Tokyo Rose Dies at 90

Posted on Sep 28, 2006

U.S. National Archives

The woman known as “Tokyo Rose” has died at the age of 90, almost 60 years after she was imprisoned for broadcasting propaganda messages to U.S. soldiers in WWII.  Pardoned in 1977, the Japanese-American Iva Toguri never agreed to renounce her citizenship, and was convicted of treason in a sham trial in 1949.

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BBC:

Iva Toguri was born in Los Angeles in 1916, the daughter of Japanese immigrant parents.

She attended college in the US but was left stranded in Japan, where she was visiting an ill relative, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour led to war in the Pacific.

Unable to speak Japanese, and with anti-American sentiments running high in the country at the time, she answered an advert for a job as an English-language typist with Radio Tokyo.

She eventually moved onto work on a propaganda programme called Zero Hour.

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