The Woman Who Became Tokyo Rose By Accident and Spent 28 Years Paying For a Crime She Barely Committed

On January 19, 1977, President Gerald Ford granted a full and unconditional pardon to Tokyo Rose—except there was never actually any such person. Iva Toguri D'Aquino, a Japanese-American woman from Los Angeles, had the profound misfortune of being stranded in Japan while visiting a sick relative when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Unable to return home and refused Japanese citizenship (she wouldn't renounce her American one), she found herself in the uniquely terrible position of being an enemy alien in her ancestral homeland during a brutal war. Needing to survive, she eventually took a job as a typist at Radio Tokyo and later became one of several women announcers on "The Zero Hour," a propaganda broadcast aimed at demoralizing Allied troops in the Pacific. The American GIs listening to these programs collectively dubbed various female broadcasters "Tokyo Rose," though no one used that name on air. Here's where it gets properly absurd: after the war, D'Aquino was the only one of these broadcasters who could be found by American authorities, largely because she'd been reckless enough to actually identify herself to journalists. Though many of the soldiers who'd heard the broadcasts testified that they found them more entertaining than demoralizing—the music was excellent, and the propaganda was ham-fisted—she was convicted of treason in 1949. Nearly three decades later, after investigative journalists revealed that witnesses had been coerced and evidence suppressed, Ford issued his pardon on his final full day in office. D'Aquino finally received the justice she'd been denied, though one imagines she might have preferred it without the preceding 28 years of infamy. This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI.