Iva Ikuko Toguri Research Papers

Iva Ikuko Toguri was born on July 4, 1916, in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. Her parents, who were first-generation Japanese Americans, loved and embraced their new nation as they raised Iva along with her brother and sisters to talk, think, and act like patriotic Americans. But despite Toguri 's strong allegiance to the United States, she spent most of her adult life denying that she was a traitor to her country or that she was the notorious Tokyo Rose. Except there was no such thing as "Tokyo Rose" -- initially. Nowhere in any broadcast script or from any voice on the radio had the name been mentioned until reporters had started looking for it and the person to which it was attached. The name was merely a GI invention that had caught

After graduating from UCLA in the spring of 1941, she had postponed her plans for graduate studies that summer to instead visit her sick aunt in Tokyo in place of her ill mother. During that same summer, relations between the United States and Japan were rapidly worsening, so any requests from Japanese Americans to travel to Japan were seen as suspicious by the U.S. government. As a result of this suspicion, Toguri 's application for a passport was handled slowly. Being a Japanese American, this lengthy wait-time would make sense, but Toguri was an American-born nisei (second generation Japanese American) that was about as American as she possibly could be, casting away nearly all Japanese traditions and policies. She was already upset about having to go to a country she never wanted to set foot on, but surely more so after being discriminated against as a potentially unfaithful American. By the time she had left on July 1, 1941, "she had only a certificate of identity and instructions from the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Los Angeles to collect her passport from the American consulate general in Yokohama."2 She, of course, would not receive

Given the opportunity and privilege as a POW to use creative license on the radio show "Zero Hour," Major Cousens decided he would have to destroy Japan 's radio program from the inside. He was given permission by Mitsushio to choose who would be next on the "Zero Hour" program: a female disc jockey. Cousens needed to be sure he could trust this woman 's loyalty to the Allies, along with making sure she did not have a voice fit for radio, so it would be easier to mask the Japanese propaganda being spread throughout the South Pacific using her verbal implications. Cousens chose Iva Toguri because of her raspy voice (much to the confusion of fellow POWs working on the show), and also because she was just as loyal to the United States as he was to Great Britain and Australia, so he believed she would understand his scheme against their common enemy. When they met, she was skeptical about having been chosen out of a pool of much more qualified announcers, but Cousens assured her she had been picked for a specific reason. Russell Warren Howe explains, "Cousens wanted and got … a voice that would not be so absurd as to be ordered off the air by Japanese radio supervisors, but one that was clearly not intended to be taken seriously as that of a romantic deejay by the GIs in the Pacific islands."5 The major told Toguri and only Toguri about his plan to sabotage the radio program. Her part in the show would be first and foremost as an entertainment announcer, complete with