Nine years after graduating from UCLA, Iva Toguri D’Aquino became the seventh person to be convicted of treason against the United States, charged with disloyalty for her presence as a radio personality on a Japanese station during World War II.

When she was tried in San Francisco in 1949, people lined up around the block to watch the proceedings, said Naoko Shibusawa, a professor of history at Brown University.

A graduate of the UCLA class of 1940, she was known commonly as Tokyo Rose, her Japanese radio personality, while she identified herself as Orphan Ann. She died of natural causes at age 90 on Tuesday as Iva Toguri D’Aquino.

She consistently maintained that she was innocent of any disloyalty against the United States.

It took nearly 20 years – six of those spent in prison – and requests aimed at three different presidents before the charges were repealed after it was proven that the claims against her were fabricated and two primary witnesses had lied, said Lane Hirabayashi, Aratani-endowed chair in the Asian American studies department at UCLA, who referred to her simply as Toguri or Iva Toguri.

On his last day in office in 1977, President Gerald Ford granted D’Aquino a pardon.

D’Aquino was an American citizen born and educated in Southern California who found herself stuck in Japan without a passport after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

Unable to return to the U.S., D’Aquino took a job at NHK, the state-run Japanese radio station, which broadcast anti-American propaganda to U.S. soldiers stationed in the Pacific.

There she became the infamous Tokyo Rose.

“She was the radio announcer who introduced songs,” said Shibusawa, who recently wrote a book titled “America’s Geisha Ally,” which includes a chapter on Tokyo Rose.

Shibusawa said D’Aquino had a sweet, all-American voice that enraptured men.

“GIs started this idea of a seductress siren calling out, ... talking to them, telling them their ship is going to sink, their wives aren’t being faithful,” Shibusawa said.

D’Aquino’s role as a so-called propagandist for the Japanese cause was publicized in a Cosmopolitan article after the war, and when she returned to the United States she was arrested and tried for treason.

Though the character of Tokyo Rose was actually several different women who spoke over NHK during the war, they were all distilled into the body of D’Aquino.

But there was much more behind D’Aquino’s conviction than words broadcast over Japanese airwaves.

Post-war hysteria, ethnic prejudice, Cold-War fear and mainstream views of femininity played into her conviction, Shibusawa said.

“There’s this idea of this Asian, Oriental seductress weakening men’s wills,” Shibusawa said, adding that during the trial much of the news coverage included descriptions of her appearance, the way she carried herself, and other descriptions not often applied to men.

The conviction came at a time when there was suspicion of foreigners – especially Japanese – and people were looking for someone to punish.

She was “a scapegoat because of prejudice and the (wartime) hysteria,” Hirabayashi said.

Though there may not currently be public trials of young women charged with treason, Hirabayashi said the times are not so different as they might seem.

“Reading about the Toguri case again this morning reminded me that the wartime situation is one where the loyalty of ethnic minorities can be questioned,” he said.

“Today, with the war and with everything going on in the Middle East and deployed soldiers over there, there’s kind of been a return to the 1940s, where people are sometimes suspicious of ethnic minorities and their loyalty to the United States,” he added.

D’Aquino’s appeal, which was granted after she had attempted three times to gain the sympathy of an American president, was also partially a product of the times, Hirabayashi said.

The appeal was granted during the same years as the Japanese community was gaining redress and reparations – an official apology from the U.S. for the mass incarcerations during the war years and monetary compensation, he said.

“This is post-civil-rights, ... post-feminism,” Hirabayashi said. “All the sorts of social-justice movements (were) happening so there was a sense of a need to redress grievances,” Shibusawa said.

D’Aquino spent the years following her release from prison in Chicago, the Associated Press reported. But though she was pardoned in the end, Shibusawa said the ordeal had a very big impact on her life – she lost her husband and miscarried during the period immediately after her return to the United States.

“It’s a really sad story actually, to tell you the truth,” Shibusawa said.

With reports from Bruin wire services.