Goodbye Tokyo RoseFollow

...although I never knew you at all. You had the grace to hold yourself while.. something, something... yadda yaddaI had an instructor over the summer who told us about how he met D'Aquino a few years ago. He was teaching in Chicago when a student said he had a suprise for him and to meet him at some coffeeshop. When the teacher got there, he was introduced to D'Aquino and she talked to him for a bit about how she was visiting family in Japan when the war broke out and was pretty much placed under arrest and not allowed to leave the country. From there, Japan put her to work eventually as an announcer on "The Zero Hour" where she reported in English on events back in the U.S. which the U.S. military media had censored, notably combat losses and that sort of thing.

When she was allowed to return home after the war, the anti-Japanese bias along the west coast was so strong that she and her husband moved to Chicago after a few years where she lived out the rest of her life.

I'm not attempting to defend her or anything; I know very little about the whole event aside from what my instructor told us and bits gleaned from popular culture over the years. Some called her a traitor, she claimed she was a young woman held by the Japanese army with little choice in the matter. In either event, I thought it was interesting that a little bit of WWII history was living a quiet, reserved life and has finally passed on some sixty years after the war.

At least her life merited an interesting obit, which is more than most. RIP.

Better get a shovel.