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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)
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- [00:00]
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Send Help Promoter
Send Help. Is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.
- [00:34]
Evelyn Iratani
We're somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand.
- [00:36]
Nicholas Gordon
Getting us out of here should be your focus. I'm your boss. You work for me.
- [00:40]
Evelyn Iratani
We're not in the office anymore.
- [00:42]
Send Help Promoter
It's bold, relentless and endlessly rewatchable. Discover why critics give it 93% on rotten tomatoes.
- [00:51]
Nicholas Gordon
You're so fired.
- [00:52]
Depop Advertiser
Oh, am I?
- [00:54]
Evelyn Iratani
No.
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Send Help Promoter (closing)
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- [00:57]
Send Help Promoter
Send help. Rated R. Now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney plus Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Nicholas Gordon (intro)
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast we interview fiction and non fiction authors working in around and about the Asia Pacific region. In October 1943, the Gripsholm, a Swedish ocean liner in the Tamaru, 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. This trade capped a long and fraught diplomatic exchange between the US And Japan, two countries at war. Evelyn Iratani's book Safe the Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by sea during World War II, tells the story of how this exchange came about. How US Civilians tried to survive in Japan or occupied Hong Kong, or how the US Government pressured Japanese Americans housing internment camps to set 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, won a Washington Governor's Writer's Day Award.
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Nicholas Gordon
She began her career at the Seattle
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Nicholas Gordon (intro)
Post Intelligencer and moved to the Los Angeles Times in 1995 to cover national economics. Her reporting garnered numerous awards, winning the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and the George Polk Award for Economics Reporting for a series she co authored on Walmart.
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Nicholas Gordon
So Evelyn, thank you so much for coming on the show today to talk about your book Safe Passage. Maybe let's kind of talk with the actual thing that was happening, the actual prisoner exchange. What was the problem that this exchange was trying to solve? I mean, kind of when in the war are we. And what are, you know, us and Japanese government officials trying to figure out, like during the war to get this prisoner exchange off the ground?
- [03:01]
Evelyn Iratani
Well, the problem starts immediately after the two governments go to war. Both countries had civilians on the wrong side of the battlefield. And in the case of Japan, the Japanese Imperial army worked its way across Asia in the weeks after the bombing of Pearl harbor, and within a few months had more than 10,000American civilians in what was then occupied Asia. And this was a vast area stretching, including parts of China and Japan, Southeast Asia, cities like Hong Kong and of course, you know, the major Japanese cities and Singapore. Um, so the Americans government, immediately after the bombing started, the State Department was starting to gear up for trying to get those civilians back. The Japanese government had a different kind of problem. They had more than 127,000 people of Japanese descent in, on in North America and the United States. And the problem for the Japanese government was determining who would want to be rescued or brought back to Japan or brought to Japan, because some of the people who ended up being sent there weren't Japanese citizens. They were Japanese Americans. So both governments launched immediately into these negotiations. And the logistics of the exchange came together rather quickly, given that both governments wanted to get their most important people back as quickly as possible out of harm's way. And this would include people like the ambassadors and their diplomatic corps and families, prominent business people, journalists, and others, what we would think of as expats. So the two governments agreed to put their enemy civilians on ships and send them to neutral ports in what turned out to be neutral ports in the. Off the coast of India and Africa, and then trade the civilians. And then those ships would return to their. What were their home ports. As I the. There were other, of course, logistics, this being wartime, they had to. Both governments had to find ships, which was not easy since America was now fighting a war on multiple fronts. And the Japanese government, though they had a powerful navy at this point, was still doing battle all across Asia. So they had to find ships, and they had to. To also charter a chart a course for those ships that would keep them as much as possible out of harm's way. And then all the governments that were. That would be involved on both sides, the Axis and Allied governments, had to agree to give those ships safe passage. The difficult, the most difficult thing part of these negotiations turned out to be, not the logistics, but figuring out who was going to be on the ship.
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Nicholas Gordon
So how do they actually, you know, make that decision in terms of deciding who's going to be on the, the ship or not?
