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Iva was denied parole whenever she became eligible for it, on the advice of the FBI and Justice Department, but earned an early release after serving six years and two months of her sentence, having accumulated 1,200 days of "meritorious good time". News of her early release sparked a renewed public outcry, and as she walked free on 28 January 1956, she was handed a deportation notice, ordering her back to Japan.
Iva was denied parole whenever she became eligible for it, on the advice of the FBI and Justice Department, but earned an early release after serving six years and two months of her sentence, having accumulated 1,200 days of "meritorious good time". News of her early release sparked a renewed public outcry, and as she walked free on 28 January 1956, she was handed a deportation notice, ordering her back to Japan.
==Aftermath and Vindication==
It took two years for her attorney, Wayne Mortimer Collins, who had originally defended her at her trial, to successfully oppose the deportation order, during which time Iva lived under his roof. Happy that the nightmare was finally over, Iva moved to Chicago to be with her family again and disappeared from the public eye.
Although she had gone to ground, people were starting to speak up on her behalf. Among the first of these was the former AP Japanese Bureau Chief, Rex Gunn. Later, Petitions for a Presidential Pardon were filed with the Eisenhower administration in 1954, the Johnson administration in 1968, and the Nixon/Ford administration in 1976.
Although the first two applications were unsuccessful, new evidence came to light, which led to the 1976 application. Ron Yates, a [[Chicago Tribune]] correspondent in Tokyo from 1974 to 1977, had been reviewing her case, since a reader's letter had informed him that "Tokyo Rose" was living in Chicago. As he read the documentation, he became increasingly aware that something did not seem right with the way the trial had been conducted. As he said in a later interview, "The evidence and the trial itself didn't seem to be done in the right way. If you take it out of the context of the time, you think, 'Why didn't anybody see this?' Well, at the time, three years after the war, 1948, there was a lot of hatred toward the Japanese. A lot of people had lost sons and mothers and fathers. You could kind of get some sense about why she was being prosecuted. But even so, even when you allow for the temper of the time, there seemed to be something wrong."
Now based in Tokyo, Yates tracked down two of the men who had testified against Iva during her trial. Kenkichi Oki and George Mitsushio, both California-born ''nisei'', had been Iva's superiors at Radio Tokyo at the time of the broadcasts. Yates was amazed when both men broke down and said they had lied when they testified that Iva had made treasonous comments on-air, following the Battle of Leyte Gulf. They now insisted she had done nothing of the sort and that their testimony had been coerced from them by members of the FBI and Justice Department. Out of fear, they had given in and perjured themselves.
Armed with this new information, "60 Minutes" broadcast a segment highlighting the plight of Iva Toguri D'Aquino, and the movement to have Iva pardoned became public knowledge. A third application was successful and President Ford, as one of his last acts in office, signed the Presidential Pardon on 19 January 1977. At the same time, her U.S. citizenship was restored to her.
Iva and Felipe d’Aquino were divorced in 1980, never having seen each other since she was shipped off to the U.S. in 1948. Iva refused to leave the U.S. again, fearing that if she did, she would not be allowed back in. Felipe, meanwhile, was forbidden entry as he had been declared "an undesirable alien".
Iva Ikuko Toguri D'Aquino passed away in Chicago on 26 September, 2006.
==Bibliography==
==Bibliography==