Born On The Fourth Of July

SHE DIED ON Tuesday, September 26, aged 90. She might have been an ordinary aspirational American, born to immigrants from Japan and graduating from UCLA in 1940 with a bachelor’s degree in zoology, “hoping to become a physician,” according to Richard Goldstein in The New York Times. But then things went wrong for Iva Toguri.

In the summer of 1941, she visited an ailing aunt in Tokyo at the request of her mother. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, she was stranded in Tokyo, knowing virtually no Japanese, deprived of a food ration card by the authorities after refusing to become a Japanese citizen and hard-pressed to find work.

She ended up as an announcer and disk jockey for Radio Tokyo’s propaganda broadcasts and became accused of being “Tokyo Rose,” the sexy-voiced announcer who urged American GIs to give up a hopeless cause.

In 1949 she was tried for treason, convicted on a single count, and jailed for ten years with a $10,000 fine. After getting out of jail she moved to Chicago and worked for her father.

She ran an Asian grocery store and gift shop on Chicago’s North Side that family members had opened after their release from a wartime internment camp in Arizona.

But her treason conviction was based on perjury and media hysteria. According to The Times

In 1976, after a second media campaign led by Bill Kurtis, of CBS, the news anchor Morley Safer produced an item about Iva Toguri on the mass-audience 60 Minutes show. This revealed not only the true nature of Toguri’s enforced wartime occupation, but the extent of the perjury and tabloid feeding frenzy that had led to her arrest and conviction.

In 1977 she received a pardon from President Ford.

Last January, according to Ben Goldberger Toguri received

the World War II Veterans Committee's Edward J. Herlihy Citizenship Award. As guests sipped champagne around an ice sculpture of a swan, Ms. Toguri pronounced it "the most memorable day of my life."

Because, it turned out, she had used her earnings in Japan to help the GI prisoners of war with whom she worked.

Iva Toguri was born in the United States in 1916 on the Fourth of July.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.