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Evelyn Iratani
Well, the U.S. government. And the person who sort of ended up being in charge of this was a diplomat named James Keeley, who was a career diplomat, had worked his way up from being a clerk in Istanbul up to being a consul in numerous countries in Turkey and Greece and Canada, but was called to Washington after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and ended up part of this division of the State Department called the Special War Problems Division. These were the people who were in charge of foreign problems outside the, the purview of admirals and generals. So the non military problems. And Keely came up with an, a system for choosing the past, the Americans that was just categories instead of specific names in part to make the system more democratic. And so there would be the diplomats and the diplomatic core at the top. And again, as I said before, the most prominent business people, educators, journalists, people in prison, they wanted to get out anybody who was being held by the Japanese in prison, and then women and children and you sort of work your way down the list. On the Japanese side, the government wanted to send over specific names. So they sent the US Government a list of names of people that they wanted on the ship. And they started similarly to the US Government with their ambassadors and diplomats, prominent business people and others who they wanted to get back.
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Nicholas Gordon
So just in terms of the actual diplomacy involved, I mean, how is this supposed to work? I mean, obviously the US and Japan are at war. They don't have diplomatic relations with each other. How does the actual diplomacy work? Or more accurately, how is it supposed to work? And then what were some of the disputes that held up, you know, that held up these exchanges?
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Evelyn Iratani
Yeah, well, I think the negotiations in some ways were what you might expect of a negotiation between two governments who want to trade people, in this case civilians who are trapped on the wrong side of the battlefield. So that the negotiations were about. They could be about things as simple as, you know, how much money are, is each passenger able to bring, how many suitcases can they bring? What kinds of things are allowed and what isn't. And for example, both governments did not want anyone bringing over anything that could be used as a weapon. And sometimes things that we might not think think of as weapons. For example, sewing machines were considered taboo because they could be used to, to make uniforms or something else nefarious. So there were those kinds of Just, you know, what are we going to allow people to bring, who is going to come? And in, in the case of the, the Japanese government and the people that they wanted to bring home, this, these negotiations which could have been not simple. But you, if, if you think of this as expats being traded, let's, let's just say both sides have people who are for, for some reason in the wrong place when the war breaks out and then they negotiate to trade them back. And we know who those expats are. In the case of the Japanese people of Japanese descent in America, the US had thrown in a big obstacle for the US negotiators who were trying to find the people that the Japanese government wanted. And this obstacle was the decision by the Roosevelt administration immediately after the war broke out to arrest several thousand people of Japanese descent under the enemy's alien act and imprison them as enemy aliens. Dangerous, potentially dangerous. So you had several thousand of the most important Japanese people. These were community leaders, prominent businessmen, priests, teachers in Japanese schools. These were the people who were arrested in that first round within a few weeks of the Pearl harbor attack. And then In February, the US government issued the Executive Order 9066 which led to the incarceration of most of the remaining Japanese, two thirds of whom were US citizens in the US So now you have most of the Japanese people in, in the United States no longer in their home, incarcerated in and prisons and camps all across America, some of them accused of being disloyal. The first 2000. And the Japanese government is sending over lists of people they want and the US Government has to try to find them. So you have the logistics of just the difficulty of finding these people who are now spread out all over the U.S. most of the people that were at the top of the US Government of Japanese government's priority list had been imprisoned in that first group of people. So the Japanese government, like the US Government wanted to get its important people out of prison. So they were, they led the priority list. And then the remainder of the people of Japanese descent again were scattered in prisons and often separated with the head of the household, the first generation immigrant being held in federal prisons and their families held in WRA camps, which made it very difficult for the US government to find these people to figure out whether or not they would want to be repatriated or sent to Japan. And the third and most problematic thing for the US negotiators was the US military didn't want many of the people on the Japanese government's priority list to go to Japan because they felt they. They had put them in prison in their minds for a reason. They were. They claimed they were disloyal or potential. Had potential information that could be valuable to the Japanese government. So the military did not, Would not sign off on a lot of those people that the Japanese government wanted. This created huge problems for the US Negotiators and led to lengthy, lengthy delays and mistrust between the two governments because the Japanese government would ask for people, they'd send over a list of names. And the US Government, which had initially agreed to send back anyone the Japanese wanted. Now, these US Negotiators found that they could not do that because the US Military wouldn't sign off on them. So they keep pushing back on the list that the Japanese government would provide. They tell them that they couldn't find them or that they didn't want to be sent back. And that, in some cases, was true. There were many people of Japanese descent in the US that didn't want to be sent to Japan in the middle of the war. We're talking about these negotiations starting immediately after the outbreak of war. And it took six months for the first negotiation to be completed. The first group was traded in June of 42, and then it was more than a year before the second negotiation was finalized because the two sides could not agree on who would be traded.
