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Authors: Gordon Kerr
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judge, Michael Mukasey, dismissed her speech as ‘simply incredible’. Evidence at the trial, he said, had shown conclusively that she was a leader of a ring that took millions of dollars from hopeful immigrants, transported them in inhumane and dangerous conditions, and used violent gangsters to collect debts and ransom.
He gave Sister Ping the maximum penalty allowed by law, thirty-five years imprisonment. She has so far been unable to smuggle herself out of prison and is currently incarcerated in Danbury in Connecticut, due for release in 2030.
Tokyo Rose
It was the most expensive court case in United States criminal history, costing $750,000 and taking sixty-one days to get through all the witnesses and evidence. Even then, the jury failed to reach a verdict. The judge, however, was not having it and insisted that they arrived at a verdict. Eventually, Tokyo Rose – Iva Toguri D’Aquino – was cleared of seven charges of treason and convicted of one – speaking ‘into a microphone concerning the loss of ships’.
She was sentenced to ten years in prison and fined $10,000 a large sum of money in those days. At last they had punished Tokyo Rose. There was just one small problem, however. She was not really Tokyo Rose. In fact, no one was.
There were around twenty women broadcasting Japanese propaganda over the airwaves to American troops serving in the Far East during the Second World War, American, Ruth Hayakawa and Canadian, June Suyama – the ‘Nightingale of Nanking’ – among them. Iva Toguri, as she had been named when she first arrived in Japan from the United States, had been a secretary at Radio Tokyo, but had been cajoled into appearing for twenty minutes every day, telling GIs to ‘be good’ and openly calling the programme, The Zero Hour on which she appeared, ‘another chapter of free propaganda’.
But Iva was not a natural radio star. She had been born Ikuko Toguri in Los Angeles in 1916, and would later anglicise her name, changing it to Iva. At the University of California at Los Angeles, she studied zoology, graduating in 1941, not long before America entered the war.
After graduating, she decided to travel to Japan, for reasons that have never been entirely clear. She has claimed that she was going to visit a sick aunt, but has also stated that she was going to study medicine. For some reason, she failed to obtain a passport before embarking on her journey and travelled on a Certificate of Identification issued by the US State Department. She set sail from San Pedro in California and arrived in July. Once there, she made efforts to obtain a passport so that she could return to her homeland as a permanent resident. Five months later, however, before a decision was made concerning her case, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States declared war on Japan.
Iva was now trapped in Japan with no hope of obtaining a passport or any means of getting back to America. Moreover, her Japanese was poor. She asked the Japanese authorities to intern her with other aliens – she was a United States citizen, after all, and refused to renounce her citizenship – but her requests were repeatedly denied.
She resigned herself to trying to earn a living and seeing out the war in Japan, giving piano lessons and trying to improve her Japanese by taking lessons at a Japanese language school. In 1942, she was given a job as a typist at a news agency before, in 1943, becoming a typist at Radio Tokyo.
The Japanese broadcast a number of radio programmes during the war that featured Allied prisoners of war reading the news, playing music and delivering messages from POWs in Japanese camps to their families back home and to troops still engaged in the war in the Pacific theatre. The objective was to demoralise and destabilise the troops and damage morale in the Allied war effort.
The Zero Hour was the first of these. It was dreamed up by Major Shigetsugu Tsuneishi who was a member
He gave Sister Ping the maximum penalty allowed by law, thirty-five years imprisonment. She has so far been unable to smuggle herself out of prison and is currently incarcerated in Danbury in Connecticut, due for release in 2030.
Tokyo Rose
It was the most expensive court case in United States criminal history, costing $750,000 and taking sixty-one days to get through all the witnesses and evidence. Even then, the jury failed to reach a verdict. The judge, however, was not having it and insisted that they arrived at a verdict. Eventually, Tokyo Rose – Iva Toguri D’Aquino – was cleared of seven charges of treason and convicted of one – speaking ‘into a microphone concerning the loss of ships’.
She was sentenced to ten years in prison and fined $10,000 a large sum of money in those days. At last they had punished Tokyo Rose. There was just one small problem, however. She was not really Tokyo Rose. In fact, no one was.
There were around twenty women broadcasting Japanese propaganda over the airwaves to American troops serving in the Far East during the Second World War, American, Ruth Hayakawa and Canadian, June Suyama – the ‘Nightingale of Nanking’ – among them. Iva Toguri, as she had been named when she first arrived in Japan from the United States, had been a secretary at Radio Tokyo, but had been cajoled into appearing for twenty minutes every day, telling GIs to ‘be good’ and openly calling the programme, The Zero Hour on which she appeared, ‘another chapter of free propaganda’.
But Iva was not a natural radio star. She had been born Ikuko Toguri in Los Angeles in 1916, and would later anglicise her name, changing it to Iva. At the University of California at Los Angeles, she studied zoology, graduating in 1941, not long before America entered the war.
After graduating, she decided to travel to Japan, for reasons that have never been entirely clear. She has claimed that she was going to visit a sick aunt, but has also stated that she was going to study medicine. For some reason, she failed to obtain a passport before embarking on her journey and travelled on a Certificate of Identification issued by the US State Department. She set sail from San Pedro in California and arrived in July. Once there, she made efforts to obtain a passport so that she could return to her homeland as a permanent resident. Five months later, however, before a decision was made concerning her case, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States declared war on Japan.
Iva was now trapped in Japan with no hope of obtaining a passport or any means of getting back to America. Moreover, her Japanese was poor. She asked the Japanese authorities to intern her with other aliens – she was a United States citizen, after all, and refused to renounce her citizenship – but her requests were repeatedly denied.
She resigned herself to trying to earn a living and seeing out the war in Japan, giving piano lessons and trying to improve her Japanese by taking lessons at a Japanese language school. In 1942, she was given a job as a typist at a news agency before, in 1943, becoming a typist at Radio Tokyo.
The Japanese broadcast a number of radio programmes during the war that featured Allied prisoners of war reading the news, playing music and delivering messages from POWs in Japanese camps to their families back home and to troops still engaged in the war in the Pacific theatre. The objective was to demoralise and destabilise the troops and damage morale in the Allied war effort.
The Zero Hour was the first of these. It was dreamed up by Major Shigetsugu Tsuneishi who was a member
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