokyo Rose. 172.
[16] Timothy Lane. “Iva Toguri D’Aquino.” 2024. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/biography/iva-toguri-daquino.
[17] Close. Tokyo Rose. 161.
[18] Close. Tokyo Rose. 275.
[19] Close. Tokyo Rose. 281.
[20] Close. Tokyo Rose. 486.
[21] Close. Tokyo Rose. 329.
[22] Close. Tokyo Rose. 336.
[23] Spark Matsunaga, letter to President Gerald Ford urging Toguri’s pardon, November 23, 1976. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/4520452.​