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Nicholas Gordon
Maybe I can ask quickly about some of the people that were involved both in negotiating this and who actually went on these exchanges. Maybe let's kind of start with Keely, the diplomat responsible for trying to. To push these exchanges kind of over the finish line. Could you tell us a bit more about, like, what, what exactly his role was and kind of what he was like?
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Evelyn Iratani
Yeah. James Hugh Keeley, as I said earlier, was a veteran diplomat who had worked his way up in the Foreign Service. He, he was born in Pennsylvania, sort of bootstrapped his way up, and he taught. He was a trainer of pilots in World War I. After that, did odd jobs and then answered an ad for a clerk in the Foreign Service office in Istanbul. He was called home from his foreign postings in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland and eventually was put in charge of these exchanges. He became the head of the Special War Problems Division in the State Department. And, you know, as. As in that role, he was overseeing the negotiations. He would be signing off on the telegrams that would go back and forth with the Japanese. Because the two governments were at war, they could not have direct contact. So under the international laws, they had assigned Protecting powers. So the US was working through the Swiss and the Japanese was working through the Spanish. So every communication would first go from the US to the Swiss, the Swiss to either the Spanish or Japanese and that would have to come back. It could take weeks, even months to get a reply to a proposed change in the negotiations, for example, which was another reason why these, these were so hard to complete, just the logistics. But Keely was, he was a kind of by the books old style diplomat. He and he had a strong sense of justice and injustice. So you know, as an example he, I in his personal files I found a multi page letter that he had written when he was in a car accident and he felt he was unfairly accused of running into someone else. He had included a long description with a map and you know, drawings. And he had a very strong sense of just moral core, A moral core which as the war progressed he, he found himself torn. He, Part of his job was overseeing these camps in the US where the Japanese were being held and he would, would go as part of those duties. He would go tour those camps and took meticulous records of whether or not the administrators were living up to their Geneva Convention requirements. And in, in private letters to his wife and his, his boss, he expressed real discomfort with the fact that the Japanese Americans have been imprisoned. He felt that was against the values that he was responsible for upholding and representing and it made him very uncomfortable. At the same time his job was to bring those American civilians home. So he needed to fill the ships. And as the war progressed it became, you know, filling the ship on the job of Japanese or people of Japanese descent became harder and harder. More, more of the Japanese who were in the US were had decided they did not want to be sent to Japan. In fact they, the US did a survey and found that the majority of people who were on the, the Japanese government's list of, of passengers didn't want to go. This led to what I, I felt was, was one of the great surprises and injustices of these exchanges which was the, the Japanese Latin American piece of this.
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Nicholas Gordon
Let's kind of actually talk about the, the, the Japanese in internment camps and specifically I want to ask about kind of one of the people you kind of follow through this book. Donald Donald Heisuke, this Japanese American teenager who is ultimately forced, he is, I mean not, maybe not, you know, but, but I mean he, he is unsure about going back to Japan and ultimately kind of has no choice in the matter, but kind of who was he and, and, and, and how did he kind of get into the situation where eventually he was basically told to go to Japan, a place that he had, you know, no real experience with.
