Author Talk: Evelyn Iritani discusses "Safe Passage"

As debates over detention and deportation play out today on America’s streets and in its courtrooms, this program looks back at a chapter from WWII with disturbing parallels to the present — when the U.S. and Japan quietly negotiated the exchange of civilians trapped behind enemy lines.

In the fall of 1943, during some of the Pacific theater’s bloodiest fighting, the United States and Japan pulled off a diplomatic coup: the exchange of civilians caught on the wrong side of the battlefield after Pearl Harbor. Nearly fifteen hundred Allied civilians trapped in Asia, mostly Americans, were traded for an equivalent number of Japanese immigrants and their families sent from the Americas.

In her widely acclaimed book "Safe Passage", Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Evelyn Iritani reveals the dramatic efforts of U.S. and Japanese officials to engineer these wartime exchanges, and the moral compromises required to bring innocent civilians home. Faced with too few bodies to trade, the United States rounded up Japanese immigrants from Latin America and shipped them north to be used as hostages, while Japanese held in U.S. camps and prisons — most of them U.S. citizens — were forced to choose between expulsion to a war zone or an uncertain future behind barbed wire. This little-known chapter of WWII carries disturbing echoes of the present moment.

About the presenters:

Evelyn Iritani is the author of "Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians in WWII" (FSG March 2026) and "An Ocean Between Us: The Changing Relationship of Japan and the United States, Told in Four Stories from the Life of an American Town" (William Morrow and Company Inc. 1994). A former reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Los Angeles Times, her reporting earned numerous awards, including the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series she coauthored on Walmart.

Mayumi Tsutakawa is an independent writer and editor. She often speaks on the history of Japanese Americans in Washington State and writes about artists of color. Previously, Mayumi was head of the grants program at the Washington State Arts Commission. She has edited several multicultural anthologies including "The Forbidden Stitch: Asian American Women's Literary Anthology" (Calyx Books).

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