During WWII a Japanese - American girl named Ikuko Toguri broadcast messages from Tokyo to American troops in the South Pacific. The intent was to lower the morale of US troops.

She was actually born in Los Angeles on July 4, 1916 and went by the name of Iva. She had gone all the way through college and obtained a degree in Zoology from the University of California [1940]. She sailed to Japan in 1941 but failed to take out a passport at the time of her departure. She was in the process of getting one issued through the State Department when the war broke out. Stuck in Tokyo, she applied for repatriation through the Swiss embassy but changed her mind and decided to wait out the war in Japan. While there, she worked for a news agency and then as a typist for Radio Tokyo. In November of 1943, she began her broadcasts called Zero Hour which eventually got her tried for treason in 1948 and sentenced to 10 years in prison. After serving a little over 6 years, she was released. The US government then tried to deport her but they were unsuccessful. She was pardoned by Gerald Ford in 1977 and was last known to be living in the Chicago area. Up until that time, she was only the 7th person convicted of treason by the US. (When she was in Tokyo in 1945, she married a Portuguese-Japanese man named Felipe D’Aquino.)

Many WWII flicks had scenes showing US troops listening to Tokyo Rose and joking about her.