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Evelyn Iratani
Yeah, well, I think John O. D. Hasarike was in many ways a good example of why these exchanges turned out to be so unjust for many of the people of Japanese descent who are sent to Japan. His don was a 12 year old boy when the war broke out. His father, George Hasawike was a prominent Japanese American businessman and he was one of the people picked up immediately on Pearl harbor day and imprisoned, accused of being disloyal because of his, the many, many ties he had to Japan, ties that any prominent businessman would have. He belonged to the Japanese business associations. He, he banked in it with a Japanese bank in Los Angeles. He was, he was, you know, very closely allied with, with Japan and as a business person. But there was no evidence in his hearing of any disloyalty. And in fact the person who, who oversaw the final decision on his imprisonment acknowledged and that he had never, he had never shown to be disloyal. But George Asuike was imprisoned as a, as a Japanese first generation immigrant, he could not become a US citizen. His wife May and Donald and his two sisters were all US citizens and they were imprisoned in Amache, one of the camps in southeast Colorado in the middle of the desert. And George, the May and her children did not want to go to Japan. They had not ever been there. They, you know, the only things Don knew of Japan were pictures and that he had seen. He, his father was a part owner of a Japanese movie theater and it's in movies but. And you know, he, his parents would take them to Little Tokyo on weekends for Japanese food. And he belonged to a Japanese American Boy Scout troop. But in John's mind he was American as were his sisters and his mom, George. The problem for the Hasawikes was that when George was arrested, the US Government took over his business, took their home, their cars, their bank accounts and began an IRS investigated investigation into the Hasawike's business, which was one of the largest produce operations in Southern California. The Roosevelt administration needed money to finance its war and was determined not to let any money go to Japan. So George Hasawike, as the war progressed and he was imprisoned in a separate place as his family came to the conclusion the only way they were going to be able to be united was on a ship to Japan. So he decided finally in 43 that he would agree to being repatriated and his wife and three children unwillingly went with him because they. They knew that it was. They wanted to keep the family together. And in my interviews with people who. Whose families did go to Japan, that's a common refrain, that people made the decision to go be part of this exchange because they wanted to keep their families together. Were they, you know, forced at, you know, at gunpoint to get on that ship? No, but they. These decisions to go were made, certainly made under extreme pressure. And I would not call them voluntary. When you have everything taken from you and, you know, the. The option is to stay in prison and with no. No real assurance of what your future would be like at the end of the war. The situation for Don Osawike, this young boy was a nightmare. He felt like walking the plank and getting on that ship was the end of the life as he knew it. And it was in many ways. He and his family were sent to a country in the middle of a war. His father, the village they were going to was outside Hiroshima, and they had no idea what their future was going to be like.
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Nicholas Gordon
To flip over to the people who were in Japanese territory, I want to talk about some of them, and let's maybe first start with Emily Hahn, who is probably the most. I'm going to use the word flamboyant, and I mean that in a positive way. You know, character kind of in your book. And I mean, obviously she's a famous writer, she's a famous journalist, but kind of how does Emily Hahn get stuck in occupied Hong Kong in the first place? You know, how. What path does her life take to put her in Japanese occupied Hong Kong?
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Evelyn Iratani
Well, Emily Hahn is a character everybody wants to meet and have at their dinner table, as long as you don't mind potentially being written about and the company of her, given Mr. Mills, who often went with her to dinner parties. Emily Hahn was the New Yorker's China reporter, and she was an intoxicating mix of wit and talent and irreverence. I think she was an adventurer from birth. And she ended up in China in 1935 because she and her sister Helen were both needing a break from the. Their romantic adventures. Her, they. They went to Shanghai on a vacation. Helen got on the ship to return home after a few weeks, and Emily Han decided to stay. She had landed in a place with interesting people and stories, and she. She wasn't about to leave. By the time the war broke out, Emily Hahn had moved to Hong Kong. She'd finished a book that was quite successful on the Tsung sisters, the three Chinese women who were such A huge part of modern China's history. And she had fallen in love with Britain's chief spy in Hong Kong, Major Charles Boxer. When the war, when Pearl harbor happened, they were both trapped in Hong Kong. Boxer was. Was injured in the final days of fighting before Hong Kong surrender and he was imprisoned. And Han, who went by Mickey, was trapped in Hong Kong with her baby daughter, just Carola, who was just a couple months old. And she found herself in the very. The horrible position of having to choose between taking Kerala to safety if she was chosen to be on that exchange, or staying behind and trying to keep Boxer alive. Boxer was in at. At that point a prison camp for Allied officers. And the conditions were bad and worsening by the day. And Hong was part of a group of women who were taking care packages into the camps and also smuggling in things people needed like medicine and money and messages. So she felt if she left Hong Kong, she would. She wasn't sure she would see Boxer alive again. And I think her situation, you know, there were a number of dozens of journalists who were caught in Asia when the war broke out. They're the people who, who are covering the war. So in that way she wasn't unusual, but she is her. Her example really is one of what you might think a more typical ex cat experience was she. She had, you know, she was in Hong Kong for work and for a personal life that she had developed there. The. The people. There were others in Asia that who were. Who were had some much deeper roots. For example in Hokkaido. Several of the characters in my book were teachers there. In particular Harold and Pauline Lane and Daniel Brooke McKinnon. They were people who had lived in Pauline's case she had been born in Japan and in McKinnon's case had lived there for decades. And they had sunk very deep roots. They had had children and got married in McKinnon's case to a Japanese woman. They had children and raised them in Japanese schools. They had made very deep friendships with Japanese people, with, with students, with neighbors and with fellow parishioners. Harold and Pauline Lang were very involved in the church in Sapporo, but when the war broke out, they were arrested and accused of being spies and disappeared into solitary confinement in Hokkaido. The Americans. There were not very many Americans in Hokkaido, but they were. Had been under very close watch for some time before the war, in part because Hokkaido as the Japan's northernmost island was very close to Russia and China, places the Japanese were government was concerned about. And getting the lanes and McKinnon out of prison became A top priority for James Keeley and his colleagues as they, as they negotiated these exchanges.
