The Tokyo Rose Case: Treason on Trial

Editors' Preface

{ ix } editors’ preface Stories of palpable injustice, particularly when the victim is sympathetic, have the power to both move our emotions and rouse our indignation. The trials of Iva Ikuko Toguri d’Aquino in Japan, as an American citizen trapped during World War II, and in the United States, after she returned , fit this description. A woman of valor mistreated by both of the warring nations during and after—long after—the conflict was over, is now shown in her true colors by Yasuhide Kawashima. “Tokyo Rose,” the name that Americans gave her, never really fit, but when she finally departed Tokyo, she found that American justice was no fairer to her than Japanese officialdom. Kawashima’s account is deeply rooted in the Japanese language sources, to which he had unparalleled access, the American legal sources, which he fully exploited, and the cultures of both nations. Because of his multicultural heritage, his thorough research, and his abiding commitment to justice in this case, he pulls no punches. There are heroes and villains aplenty, in both the United States and Japan: prosecutors who sought to build careers on her conviction for voluntarily betraying her country, defense counsel who braved public censure to prove her innocence of treason , and above all ordinary men and women who befriended her because of her personal qualities. In 1977, Iva was finally pardoned by President Gerald Ford, an act of belated grace for which both houses of the California legislature and the city governments of San Francisco and Los Angeles, among others, had pleaded. Los Angeles’s act was especially moving, in light of the city’s 1948 resolution that she not be allowed to return from Japan. Interwoven in Iva’s story are larger ones—of the internment of thousands of loyal Japanese Americans during the war; of the meaning of citizenship and the nation ’s commitment to the ideal of fair trial; and of the place that tabloid journalism has in our culture. Yet first and foremost, Iva’s story is hers—a story that Yasuhide Kawashima has been waiting to tell for many years. No one will read it and come away unimpressed. ...