Iva Toguri

Iva Toguri D'Aquino was an American citizen who was convicted of being the infamous World War II propagandist "Tokyo Rose", a nickname given by American GIs and applied to several female radio broadcasters responsible for anti-American Propaganda broadcast over the radio waves by the Japanese that were intended to demoralize U. S. soldiers. D'Aquino was the only U. S. citizen identified by that name. D'Aquino was born in Los Angeles to Japanese immigrant parents. She had graduated from UCLA just prior to the outbreak of World War II, and was visiting relatives in Japan when she became trapped in the country when war broke out. She worked odd jobs to support herself while trying to find a way out of the country. She started working on a Japanese Propaganda radio show manned by Allied prisoners, called "Zero Hour. " She later claimed that she was forced to broadcast Propaganda by her Japanese captors. When D'Aquino attempted to return to the U. S. in 1948, the right-wing American press went into an uproar. The relentless pressure brought to bear on the government resulted in her being put on trial for treason. Among the witnesses against her were two of her supervisors at Radio Tokyo and several U. S. soldiers who had heard the broadcasts, although those witnesses later admitted that they had couldn't remember if they had heard the actual broadcasts, and that they had been pressured to lie. D'Aquino, in her defense, said that the scripts for the broadcasts were written by U. S. and Australian POWs. She was found guilty of one count of treason (the seventh person to be convicted of treason in American history), fined $100,000, and sentenced to ten years in prison.