On This Day in History: January 19

Tokyo Rose gets a pardon

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When President Ford pardoned Nixon in 1974, a lot of people said the fuck, dude? Fuck that guy. Ford tried to make up for it, at least a little, by pardoning the infamous radio broadcaster “Tokyo Rose” on his last full day in office.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: January 19, 1977--

Her real name was Iva Toguri, and her radio handle was “Orphan Ann.” The name Tokyo Rose predated her broadcasts; it was the moniker given by Allied troops to all English-speaking female radio personalities who broadcast Japanese propaganda as part of their “psychological warfare.” But because of her trial and imprisonment, Toguri came to epitomize the Tokyo Rose handle.

She was born in Los Angeles in 1916, the daughter of Japanese immigrants, and attained a degree in zoology from UCLA in 1940. In 1941 she sailed to Japan to visit a sick relative, but when she tried to come home Pearl Harbor had happened, and the U.S. was nah fuck you no Japanese allowed. It didn’t matter that she was FUCKING BORN THERE.

Japan was a dick to her as well. They said renounce your American citizenship and she said no and they said fine you’re an enemy alien then. Since they considered her the enemy, she embraced the role and smuggled food to starving Allied POWs. Speaking of which, POWs were often forced to broadcast propaganda. Toguri wasn’t forced, but she needed work to survive, so when asked to be a broadcaster for The Zero Hour radio show, she agreed. However, she refused to broadcast anti-American propaganda, and she fucking didn’t.

That didn’t save Toguri from getting sent to prison after the war though. After Japan’s surrender, she was detained in Yokohama by the U.S. military for a year, and eventually released when they determined her broadcasts to be “innocuous.” Yet when she tried to return to the U.S., a bunch of Americans freaked right the fuck out and so the FBI decided to screw her over to appease the racists. In 1949 they charged her with eight counts of treason. She was found guilty of one count and served more than six years of a 10-year sentence.

In 1976 the Chicago Tribune investigated and discovered the FBI and the U.S. occupation police had coached the primary witnesses against Toguri. The witnesses were threatened with charges of treason if they didn’t cooperate, so they perjured themselves at her trial to secure a conviction. That story led to President Ford’s pardon on January 19, 1977, which restored her citizenship. Iva Toguri died in Chicago in 2006 at age 90.

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