Evelyn Iritani – Safe Passage

@ Please note: this event is off site at 431 NW Flanders St. Join Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Evelyn Iritani for an interactive discussion of 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. Evelyn will be joined in conversation by scholar and author Linda Tamura. Book signing to follow – books will be available for purchase at the event. Evelyn Iritani – Safe Passage Saturday, June 13 at 1:00pm 431 NW Flanders St. Portland, OR 97209 RSVP About the Book: 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. About Evelyn Iritani: The child of a Japanese American father and a Japanese mother, Evelyn Iritani learned to straddle cultures at the kitchen table, where a meal might include sukiyaki or tonkatsu, spaghetti or even an occasional Swanson’s TV dinner depending on who was joining for dinner. That upbringing led her to a lifelong interest in the complex, often tumultuous, relationship between the United States and Japan and the people caught in the cross-fire. A longtime resident of the Pacific Northwest, Iritani began her career at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and moved to the Los Angeles Times in 1995, where her beat was international economics with a focus on Asia. Her work has  earned her journalism’s highest honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and the George P...