Safe Passage

An untold story of idealism, betrayal, and behind-the-scenes American–Japanese contacts in World War II.

Safe Passage tells one of World War II’s great and neglected stories. In the fall of 1943, amid the Pacific theater’s bloodiest battles, the United States and Japan pulled off an unlikely diplomatic coup: the warring nations agreed to exchange civilian nationals via two ocean liners. Nearly fifteen hundred Allied civilians who’d been trapped in Asia since the attack on Pearl Harbor sailed through dangerous waters to the port city of Goa, India, where they were traded for an equivalent number of Japanese diplomats and immigrants, sent from the Americas. The future return of some ten thousand Americans still in Japan would depend on the mission’s success.

In this revelatory history, Evelyn Iritani tells a dramatic tale of humanitarian action in wartime and its darker complications. She reveals the herculean efforts of the U.S. diplomat James Keeley to repatriate civilians despite stiff resistance from within and outside his government; the shipboard adventures of passengers, including hymn-singing missionaries, drunken revelers, and sharp-tongued journalists such as the New Yorker’s celebrated Emily Hahn; and the fraught 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 uprooted and repatriated Latin American citizens of Japanese descent, sometimes against their will, while also forcing some Japanese Americans who had been held in internment camps to choose between expulsion to a war zone or remaining behind barbed wire. Intimate, energetic, and enriched by previously untapped archives and sources, Safe Passage is a crucial addition to the moral history of World War II.