You heard her voice in the introduction to Seijigiri #3 and a song mocking her close Seijigiri #4, you’ve heard the pseudonym she never used, and that no one ever used for that matter, you’ve probably even heard some stories. Hell, you probably even know or have met someone who claims to have heard her nonexistent alter ego. You may not have heard her name, though, which is a shame because what happened to her should be a lesson to us all on both sides of the Pacific.

Her name was Iva Ikuko Toguri D’Aquino, born in Los Angeles on the Fourth of July in 1916, she visited a sick aunt in Japan in the summer of 1941, was still here when Pearl Harbor was bombed, got stuck in Japan, where she barely spoke the language, and wound up on Radio Tokyo, from which she broadcasted as “Orphan Ann” in a show filled with double-meanings and sarcasm. (”We’re ready now for a vicious assault on your morale.” Come on! Who does propaganda like that? Someone who doesn’t believe in what she’s doing, that’s who.)

After the War, she was paid by a magazine to say she was the famous (she thought) “Tokyo Rose,” only to wind up in prison stripped of her American citizenship for being the infamous Tokyo Rose. Released in 1946 after the Justice Department and GHQ decided they had nothing on her, she was only able to return to the US when she was dragged to San Francisco in 1949 to face charges in a case reopened by the Justice Department. When she got out of prison a little over six years later, she had lost her husband (she never saw him after her arrest), her mother (she died on the way to an American internment camp for people of Japanese descent during the War), and found herself fighting deportation. (She was born in Los Angeles.)

She was pardoned, without comment, by President Gerald Ford in his last act before leaving the White House in 1977.

She died at the age of 90.

TPR has long wanted to put out a documentary on Mrs. Toguri D’Aquino, or at least release the recordings of hers that Ken Worsley has collected. It looks like now is the time. Check back here for more.

In the meantime, please click on the links in this post for more information. There’s a moral in her story of which we still need to be reminded.