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 Polk Award for Economics Reporting for a series she co-authored on Wal-Mart’s impact on the global economy, the Overseas Press Club Award for a series she co-authored on China’s meteoric rise as a manufacturing base and numerous honors from the Asian American Journalists Association including its national reporting award.
As a correspondent during a period of global economic upheaval, Iritani witnessed many of Asia’s pivotal moments, including the rise and fall of Japan Inc., the Asian financial crisis, the ouster of Indonesian President Suharto, the 1997 Hong Kong handover and the 1999 anti-globalization protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle.
Iritani’s first 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 Writers Award for its depiction of the century-long connections between Japan and the Pacific Northwest. Her latest work, Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians During World War II, tells the true-life drama of the American and Japanese civilians trapped behind enemy lines during the war and the diplomats who “rescued” them, sending them on a perilous journey by sea that reshaped their destinies in unexpected, sometimes tragic, ways.
A graduate of the University of Washington’s Department of Communications, Iritani was inducted into the Alumni Hall of Fame in 2005. She lives in Seattle and is married with two children and three book-loving grandchildren. Her wanderings have allowed her to indulge in some of her favorite pastimes: querying strangers, foraging for street food and exploring exotic markets.