Book Talk - "Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II"

Join the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture for a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Evelyn Iritani as she discusses her new book, Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II. The book is an immensely moving untold story of idealism, deception and behind-the-scenes diplomacy between the US and Japan.

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About the book
In the fall of 1943, despite fighting some of the Pacific's bloodiest battles, 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, sailed through dangerous waters to an Indian port city where they were traded for an equivalent number of Japanese immigrants and their families sent from the Americas.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Evelyn Iritani has spent over ten years researching and interviewing family members and survivors of the exchange. On the ships were Emily Hahn, the sharp-tongued New Yorker writer and her illegitimate daughter by lover Charles Boxer, now imprisoned as a British spy; Don Hasuike, a Japanese American teenager who loved baseball and the Green Hornet radio show, being shipped to a country he'd never seen; and Daniel Brooke McKinnon, an American missionary and teacher with a deep love of Japan and a wife he was forced to leave behind.

For so many, the battle lines of their hearts did not align with their passports as government officials made judgment calls that reverberated across time. Faced with too few bodies to trade and desperate to free Americans from perilous conditions, the United States uprooted and traded Japanese immigrants from Latin America, often against their will, while Japanese imprisoned in camps —many of them American citizens—were forced to choose between expulsion to a war zone or an uncertain future behind barbed wire.

Safe Passage tells us important things about belonging, migration, and the hurdles to pursuing humanitarian action in wartime.

About the Author

Evelyn Iritani is the author of An Ocean Between Us: The Changing Relationship of Japan and the United States Told in Four Stories from the Life of an American Town. A former reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Los Angeles Times, her reporting garnered numerous awards, including the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting on global economic issues and the George Polk Award.