Yasuhide Kawashima - The Tokyo Rose Case: Treason on Trial

The Tokyo Rose Case

landmark law cases
&
american society

Peter Charles Hoffer
N. E. H. Hull
Series Editors

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YASUHIDE KAWASHIMA

The Tokyo Rose Case

_____________________

Treason on Trial

_____________________

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KANSAS

2013 by the University Press of Kansas

All rights reserved

Published by the University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas 66045 ), which was organized by the Kansas Board of Regents and is operated and funded by Emporia State University, Fort Hays State University, Kansas State University, Pittsburg State University, the University of Kansas, and Wichita State University

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kawashima, Yasuhide, 1931

The Tokyo Rose case : treason on trial / Yasuhide Kawashima.

pages cm.(Landmark law cases & American society)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN -- 7006 - 1904 - (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN -- 7006 - 1905 - (paperback : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-7006-1979-5 (ebook) . Tokyo Rose, 1916 2006 Trials, litigation, etc.

. Trials (Treason)CaliforniaSan Francisco. I. Title.

KF.TK 2013

. 0231 dc

2012049234

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available.

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication is recycled and contains percent postconsumer waste.

It is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z.- 1992 .

For A. Russell Buchanan

Alexander DeConde

Wilbur R. Jacobs

Otey M. Scruggs

CONTENTS

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 dAquino 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 afterlong afterthe 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.

Kawashimas 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 Angeless act was especially moving, in light of the citys 1948 resolution that she not be allowed to return from Japan. Interwoven in Ivas story are larger onesof the internment of thousands of loyal Japanese Americans during the war; of the meaning of citizenship and the nations commitment to the ideal of fair trial; and of the place that tabloid journalism has in our culture. Yet first and foremost, Ivas story is hersa story that Yasuhide Kawashima has been waiting to tell for many years. No one will read it and come away unimpressed.

preface and acknowledgments

Iva Ikuko Toguri dAquino, American-born but infamously identified in history books as the traitorous Tokyo Rose, found herself living in Tokyo during World War II, arguably the worst period of the citys history. I had a similar experience, living through both the war and early postwar period, first in Nagasaki and then in Tokyo. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, I and many other teenagers were working in the mountains only thirty miles from the city, tapping resin (matsuyani) from pine trees for conversion into turpentine. The Japanese government was making desperate efforts to convert such fluids into airplane fuel, and we were responding to the order of government officials who had a vise-grip on our lives in the service of the Emperor.

Word spread immediately after the bomb struck Nagasaki, but I did not go back to the city until four months later. When I did I was appalled by the extent of the destruction this lone new-style bomb had inflicted. Although the B- had actually missed its target, thus destroying only half of the city, it left in its wake desolate ruins. The devastation was so complete that very little remained; the heights where charming school buildings and houses had once stood had in an instant turned into bare hills, and the sections that formerly contained hospitals and other public buildings and busy, prosperous streets had become darkened, empty fields. Nothing seemed to have been spared. On top of that, the radiation damage, we were told, would be incalculable while remaining at the same time insidiously invisible to us.