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Tokyo Rose was a name given by
United States forces in the South
Pacific during
World War II to any of several English-speaking female broadcasters of
Japanese
propaganda. However, the name is usually associated with
Iva Toguri D'Aquino who was tried for
treason by the United States government.
Iva Toguri D'Aquino stood
trial for eight "overt acts" of treason at the
Federal District Court in
San Francisco in July 1949. Neither Toguri nor any of the other women
called herself Tokyo Rose: the name was invented by
GIs
and applied by them to any female Japanese announcer. During what was at
the time the costliest trial in U.S. history (over half a million
dollars), the prosecution presented forty-six witnesses, including two
of Toguri's former supervisors at
Radio Tokyo (both of whom later admitted to having committed
perjury) and a few soldiers who could not distinguish between what
they had heard on
radio broadcasts and what they had heard by way of rumour.
Iva Toguri, for her part, denied during the trial that she had
committed
treason. Ordered to make propaganda broadcasts along with other
prisoners of war, Toguri claimed she and her associates subtly sabotaged
the Japanese war effort. The American and
Australian
prisoners of war who wrote her scripts assured her she was doing
nothing wrong and immediately after the war General
Douglas MacArthur's staff and the United States
Justice Department cleared her of wrongdoing.
When the United States
press caused an uproar over her attempt to return to the United States
in
1948, Toguri was put on trial. Her former supervisors at Radio Tokyo
under government pressure gave perjured or otherwise distorted
testimony that was instrumental in her conviction. Count VI (the only
count on which she was convicted) claimed, "That on a day during October,
1944, the exact date being to the Grand Jurors unknown, said defendant, at
Tokyo, Japan, in a broadcasting studio of The Broadcasting Corporation of
Japan, did speak into a microphone concerning the loss of ships." The
supervisor at Radio Tokyo gave the following evidence:
- ""I said to Toguri I had a release from the Imperial General
Headquarters giving out results of American ship losses in one of the
Leyte Gulf battles, and I asked that she allude to this announcement,
make reference to the losses of American ships in her part of the
broadcast, and she said she would do so."
Another co-worker testified that Toguri said:
- "Now you fellows have lost all your ships. Now you really are
orphans of the Pacific. How do you think you will ever get home?"
Toguri was fined US$100,000 and given a 10 year prison sentence, of
which she served more than six years.
The case was later reopened and Toguri was granted a full
pardon by
Gerald Ford as his last presidential act in
1977. Today, Toguri is a shopkeeper in
Chicago.
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