Safe Passage

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

By Evelyn Iritani.

In the fall of 1943, during some of the Pacific theater’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. The fate of the more than ten thousand Americans left behind rested on the success of this high-risk endeavor, the second exchange between the two bitter enemies.

In Safe Passage, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Evelyn Iritani reveals the herculean efforts of the American diplomat James Keeley to engineer these wartime exchanges despite great resistance from within and outside his government; the shipboard conflicts among passengers, including missionaries, revelers, and sharp-tongued journalists; and the moral compromises involved in securing their safe passage. Faced with too few bodies to trade and desperate to free Americans from perilous conditions, the United States rounded up Japanese from Latin America, often against their will, while Japanese held in U.S. camps and prisons, many of them American citizens, were forced to choose between expulsion to a war zone or an uncertain future behind barbed wire. The lessons of this little-known chapter in WWII could not be more timely, given the striking parallels between this moment in history and the events unfolding today on the streets and in the courtrooms of America.

Hardbound: 480 pp.

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