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September 27, 2006

Iva Toguri D'Aquino, 1916-2006

I
va Toguri d'Aquino, better (though mistakenly) known as "Tokyo Rose," has passed away.

Here is what I wrote about her World War II treason case in a recent article, "The Japanese American Cases: A Bigger Disaster Than We Realized," 49 Howard Law Journal 417 (2006):

The third and last treason prosecution brought against a Japanese American for conduct during World War II was the notorious case of United States v. Iva Toguri d'Aquino. It was known as the "Tokyo Rose" case, because it arose from the nightly Radio Tokyo propaganda show that American servicemen in the Pacific liked to say was anchored by a disc jockey named "Tokyo Rose." In fact, though, Radio Tokyo had no disc jockey by that name. Quite a few women did English-language broadcasts for Radio Tokyo during the war, and "Tokyo Rose" was a made-up name that soldiers used for all of these female voices.

There is no question that one of those voices was Iva Toguri d'Aquino's. d'Aquino, a Nisei, was born in Los Angeles in 1916, and attended public schools in a variety of southern California communities. She graduated from U.C.L.A. with a degree in zoology in 1940, and then began working toward a graduate degree. In July of 1941, however, her family got word that her mother's only sister, who lived in Japan, was seriously ill, and that she wanted d'Aquino's mother to visit her. Her father decided that d'Aquino would go as the family's representative, because d'Aquino's mother was herself ill. They were unable to obtain a passport for her quickly enough, but at that time a passport was necessary only during war or national emergency, so they instead prepared a simple photo identification card and had it notarized. With that in hand, d'Aquino left for Japan on July 5, 1941, for what was to be a six-month stay. She arrived in Japan on July 24, 1941, and took up what she thought would be temporary residence with her aunt and uncle. The state of war that arose with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor changed her plans drastically, because with no passport, and no means of obtaining one, d'Aquino was stranded in Japan for the duration of the war.

d'Aquino eventually landed a position as a typist at Radio Tokyo in August of 1943. Her job at first was to type material for Radio Tokyo's English-language broadcast. Late in the fall of 1943, however, she was approached by two Allied war prisoners--an American and an Australian who had radio experience and were producing "Zero Hour," an evening program of music, recorded messages from prisoners of war, and news items. They liked her "Yankee personality" and asked her to join the program as an announcer. Certainly everyone involved understood that these broadcasts were Japanese propaganda, but d'Aquino believed that the Allied war prisoners creating the show were working as hard as they could to make the program "as entertaining as possible rather than propaganda," and that the scriptwriters were inserting passages with "'a double meaning' in their scripts." In any event, d'Aquino understood these "requests" that she take up the announcer's position as "tantamount to [Japanese] army orders which one did not disobey."

She began broadcasting in mid-November of 1943. One of the Allied war prisoners wrote her scripts until mid-1944, when he got sick; she took over the writing duties at that point, using the earlier scripts as a guide. She was always introduced on the show as "Orphan Ann," "Orphan Annie," "your favorite enemy, Ann," or "your favorite playmate and enemy, Ann." Mostly she announced and played music, while others read news, commentary and announcements.

After Japan's surrender, d'Aquino was questioned and then arrested by military police. She was held in military custody and repeatedly interrogated for nearly a year. Throughout this time she told the same story, which was that she had gotten stranded in Japan, had landed a job at Radio Tokyo, had been more or less conscripted into doing announcements for "Zero Hour," and that through it all she had remained critical of Japan's aggression and a loyal American, albeit in difficult and coercive circumstances. The army ultimately declined to prosecute her, and she was released from detention in Tokyo in May of 1946.

d'Aquino applied for a U.S. passport in the fall of 1947 so that she could return home. The Justice Department at first voiced no objection to her obtaining a passport; her case had been investigated and closed more than a year earlier. However, word somehow leaked to the press that "Tokyo Rose" had applied for a passport, triggering a firestorm among veterans' groups and West Coast nativist organizations, and they demanded a treason prosecution. Bowing to this strong public pressure, the Justice Department opened a new investigation. It lasted until October of 1948, when Justice Department lawyers, having overcome hesitations about the innocuous nature of the broadcasts, concluded that the facts presented a colorable--if not overwhelming--case of treason, and obtained an indictment. d'Aquino, who had again been arrested in Japan, was brought back to San Francisco by ship to stand trial.

