Evelyn Iritani, "Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II" (FSG, 2026)

About this episode

Evelyn Iritani discusses her book on the diplomatic exchange of American and Japanese civilians during World War II.

In October 1943, the Gripsholm—a Swedish ocean liner—and the Teia Maru—a Japanese troop ship—sat in Mormugao, a port in Portuguese India. There, the two ships exchanged their passengers: Allied civilians stuck in Japanese territory after Pearl Harbor , and an assortment of Japanese, Japanese-American, and other Japanese-ethnic people from the Americas. The trade capped a long and fraught diplomatic exchange between the U.S. and Japan, two countries at war. Evelyn Iritani’s book Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026) tells the story of how this exchange came about: How U.S. civilians tried to survive in Japan or occupied Hong Kong, or how the U.S. government pressured Japanese Americans, housed in internment camps, to accept repatriation to Japan, a country many had never known. Evelyn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Her previous book, An Ocean Between Us: The Changing Relationship of Japan and the United States Told in Four Stories From the Life of An American Town (William Morrow and Company: 1994), won a Washington Governor’s Writers…

People in this episode

Guest: Evelyn Iritani

Topics covered

• World War II
• diplomatic history
• civilian exchange
• Japanese Americans
• internment camps
• U.S.-Japan relations

Keywords

• diplomatic intrigue
• civilians
• World War II
• Japan
• United States
• Evelyn Iritani
• internment
• repatriation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Los Angeles Times

Books & works: Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II, An Ocean Between Us: The Changing Relationship of Japan and the United States Told in Four Stories From the Life of An American Town

Places: Mormugao, Japan, United States, Hong Kong

More episodes of New Books in Diplomatic History

• Courtney Rickert McCaffrey et al., "Geostrategy By Design: How to Manage Geopolitical Risk in The New Era of Globalization" (Disruption Books, 2024) · June 5, 2026 · 1h 10m
• Craig Fehrman, "This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark" (Simon & Schuster, 2026) · May 31, 2026 · 59 min
• David Petruccelli, "A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe" (Oxford UP, 2025) · May 31, 2026 · 1h 3m
• Timothy Mason Roberts, "After Barbary: Algeria's Roles in the French and American Empires" (Cornell UP, 2025) · May 28, 2026 · 45 min
• Jeremy Yellen, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War" (Cornell UP, 2019) · May 25, 2026 · 1h 17m
• Julia F. Irwin, "Catastrophic Diplomacy: US Foreign Disaster Assistance in the American Century" (UNC Press, 2023) · May 25, 2026 · 57 min