{"id":68378,"date":"2026-01-27T14:07:40","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T22:07:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/?post_type=tribe_events&#038;p=68378"},"modified":"2026-02-09T17:01:50","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T01:01:50","slug":"evelyn-iritani","status":"publish","type":"tribe_events","link":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/event\/evelyn-iritani\/","title":{"rendered":"Evelyn Iritani with Frank Abe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p data-aura-rendered-by=\"4774:179286;a\">Across the water from Seattle, you can visit the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial. It\u2019s a place to honor and learn from the past. Evelyn Iritani, a longtime Seattle resident and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, wants to remember \u2013 and learn from \u2013 another, lesser-known story from World War II. In her book,\u00a0<em>Safe Passage<\/em>, she reveals the dramatic, behind-the-scenes efforts to bring U.S. and Japanese citizens home from enemy land.<\/p>\n<p data-aura-rendered-by=\"4774:179286;a\">In 1943, during some of the Pacific theater\u2019s bloodiest battles, the United States and Japan coordinated the exchange of civilians caught on the wrong side of the battlefield after Pearl Harbor. Nearly fifteen hundred Allied civilians trapped in Asia, mostly U.S. citizens, sailed through dangerous waters to India, where they were traded for Japanese immigrants sent from the U.S. The fate of the more than ten thousand U.S. civilians left behind in Asia rested on the success of this endeavor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p data-aura-rendered-by=\"4774:179286;a\">Across the water from Seattle, you can visit the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial. It\u2019s a place to honor and learn from the past. Evelyn Iritani, a longtime Seattle resident and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, wants to remember \u2013 and learn from \u2013 another, lesser-known story from World War II. In her book,\u00a0<em>Safe Passage<\/em>, she reveals the dramatic, behind-the-scenes efforts to bring U.S. and Japanese citizens home from enemy land.<\/p>\n<p data-aura-rendered-by=\"4774:179286;a\">In 1943, during some of the Pacific theater\u2019s bloodiest battles, the United States and Japan coordinated the exchange of civilians caught on the wrong side of the battlefield after Pearl Harbor. Nearly fifteen hundred Allied civilians trapped in Asia, mostly U.S. citizens, sailed through dangerous waters to India, where they were traded for Japanese immigrants sent from the U.S. The fate of the more than ten thousand U.S. civilians left behind in Asia rested on the success of this endeavor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":68450,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":"","_tribe_events_is_hybrid":"","_tribe_events_is_virtual":"","_tribe_events_virtual_video_source":"","_tribe_events_virtual_embed_video":"","_tribe_events_virtual_linked_button_text":"","_tribe_events_virtual_linked_button":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_embed_at":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_embed_to":[],"_tribe_events_virtual_show_on_event":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_on_views":"","_tribe_events_virtual_url":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[],"tribe_events_cat":[55],"class_list":["post-68378","tribe_events","type-tribe_events","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tribe_events_cat-civics","cat_civics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/68378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/tribe_events"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/68378\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68378"},{"taxonomy":"tribe_events_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/townhallseattle.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events_cat?post=68378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}