The indictment identified eight overt acts of treason, all of them related to broadcasts that d'Aquino had allegedly made between November of 1943 and August of 1945, but during the course of three months of trial, the government's case came to focus primarily on a single comment in a single broadcast that d'Aquino allegedly made in October of 1944. Two witnesses testified that they saw her read the following words into Radio Tokyo's microphone shortly after a typhoon caused the loss of a number of American ships: "'Now you fellows have lost all your ships. You really are orphans of the Pacific. Now how do you think you will ever get home?"' When d'Aquino testified in her own defense, she denied uttering these words.

As in the Kawakita case, the jury's deliberations were long and difficult. The jurors debated the case for almost four days, once reporting hopeless deadlock along the way. Nine out of ten reporters covering the case expected d'Aquino to be completely exonerated, and she nearly was. The jury convicted d'Aquino of treason, but only on the strength of one of the eight overt acts charged in the indictment, the one concerning the loss of ships. The trial judge sentenced her to ten years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine; she served the sentence at the federal prison for women in Alderson, West Virginia, and was released in January of 1956.

Thus, the government eked out a victory in the d'Aquino case, but it was a thin one, obtained from a reluctant jury on the strength of hotly contested testimony. In the view of one of the case's closest observers, Iva Toguri d'Aquino "was a pathetic, isolated, relatively insignificant individual" whose "acknowledged acts of broadcasting for the enemy took on a legendary mystique that heightened her importance far beyond the innocuous substance of her activities." This sense lingered in the Japanese American community long after her release from prison. Three times her supporters applied for a presidential pardon, in the administrations of Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon, and were refused. Finally, on his last day in office in January of 1977, President Gerald R. Ford issued a full pardon to Iva Toguri d'Aquino, bringing to a forgiving close her rather muddled prosecution for treason.

Note: I have omitted the footnotes from this excerpt, in keeping with the blog format. My principle sources were Stanley I. Kutler, Forging a Legend: The Treason of "Tokyo Rose," 1980 Wisc. L. Rev. 1341, and Frank F. Chuman, The Bamboo People: The Law and Japanese-Americans (Del Mar Publishers, Inc., 1976).

Posted by Eric at September 27, 2006 8:46 PM

Comments

I'm only passing familiar with the US treatment of Japanese during and after the war, but in the light of current trends, it seems less horrendous.

ELM: Less horrendous than what?

Posted by: Mark at September 28, 2006 9:31 AM

The Toguri family has run a Japanese American "department store" for well over 50 years. J. Toguri's has been on Belmont between Clark and the el stop, in Chicago's north side since the early 1950's. It is now one of a kind and is pretty much the final, remaining landmark of early, post-war resettlement in Chicago. Several of my "elders" knew the family much better than I, but I will still go into the store and pay my respects. Plus, I can always use another package of dried cuttlefish.

Posted by: paul yamada at September 28, 2006 10:44 AM

My comment was a little ambiguous. I was trying to say this: the treatment of American citizens of Japanese descent during WW II was horrendous in my view. It was perhaps understandable since we were in a struggle for national survival, but still less than we should expect of ourselves. The treatment of Iva Toguri d'Aquino was less understandable, but not particularly surprising given the sentiment of veterans, their families and the population in general. However, the US today is not in a struggle for national survival and the current administration has jailed at least one citizen and tried to deny him his rights under the Constitution. We are also denying noncitizens their human rights (through secret torture camps), and attempting to justifty it by saying we do it only to terrorists (a terrorist is apparently anyone to whom we do this). If I compare the treatment of Japanese during WW II to the treatment of "terrorists" in the GWOT, I think the treatment of Japanese seems less horrendous than if we were behaving as a civilized county today.

Neither type of behavior is what we should expect of ourselves. I guess what I'm saying is that seeing what we do today leads to lowered expectations.

Posted by: Mark at September 28, 2006 11:26 AM

I forgot to mention that I understand that what we did to our citizens of Japanese descent during WW II was pretty clearly racist. I don't know of many people of German descent who ended up in concentration camps in the US (not my own family, certainly, and we had our share of Schumans).

ELM: There were, in fact, German and Italian aliens in the USA who (along, in some cases, with their U.S. citizen dependents) were interned during the war. The numbers I've seen have been in the range of 10,000 Germans and a smaller number of Italians.

Posted by: Mark at September 28, 2006 11:34 AM