Trapped while visiting Japan at the start of World War II, U.S. citizen Iva Toguri became known to millions by a radio handle she never used: Tokyo Rose, the "siren of the Pacific" whose broadcasts were meant to demoralize American servicemen fighting in the Pacific theater.
But there was one problem: A single Tokyo Rose didn't exist. U.S. servicemen branded any English-speaking female radio broadcaster of Japanese propaganda with the name, and there were at least a dozen.
Forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur's command and the U.S. Justice Department independently concluded that Toguri had committed no crime. Yet the Los Angeles native was the only Tokyo Rose to be prosecuted. She was convicted of treason in 1949 and served more than six years in prison.
Two decades later, journalists revisited her story and helped clear her name, painting her as a victim of racism and wartime hysteria.
"They wound up prosecuting the myth instead of the person," said Bill Kurtis, the broadcast journalist whose 1969 documentary for CBS, "The Story of Tokyo Rose," first told Toguri's side of the story.
Toguri, who received a presidential pardon in 1977, died Tuesday of complications of old age at Advocate Illinois Masonic Hospital in Chicago, said Barbara Trembley, a family spokeswoman. She was 90.
She had lived to see herself hailed as a hero by former servicemen who wanted to right "a grotesque miscarriage of justice," said James Roberts, president of the World War II Veterans Committee.
At a private ceremony in January in Chicago, Toguri wept when she received the veterans' Edward J. Herlihy Citizenship Award -- named for the radio broadcaster known for narrating World War II newsreels.
She called it "the most memorable day of my life."
Those who tell her story like to point out that she was born on the Fourth of July, 1916. Raised by Japanese immigrants in a predominantly white neighborhood in Compton, she spoke almost no Japanese. She attended a Methodist church, was a Girl Scout, loved big bands and hated sushi.
A month after graduating from UCLA with a degree in zoology in June 1941, she was sent to Japan to care for her mother's dying sister. Her mother, who was too ill to travel, died the next year on her way to a Japanese American internment camp. Near the end of Toguri's planned six-month stay, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
