The Tokyo Rose Case by Yasuhide Kawashima

Author:Yasuhide Kawashima
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780700619795
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2016-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

chapter 8

The Defense Rebuttal

If I got on the witness stand and told only the truth, then the truth would win, I thought. My family was very worried when I took the witness stand. But I wasn’t all that worried. I did not feel the least bit as though I had betrayed America. If I had felt that way, I wouldn’t have stood up in court. I would have run away to Lisbon. I had the chance to do so.

iva toguri d’aquino’s interview with masayo duus, May 20, 1976, quoted in Duus, Tokyo Rose (1979), 203

The defense’s opening statement was delivered by Theodore Tamba on August 13. In his forty-minute speech, Tamba pointed out that the prosecution had tried to prove that the defendant not only had the will to commit the act but committed the act with the intent to betray her country. He then insisted that the defense was going to show that Iva did not have any treasonous intent and that she had broadcast “under threat and duress.”

As a matter of fact, the prosecution had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Iva had committed treasonable acts in her broadcasting. They did not prove in the witnesses’ testimony that Iva broadcast with the intention to betray her country despite their pledge at the outset in their opening, nor were they successful in identifying her, beyond a reasonable doubt, as the announcer of the statement set forth in the indictment and the voice the GIs were supposed to have heard in the Pacific. Since the defendant had a presumption of innocence, the defense did not have to prove anything. The only thing they had to do was to destroy as effectively as possible the credibility of the prosecution’s arguments and evidence presented in court.

The main defense witnesses were the three former POWs who worked on the “Zero Hour” program. The first witness called to the stand was Charles H. Cousens, who had been previously cleared by an Australian court and voluntarily came from Australia to testify, paying most of his own expenses. Cousens, who had been a war prisoner of the Japanese for almost four years, tried to establish the groundwork for a defense plea of duress by describing the scene on the deck at Singapore in March 1942 and what had befallen a fellow soldier:

The word got around amongst the boys that he was starving and had rushed in and had tried to snatch a can of food from a Japanese soldier. . . . They threw him to the ground and put his head under a tap so that as he drew breath and screamed, he drew water into his lungs. And then they drew him away, and he got up and they proceeded to beat him again, and then they put him under the tap again. . . . Eventually, they put him under the tap, and I suppose he clenched his teeth because they broke his face open on the tap, turned the water on, drowned him, and threw the body away.

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