The Myth of Tokyo Rose

by Rick Shenkman

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On Tuesday Iva Toguri died at age 90. NBC News, repeating a mistake made five years ago, claimed on Wednesday's Nightly News that she had been "Tokyo Rose," "the voice of propaganda and the voice of the enemy ... [who] went on the air for Radio Tokyo, notoriously telling US servicemen that their cause was lost and that their sweethearts back home were betraying them." As this story published on HNN in December 2001 noted, Toguri was innocent of the charge.

Of myths E.M. Forster once wrote, "Nonsense of this type is more difficult to combat than a solid lie. It hides in rubbish heaps and moves when no one is looking." This quotation came to mind this week when we came across several references in the media to the World War II traitor Tokyo Rose. Old traitors like Tokyo Rose have been in the news since the capture last week of Suleyman al-Faris (aka: John Walker), the wan 18-year-old from posh Marin County who turned to Islam and then volunteered to fight with the Taliban.

The New York Times was the first to make the association of Walker with Tokyo Rose in an article published December 4 titled, "Could Seized American Face Treason Count?" Toward the end of the piece reporter Neil A. Lewis noted that only about 30 Americans have ever been charged with treason, among them, "Iza Ikuko d'Aquino, known as Tokyo Rose, who served seven years in prison for her role in broadcasting appeals to American soldiers to desert during World War II." Playing catch-up, NBC News finally got around to Tokyo Rose on December 10, reporting that she had been charged with treason and then pardoned three decades later by President Gerald Ford.

Alert viewers might have wondered why President Ford gave a known traitor a pardon, but NBC didn't bother explaining. Too bad. The story, though little known, is an appalling study in media hysteria, prosecutorial misconduct, and judicial incompetence. To jump to the end of the story: there was no Tokyo Rose. The Japanese-American woman convicted of broadcasting propaganda to soldiers during World War II – her actual name was Iva Toguri – was innocent of the charge of treason.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The story begins with World War II, when a myth began circulating in the Pacific about an American of Japanese descent who was said to be using her sultry voice on Japanese radio to undermine the morale of American soldiers. Walter Winchell got hold of the story, setting in motion the frenzy that was to lead to one of the great travesties in the history of American justice. At war's end reporters visiting Japan went on the hunt for Tokyo Rose. Only Tojo was a bigger "get" to interview. Unfortunately, as the reporters soon discovered, several women broadcast over Radio Tokyo and none used the name Tokyo Rose. Unwilling to puncture a balloon that now had grown to a gigantic size, the reporters promised $2,000 to Iva Toguri to say that she was Tokyo Rose. Toguri, who'd been stranded in Japan by the war and provided for herself by getting a job as a DJ, signed a statement claiming to be Tokyo Rose, though she had no idea that this figure had been implicated in treason.

The army conducted an investigation and cleared her, as the New York Times reported in August 1945. "There is no Tokyo Rose," the U.S. Office of War Information revealed, "the name is strictly a G.I. invention.... Government monitors listening in twenty-four hours a day have never heard the word 'Tokyo Rose' over a Japanese-controlled Far Eastern radio." Three years later Assistant Attorney General Theron L. Caudle confirmed that Toguri was innocent. "Her activity," he wrote, "consisted of nothing more than the announcing of music selections."

No matter. The media, led by Walter Winchell, went on a witch hunt. In 1948 the government of Harry Truman, then in the political race of his life, pressed charges against Toguri, indicting her for treason and trying her in federal court in San Francisco. It was a frame-up from the start. The key witnesses who testified against her during the trial, claiming she had broadcast propaganda over the radio, subsequently admitted they had lied. "We had no choice," said one of the witnesses, a Japanese businessman. "U.S. Occupation police came and told me I had no choice but to testify against Iva, or else." He and others flown in from Japan for the trial "were told what to say and what not to say for two hours every morning for a month before the trial started."

The judge in the trial was convinced that Toguri was guilty and privately confessed that he was shocked that his son – a veteran who had been stationed in the Pacific – felt no animosity to her. "I can't understand it," the judge confessed. In his instructions to the jury he excluded virtually all of the arguments Toguri's lawyers had raised in her defense. The jury foreman afterward said, "If it had been possible under the judge's instructions" to acquit her, the jury would have.

In 1956, after spending seven years in prison, Iva Toguri was finally released. Reporters hid in bushes all night so they could catch a glimpse of the notorious traitor.

In the 1970s the truth came out and Ford, on his last full day in office, pardoned her, finally vindicating her quiet claims of innocence. But what is the truth compared to the myth? And so the New York Times and NBC repeated as truth one of the most sordid lies of postwar justice.

SOURCE: Masayo Duus, Tokyo Rose: Orphan of the Pacific (1979).

September 30, 2006

Rick Shenkman is the editor of HNN and author of several books on myths, including, I Loved Paul Revere Whether He Rode or Not, in which he debunked the myth of Tokyo Rose.

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