Iva Ikuko Toguri was born in Los Angeles, California, to Japanese immigrant parents.
Iva Ikuko Toguri was born on July 4, 1916, in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Japanese immigrants Jun and Fumi Toguri. Her birth on American Independence Day would later become a poignant symbol given the trial she faced decades later over questions of loyalty and citizenship.
Raised in a middle-class household, Iva was a Nisei — a second-generation Japanese American — and grew up thoroughly assimilated into American culture, attending local schools and eventually the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she studied zoology. She was raised as a practicing Methodist and considered herself, by upbringing and identity, fully American.
Her early life gave no indication of the extraordinary and unjust ordeal she would later face. The circumstances of her birth in the United States, and her deep identification with American culture, would become central to the eventual arguments both for and against her prosecution, and ultimately to the case for her exoneration. Her story stands as one of the most striking examples in American history of the intersection between wartime hysteria, racial prejudice, and due process.