government, and received no answer from repeated presidential pardon requests. She was forced to fight off a deportation order from the U.S. She reunited with her family, settled in Chicago and began working as an employee at her father business, but her reputation as “Tokyo Rose” continued to follow her. Toguri ultimately spent six years in a women’s prison in West Virginia before being released early in 1956. She would remain in custody for over a year until a government investigation concluded that her broadcasts had been nothing more than “innocuous” entertainment. Once her identity became public, Toguri was made into the poster child for Japan’s wartime propaganda and was arrested on suspicion of treason. It would prove to be a disastrous decision. She remained in dire financial straits, however, so when two American reporters arrived in Japan and offered $2,000 for an interview with the famous “Tokyo Rose,” she naively stepped forward to recount her story. By then, she had married a Portuguese-Japanese man named Filipe D’Aquino and was looking to return home. Toguri performed her “Orphan Ann” character on the “Zero Hour” for roughly a year and a half, but she appeared with less frequency in the lead-up to the Japanese surrender in August 1945. “Hers was so persuasive a myth that for most Americans she was as famous a Japanese as Emperor Hirohito,” journalist John Leggett later wrote in the New York Times. None of the announcers-Toguri included-had ever used the moniker, yet the character became legendary. There were dozens of other English-speaking women who read propaganda, and at least some of them adopted a more sinister tone.Īs the war dragged on, American servicemen began referring to the different female voices by a single, infamous nickname: Tokyo Rose.

The surviving recordings and transcripts of Toguri’s programs indicate that she never threatened her listeners with bombings or taunted them about their wives being unfaithful-two favorite strategies of wartime propagandists-but she wasn’t Japan’s only lady announcer. Talking to Ghosts: How Two Sisters' Hoax Sparked a Spiritualism Craze

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