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Nicholas Gordon
So why don't we talk about the voyage itself? And there is definitely this, like, pretty big divergence between what life is like on, on, on the Gripsholm, the US chartered ship, and the Tamaru, which is the Japanese ship. Conditions on both these ships are, are, are quite different, you're right.
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Evelyn Iratani
And I think it, well, it speaks to the fact that Japan was a, you know, part of a battlefield fighting the war. So it's, it's, it was short on ships and the ships it used were refurbished troop ships. The US chartered two Swedish luxury liners, the Grips Home and the Drakening Home, to do its exchanges. In addition to these exchanges, it was negotiating with Japan. The US Was also negotiating exchanges with Germany and Italy. The Grips Home was a ship that was used on the, in the U.S. japan exchanges. And for the Japanese who boarded the Grips Home for Don Hatsuike, for example, they, they entered a world of luxury. You know, they had been held in, in these WRA camps where they were living in, in former, you know, in barracks, one room, four wooden beds and large cracks in the wall where this, where the sand and wind blew through. And they boarded the Grips Home and it was, it was a luxury liner. It was. They, they had, you know, Swedish waiters with white gloves and uniforms that would serve them at dinner. They were given menus. Don had, you know, ice cream every, every meal for dessert. Their cabins were small, but they were, you know, they had mattresses and running water. There was a swimming pool, a movie theater. They could watch movies. But they were, in Don's case, in the case of not all, but many of the people, they were going to Japan, a country they didn't want to go to. So there was this, you know, this feeling of, yes, we're enjoying life now, but what, what is going to wait? What is waiting for us on the other side? For the Americans, they, they boarded, you know, the Conte Verde and the Teamaru, these Japanese troop ships. And the conditions were horrible. You know, men were, were sleeping on straw mattresses and deep in the ship and there were. Depending on the ship, there were people on bunks on the decks because there weren't enough cabins. There was not one person that I interviewed or read their memoirs that they didn't talk about. The fact that the rice had worms in it and the, the fruit and vegetables were rotting. And again, Japan was a country at war with and embargoed, so its access to supplies was very limited. The US on the other hand, was able to fill the grips home with good food and, and it also contained thousands of Red Cross packages that were being sent to Asia to be distributed to the prison camp. So the, and back to the American throat for a minute. While the conditions were terrible on the ship, their water was rationed. You know, they were crowded. There was limited deck chairs and so there, there were bidding wars to buy a deck chair to sit on. Often Emily Hahn came out of her bunk and in the middle of the night just to breathe fresh air. But they were also going to, going to safety. So while the conditions were terrible, there was hope that on the other side of this voyage was home. And the, the, you know, being rescued from what they knew was becoming a battle zone, if it wasn't already.
- [40:05]
Nicholas Gordon
I mean, how much do we know about what each side felt after the exchange happened? So when the Americans left the Tamaru and got on the grips home and vice ver versa, I mean, how much information do we have about, you know, what is what I assume was a pretty drastic change in conditions?
- [40:21]
Evelyn Iratani
We, we have some information. Emily Hahn wrote a few articles in the New Yorker. There were a few people who ended up writing memoirs on the other side of their voyage. Not many. The US Government, lucky for me, had done a series of interviews with Americans on the ship once they boarded the grips home. So those interviews are in the archives at the National Archive. And I was able to read those interviews to find both, get both an idea of what had happened to people during the war, but also how what their, their voyage was like on the Japanese ship. And then once the they were on the grips home people were, were able, the Americans were able to get paper. The journalists were able to start writing stories and they were able to post some of those stories back home once they reached their port Elizabeth and Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, where the ship stopped. So we had some, some stories from there. But the US government worked hard to limit what was written about both the exchanges, but also what had happened to the American civilians in captivity. And the reason they did that was in part because they didn't want to escalate the tensions between the two governments when they were still trying to negotiate the rescue of thousands of additional Americans. So the information about the voyage itself is quite limited. There were no. I, I tried to find captain's logs for the two ship, for the two ships in the 1943 exchange, hired people in Sweden because that was the home of the grips home, but we were not able to find those captain's logs. And on the Japanese side in particular, not just the captain mark, but any other documents about both the exchange negotiations and anything else connected with this period of time. Many, most of those records were destroyed during the war, either in the bombing of Tokyo or they were destroyed by the officials before the war ended.
