Join Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Evelyn Iritani for a conversation with former Los Angeles Times reporter and Asian American Journalists Association-Los Angeles President Teresa Watanabe about Iritani’s 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 event, part of the JANM Book Club series, will take place on Saturday, May 23, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at the Japanese American National Museum’s Democracy Center, 100 N. Central Ave. in Little Tokyo.
In the fall of 1943, the U.S. and Japan pulled off a diplomatic coup — the exchange of civilians caught on the wrong side of the battlefield after Pearl Harbor. Nearly 1,500 Allied civilians trapped in Asia 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.
Faced with too few bodies to trade and desperate to free Americans from perilous conditions, the U.S. rounded up Japanese from Latin America, often against their will, while Japanese Americans held in U.S. camps and prisons were forced to choose between expulsion to a war zone or an uncertain future behind barbed wire.
Given the striking parallels between this moment in history and the events unfolding today on the streets and in the courtrooms of America, the lessons from this little-known chapter in World War II could not be more timely.
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.” She is a former reporter for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Los Angeles Times, where her reporting garnered numerous awards, including the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series she co-authored on Walmart.
Watanabe is the senior communications officer at the California Community Foundation. Previously, she was a reporter who covered education for The Los Angeles Times. She has also covered immigration, ethnic communities, religion, and Pacific Rim business, and served as Tokyo correspondent and bureau chief.
$5 general, free for youth (under 18) and JANM members. Info/tickets: www.janm.org/events/2026-05-23/janm-book-club-safe-passage-evelyn-iritani