No one knows who invented the name, when it was first used, or even why a Japanese broadcaster should be dubbed 'Rose'--but two of the first American reporters in Occupied Japan, bent on finding "Tokyo Rose" at any cost, elicited the name of one of the women disk-jockeys on the popular Zero Hour program. Iva Toguri d'Aquino, foolishly, unfearingly let herself be styled, "the one and only Tokyo Rose." A UCLA-graduate, she had gone to Japan reluctantly in 1941 on family business. Red tape and dwindling funds prevented her from leaving, and an Australian journalist POW recruited her for the radio program. It's a startling story that Masayo Duus has uncovered almost by accident: Iva waited on her at the Toguri family store in Chicago in 1967, and the plain person didn't fit the sensational image. Iva ubbornly clung to her U.S. citizenship when the other nisei she knew recanted--else she could not have been tried for treason. D'Aquino served six years of a ten-year sentence in federal prison. In the 1970s, Japanese Americans convinced of her innocence began a movement that led to a presidential pardon in 1977.

No one knows who invented the name, when it was first used, or even why a Japanese broadcaster should be dubbed 'Rose'--but two of the first American reporters in Occupied Japan, bent on finding "Tokyo Rose" at any cost, elicited the name of one of the women disk-jockeys on the popular Zero Hour program. Iva Toguri d'Aquino, foolishly, unfearingly let herself be styled, "the one and only Tokyo Rose." A UCLA-graduate, she had gone to Japan reluctantly in 1941 on family business. Red tape and dwindling funds prevented her from leaving, and an Australian journalist POW recruited her for the radio program. It's a startling story that Masayo Duus has uncovered almost by accident: Iva waited on her at the Toguri family store in Chicago in 1967, and the plain person didn't fit the sensational image. Iva ubbornly clung to her U.S. citizenship when the other nisei she knew recanted--else she could not have been tried for treason. D'Aquino served six years of a ten-year sentence in federal prison. In the 1970s, Japanese Americans convinced of her innocence began a movement that led to a presidential pardon in 1977.

[A] dramatic, affecting account...—Publishers Weekly

Tokyo Rose / An American Patriot explores the parallel lives of World War II legend Tokyo Rose and a Japanese American woman named Iva Toguri. Trapped in Tokyo during the war and forced to broadcast on Japanese radio, Toguri nonetheless refused to renounce her U.S. citizenship and surreptitiously aided Allied POWs. Despite these patriotic actions, she foolishly identified herself to the press after the war as Tokyo Rose. This book assembles for the first time a collection of images from American pre-war popular culture that provided impetus for the legend. It explains how the wartime situation of servicemen caused their imaginations to create the mythical femme fatale even though no Japanese announcer ever used the name Tokyo Rose. Further, in spite of the fact that there was only one rather innocuous broadcast by a woman between December 1941 and April 1942, a news correspondent with the U.S. Navy reported in April 1942 that sailors in the Pacific theater routinely listened to Tokyo Rose's propaganda. Using interviews conducted over decades, this biography also explores Toguri's character and decisions by placing her story and conviction for treason in the context of U.S. and Japanese racial views, Imperial Japan, and Cold War politics. New research findings prompt a different perspective on her sensational trial, the most expensive in U.S. history up to that time. Misguided strategy by Toguri's defense attorney and her deceptive testimony about a key event led to the jury's verdict as surely as the perjury suborned by prosecutors. In addition to updated information, this expanded edition discusses Manila Rose, another Japanese broadcaster who lived in San Francisco in 1949 a few blocks from the courthouse where the federal government prosecuted Tokyo Rose. The U.S. Army misstated Manila Rose’s name to the public when it interviewed her in 1945. As a result historians have never turned up her files because they researched this incorrect name. Close discovered the FBI investigation from 1954 in the National Archives and is the first here to reveal the full story of Manila Rose, a woman whose real life parallels that of the fictional Tokyo Rose.

Iva Ikuku Toguri (1916-2006) was an American citizen, born on the 4th of July. Her parents, first-generation Japanese Americans, embraced their new nation and raised Iva to think, talk, and act like a patriotic American. But, despite her allegiance to the United States, she was forced to spend most of her adult life denying that she was a traitor or that she was World War II's infamous Tokyo Rose. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Iva was nursing an ailing aunt in Japan. Prevented from returning to home, she was viewed with suspicion by the Japanese authorities. They hounded her to renounce her American citizenship, which she adamantly refused to do. Pressured to find employment, she joined Radio Tokyo. Known as Orphan Ann, she did nothing more than emcee brief music segments on "The Zero Hour" during the war's last two years. She was never called "Tokyo Rose" by anyone and was but one of only a dozen or so English-speaking females heard on Japanese airwaves. In need of money to return home after the war, she made the mistake of allowing herself to be interviewed by two ambitious journalists who were certain that she was the Tokyo Rose, even though she denied it. The published story brought Iva to the attention of American authorities who tried and convicted Iva for treason, despite the lack of evidence and a reluctant jury. She was then stripped of her citizenship and sent to prison. Yasuhide Kawashima's account of Toguri's trials are deeply rooted in Japanese language sources, American legal archives, and the cultures of both nations. He identifies heroes and villains in both the United States and Japan and also highlights broader concerns: the internment of thousands of loyal Japanese Americans, the meaning of citizenship, the nation's commitment to the idea of fair trial, the impact of tabloid journalism, and the very concept of treason. Iva was eventually pardoned in 1977 by President Gerald Ford—she was the first person in U.S. history to be pardoned for treason—and had her citizenship restored. Yet when she died in 2006, obituaries continued to identify her as Tokyo Rose. Kafkaesque in its telling, Kawashima's tale provides a harsh reminder that the law does not always render justice.

A dramatic tale of how a little-remembered strike in Hawaii fanned the flames of anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States and, the author argues, ultimately led to the infamous Japanese Exclusion Act of 1924.

A puzzling tsunami entered Japanese history in January 1700. Samurai, merchants, and villagers wrote of minor flooding and damage. Some noted having felt no earthquake; they wondered what had set off the waves but had no way of knowing that the tsunami was spawned during an earthquake along the coast of northwestern North America. This orphan tsunami would not be linked to its parent earthquake until the mid-twentieth century, through an extraordinary series of discoveries in both North America and Japan. The Orphan Tsunami of 1700, now in its second edition, tells this scientific detective story through its North American and Japanese clues. The story underpins many of today�s precautions against earthquake and tsunami hazards in the Cascadia region of northwestern North America. The Japanese tsunami of March 2011 called attention to these hazards as a mirror image of the transpacific waves of January 1700. Hear Brian Atwater on NPR with Renee Montagne http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4629401