U.S. President Gerald Ford pardons Iva Toguri D'Aquino (Tokyo Rose) on January 19, 1977, a Japanese-American broadcaster from Japan to U.S. troops during World War II, who, after the war, was convicted of treason and served six years in a U.S. prison. Decades later, it was revealed that key witnesses had been coached by the FBI to lie under oath. President Gerald Ford granted her a full presidential pardon, acknowledging the injustice of her conviction.
"Tokyo Rose" was imagined as a single, seductive female traitor by GIs, a legend fueled by media and their own homesickness. In reality "Tokyo Rose" was the collective nickname given by Allied soldiers to several English-speaking women who broadcast Japanese propaganda during WWII. Iva Toguri D'Aquino, was born in Los Angeles in 1916 and was a UCLA graduate, Toguri was visiting an ill aunt in Japan when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred in 1941 and she was stranded in Japan and forced to work as a radio announcer for the Zero Hour program. After the war, she was falsely identified as the "one and only" Tokyo Rose by journalists and others.