- [43:16]
Nicholas Gordon
So to kind of close off this conversation, you know, now that you've kind of done all the, done all the
- [43:22]
Nicholas Gordon (intro)
research and reporting for this book, I
- [43:24]
Nicholas Gordon
mean, how do you feel about, I mean, calling it. The morality of this whole situation is a little bit, maybe the wrong term to use. But, you know, like, on the one hand, the US Was trying to rescue people trapped on the wrong side of the front lines. And I mean, from the stories like being the Japanese treated a lot of these people, you know, really very badly. You know, instances of torture, instances of, you know, starvation and things like that. On the other hand, they seemed quite, maybe not happy, but they seemed open to, as you note, pressuring a lot of these people to go back to Japan in the United States and kind of, kind of make sure the list seemed balanced. I mean, how do you feel about kind of the dilemma that, that, that the U.S. negotiators at least were facing on this?
- [44:19]
Evelyn Iratani
Well, I do feel like you saw the, the best and worst of the U.S. government captured in this incident because you, the diplomats, Keely and his colleagues worked very hard both to and were successful in, in rescuing nearly 3,000American civilians from dangerous war. And they also were able to use the Geneva Conventions to improve the conditions of the prisons both in the US where the Japanese were being held and in Asia. And, you know, using those international laws to force the Japanese government to accept aid packages and to allow prisoners to send mail and in some cases but not many, to allow them to inspect prisons and camps in Asia. You know, the US Government, those officials were, you know, did, did perform miracles. However, the Roosevelt administration's decision to incarcerate most of the Japanese in America, which has now been clearly shown to be unconstitutional and illegal, complicated those negotiations tremendously. And if those, if that decision had not been made, if the Japanese living in North America were in, living in their homes and the Japanese Americans were treated as American citizens, given the options to go fight in the war, which many of them ended up, 30,000 of them ended up doing, and families were able to make a decision about being repatriated or sent to Japan without, with, without the pressure that was created by the incarceration, you would have had a much more even playing field. These two governments would been able to negotiate much more even exchange. It would have been much easier for the Japanese government to find people who wanted to go to Japan, and there were thousands of people who did. And it would have been much easier for James Keeley to come to complete his job. I mean, there's no question that they could have gotten out more people had they not had the obstruction of both the incarceration and also the military refusing to let people go. And you know, this, that there were officials who made that clear. So it was, you know, it's as I said, I think it was you, you saw both the best and, and the worst of government in this piece of World War II history. And I hope one that provides some clarity for what's happening now, because I came away from the research I did here even more it I, I came away from this research even more convinced of the importance of these humanitarian laws that were designed to protect civilians. And that's what's true 80 years ago and it's true now.
- [48:27]
Nicholas Gordon
So I think that's a great place to end our conversation with Evelyn Irotani, author of Safe the Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American Japanese Civilians by Sea during World War II. Evelyn, I actually have two final questions for you, which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work, and what's next for you? What do you think the next project might be?
- [48:50]
Evelyn Iratani
Well, you can find my work at my website, www.evelynierratani.com and you'll find my books and other press and upcoming events. I'll be traveling a bit in the next few months to to talk to folks about this book and I'm not sure what I'm going to do next. I'm really focused on getting the word out about Safe Passage and I, I want to use this moment in time to do that. I've got some ideas about another story and I've got to decide whether or not it this is the time to jump into it.
- [49:40]
Nicholas Gordon
So you can follow me, Nicholas Gordon on Twitter at Nick R I Gordon that's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to agereviewbooks.com at other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter @BookReviews Asia. That's reviews, plural. And you can find many more authors at New books number and newbooksnetwork.com we're on all of your podcast apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify Rate us Recommend us Share us with your friends Support us Interviewing those running in around and about Asia next week. Join us. Interview with Homma Khatouzian, author of Iran and the A History. But before then, Evelyn, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [50:15]
Evelyn Iratani
Thank you, Nicholas. It was a pleasure. Foreign.
- [50:30]
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