Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World - Ann Shen (2016)

Iva Toguri D’Aquino

In a clear case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Iva Toguri D’Aquino (1916-2006) was an American citizen who was stranded in Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in World War II. When she refused to renounce her U.S. citizenship, she and other captured POWs were forced to work at Radio Tokyo, a station that broadcast in English to the Allied troops in the South Pacific. D’Aquino was soon a minor celebrity, with thousands of GIs tuning in to her show, The Zero Hour. She performed comedy sketches, played pop songs, and delivered Japanese war propaganda intended to lower the morale of the soldiers, but with a tongue-in-cheek attitude that demonstrated she was not a Japanese sympathizer. Her reports actually raised the morale of the U.S. army soldiers. “Tokyo Rose” was a moniker that the soldiers came up with to put a name to the seductive and mysterious female voice on the radio. It became most closely tied to D’Aquino after the war, when the United States charged her with eight counts of treason upon her return. She served six years in prison. But in 1976 a reporter investigated further into her case and unearthed two witnesses who admitted they had committed perjury under threat from the FBI that they would be charged with treason themselves if they didn’t turn her in. The following year, President Ford granted D’Aquino a full pardon.