In October 1943, in the midst of a world war that was raging on two fronts, an extraordinary scene unfolded in the small port city of Mormugao on the west coast of India. Hundreds of passengers from two large ships were exchanged from the warring countries of Japan and the United States, the second of two such exchanges of civilians during the war.
While the forced removal and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the U.S. West Coast during World War II are relatively well known, author Evelyn Iritani stitches together a moving and important story that has been nearly lost to history in her book Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II. Using first-person interviews, books, letters, newspaper articles and scores of documents from government archives, Iritani tells this remarkable tale through the people who made the history.
Iritani is a former reporter with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Los Angeles Times, where her reporting won numerous awards, including the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. She is also author of the 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.
In Safe Passage, the narrative unfolds through the points of view of several individuals, among them the U.S. diplomat who oversaw and negotiated the exchange on the American side, a teen-aged Japanese American who had never been to Japan, and four Americans caught behind enemy lines in Japan and occupied Asia at the start of the war.
The book reads at times like a spy novel against a backdrop of wartime horror and uncertainty. In the best tradition of literary nonfiction, Iritani dives deep into the characters’ backgrounds describing in satisfying detail their upbringing, education, family relationships, and personality quirks. She pings between the places and the passengers destined to board the two departing ships, one from America, the Gripsholm, once a luxury liner from Sweden, and the other from Japan, the Teia Maru.
Tension mounts as the U.S. and Japan fill out their exchange lists, about 1,300 Japanese and Japanese American civilians on the Gripsholm, and the Teia Maru with about 1,500 Americans. Each individual had to be vetted and deemed acceptable to both sides.
Diplomacy played a vital role in the exchange and the chief American diplomat was James Keeley, who headed up the U.S. State Department’s Special War Problems Division. “War forced a rearrangement of the diplomatic playbook,” Iritani notes. “Though trust was now the scarcest of commodities, the American and Japanese officials understood the importance of keeping lines of communication open to negotiate the return of their citizens.” Communication was often slow and cumbersome, accomplished through neutral third-party nations such as Switzerland and Spain.
From Keeley’s perspective, the goal of the mission was to protect and rescue as many of the thousands of Americans caught behind enemy lines in Asia as possible. After the war broke out, many of these expatriates were imprisoned or living under harsh conditions.
One such American was Emily Hahn. By the 1940s, Hahn was already a prominent writer, known mostly for her dispatches from Asia for New Yorker magazine. Hahn lived in Shanghai. Another American was Daniel McKinnon, a teacher married to a Japanese woman and living on Hokkaido, the northernmost Japanese island. Prisoners accused of espionage by the Japanese were subject to solitary confinement in small cages, sleep deprivation and worse.
In the U.S., government officials set out to find a roughly equal number of Japanese “repatriates.” There was a fundamental problem, however: many of the Japanese and Japanese Americans, Nisei young people who were U.S. citizens, did not want to go to Japan after having lived in this country their whole lives. Their immigrant parents had worked for decades and raised families in their adopted home, where they also faced racism and discrimination, especially on the U.S. West Coast. This culminated in the forced removal and incarceration of 120,000 Nikkei (people of Japanese heritage) beginning in early 1942.
One of the civilians being shipped to Japan was fourteen-year-old Don Hasuike from Burbank, California. He was a thoroughly American kid with mostly white friends, a Boy Scout who grew up in a mix of Japanese and American cultures. He loved listening to “The Green Hornet” program each week on the radio. His father, George Hasuike, the founder of a large produce company in Burbank, was arrested on December 7, 1941 by federal officials. A few months later, Don, his mother and sisters were incarcerated in a concentration camp at Amache, near Granada, Colorado, one of ten such camps in the U.S.
George Hasuike, imprisoned in a U.S. Department of Justice “internment” camp, joined the list of people on the civilian exchange list and he wanted his family to join him. Don had no desire to go but, as a minor, he had little choice. Notes Iritani: “He was destined for a place he had never visited and he didn’t even speak the language. It might as well have been the moon, for all he knew. But here he was on a trip to the moon.”
Among the Japanese repatriates were those who were understandably bitter at their wartime treatment by the U.S. government. In a fascinating and little known diplomatic maneuver, the U.S. also included on its exchange list Japanese immigrants to Peru, who had been rounded up and transported to New Orleans for this purpose. Iritani goes on to describe the contrasting experiences of passengers aboard the two ships as they approached and reached their final destinations: Japan and the U.S.
In a potent conclusion, she connects this story from eighty-two years ago to the current persecution and demonization of immigrants by the U.S. administration. “Once again, Americans are reminded of how fragile our democracy is and the importance of resisting when the values we believe in are threatened and our Constitution is under attack,” she writes. “It is a powerful testament to the strength of those ideals that the Hasuike children and the vast majority of Japanese American children who were repatriated to Japan in World War II made their way back to the United States after the war to start their lives anew. The Gripsholm’s children refused to give up on America. We owe it to them to ensure that their history is not repeated.”
Her words and this book, an important addition to the canon of Japanese American history, could not have been more timely.
Evelyn Iritani discusses her book with Frank Abe on Tuesday, March 10, 2026 at 7:30pm at Town Hall Seattle. Co-presented by Elliott Bay Book Company. Go to ww.elliottbaybook.com for details. She will also read from the book at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park at 17171 Bothell Way NE.on Thursday, April 2, 2026 at 7pm. Go to www.thirdplacebooks.com.
David Takami is the author of Divided Destiny: A History of Japanese Americans in Seattle, numerous essays and online content about Asian American history, and dozens of book reviews published mostly in The Seattle Times. He grew up in Cold Spring Harbor, NY and has lived in Honolulu, Tokyo and Seattle. He now lives in Kenmore, Washington.
