How a pair of perjuries after WWII ensnared 'Tokyo Rose'

As World War II ended in the summer of 1945, journalists went looking for the siren of the Pacific in the ruins of bombed-out Tokyo.

- BY CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD

Associated Press

IVA TOGURI D'AQUINO looks out from her cell in Yokohama, Japan, in 1945.

They were hunting for “Tokyo Rose,” the owner of a voice that sought to sap military morale by spreading propaganda through countless scratchy Allied radios.

Her identity was a mystery, and journalists rushed to uncover it. They found a soft-spoken woman from Los Angeles who loved America.

Her name was Iva Toguri D’Aquino, and she was born in Watts to Japanese parents in 1916 and had a degree in zoology from UCLA. She wanted to be a doctor. But she traveled to Tokyo in 1941 to care for a sick aunt, with disastrous timing. She made the trip without a passport, which doomed her desperate efforts to board a ship home as the war erupted.

She was trapped in a country not her own and hounded by police who were suspicious of her loyalty because she refused to renounce her American citizenship. Neighbors and authorities harassed her relatives for harboring her; she moved out to spare them further pain.

She could not read Japanese and spoke it spottily. But she found a job as a typist at Radio Tokyo, which enlisted POWs in its propaganda division and recruited her in late 1943 as a disc jockey.

In a melodic, chirpy voice, speaking in unaccented American English and calling herself Orphan Ann, D'Aquino did hundreds of broadcasts for a news and music show called "Zero Hour." She would address the troops as "My boneheads in the South Pacific.

She was "a betrayer of her native land and a betrayer of her government in time of need," a federal prosecutor would say. She was a "turncoat and a female Benedict Arnold.'