Posted on 01/21/2025 10:54:28 AM PST by DallasBiff
Was Tokyo Rose a charming radio host or a vicious propagandist who committed treason from the DJ booth? Historians still haven’t settled the matter. She was convicted in 1949 but received an official pardon on this day, Jan. 19, in 1977, when the case for treason appeared less clear-cut than it had in the bitter years after World War II.
Iva Toguri d’Aquino was born in the U.S. to Japanese parents and, by all early accounts, she grew up as a devoted patriot. She earned a degree in zoology from UCLA in 1940 and had begun doing graduate work there when her life took a fateful turn. She visited Japan — either to visit a sick aunt or to study medicine, depending on whether you believed her account or the government’s — and became stuck there when war broke out.
The trouble began when she took a job as a wartime DJ for Radio Tokyo, playing popular, if sappy, American music, punctuated by banter that was either playfully entertaining or a deliberate attempt to undermine the morale of U.S. troops — again, depending on whose version you believe. Although she broadcast by the name of “Orphan Ann,” d’Aquino was more popularly known as “Tokyo Rose.”
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
It was not a presumptive pardon, as Biden did.
Discuss.
She certainly was better off than William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw)
I’d be OK with a pardon for Hanoi Hannah. She usually played better music than Cronauer.
If Japan hadn’t made the mistake of bombing Pearl Harbor, China might today still be Japan’s “comfort woman”.
Patty Hearst did time. 19 years old when kidnapped. She was scared to death and may or may not have had Stockholm syndrome. The public was not going to allow this rich girl get away with what the Hearst empire did in advocating wars against the ‘yellow peril’.
Tokyo Rose may not have been guilty. This article was too short and incomplete.
His was an interesting case. William Joyce was born in America, but was later issued a British passport. That passport is what did him in.
I suspect that had Joyce’s trial been held 10 years after the war ended, he’d be let off with a slap on the wrist.
Timing is everything, I guess.
In hindsight, we should have palled with the Japs in the 1920s to try to destabilize the Soviet Union.
Imperial Japan never could have been the threat that the ChiComs now are.
I don’t think he should have been executed. 10 to 20 years would probably have been the right sentence.
The Brits had Vice Chancellor Rudolph Hess and didn’t even execute him.
(If Japan hadn’t made the mistake of bombing Pearl Harbor)
I thought it was the Germans who bombed Pearl Harbor. 🤔
And they didn’t execute Speer, who should have hung with the rest of them.
I thought it was Pearl Bailey.
“I thought it was the Germans who bombed Pearl Harbor. “
Forget it, he’s rolling .
or if he had been a woman.
It’s been forever since I’ve seen that movie! LOL
I read years ago that she was basically forced to buy the Japanese Secret Police. Those guys made the Gestapo look like nice guys.
Hanoi Jane should have been charged with treason.
Toguri died of natural causes in a Chicago hospital on September 26, 2006, at the age of 90.[23][24]
The English author PG Wodehouse faced a somewhat similar situation, where he did some radio broadcasts from Berlin in 1941. It wasn’t outright pro-Nazi propaganda per se, as it was done in his humorous style, but his broadcasts were definitely arranged by Goebbels for an intended effect, particularly on American audiences, where Wodehouse was popular.
His biographer talked about Wodehouse’s thinking at the time
https://southwestreview.com/a-grave-moral-mistake-the-tragedy-of-p-g-wodehouses-berlin-broadcasts/
Dad was a guard at the prison where she was held for a year.
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