Evelyn Iritani: Safe Passage — The Secret WWII Civilian Exchange
Pulitzer-winning journalist Evelyn Iritani uncovers the forgotten 1943 diplomacy that traded 1,500 American civilians for Japanese internees across wartime seas.
Why we picked this
Safe Passage recovers a wartime episode most historians overlooked — the moment two nations at war quietly agreed to send civilians home — and Iritani's Pulitzer-winning eye for detail makes the diplomacy feel as tense as any battle.
In the fall of 1943, while American and Japanese forces were fighting across the Pacific, their governments pulled off something almost impossible: a negotiated exchange of civilian prisoners. Nearly 1,500 Allied civilians — mostly Americans caught in Asia after Pearl Harbor — sailed through dangerous waters to an Indian port city where they were traded for an equivalent number of Japanese immigrants and their families held in the Americas. The story has never been fully told. Evelyn Iritani has spent years reconstructing it.
Iritani’s Safe Passage follows the American diplomat James Keeley, whose behind-the-scenes maneuvering made the exchange possible, and tracks the ethical fault lines that ran through the entire operation — including the troubling calculus of repatriating Japanese Latin Americans while Japanese Americans remained locked in domestic internment camps. Iritani brings to this history the same granular precision she brought to her 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into Walmart’s global supply chain for the Los Angeles Times: an attention to institutions, to the individuals inside them, and to the gap between official policy and what actually happened.
Joining Iritani in conversation is Mark Obmascik, the Denver Post journalist whose team shared a Pulitzer in 2000 and who is himself a National Outdoor Book Award winner — making this one of those evenings where the conversation partner is as credentialed as the author. Tickets include either a signed hardcover copy or a $5 Tattered Cover gift card.