How Inhumane Can a State Become in the Name of “Humanity”?
The U.S.-Japan Exchange Ships and the Wartime Logic of “Exchanging Human Beings”
「人道」のために国家はどこまで非人道的になり得るのか
日米交換船が映し出す、戦争と「人間を交換する論理」
在米ジャーナリスト 髙濱 賛 (Tato Takahama)
2026年5月25日
PACIFIC RESEARCH INSTITUTE－日系米人ジャーナリストでピューリッツァー賞受賞記者でもあるエブリン・イリタニが、日米交換船の内幕を描いた新著『Safe Passage』を上梓した。そこに描かれているのは、戦争と「人間を交換する論理」である。
第二次世界大戦のさなか、アメリカと日本は戦争状態にありながら、民間人の移送をめぐる交渉を続けていた。いわゆる「日米交換船」である。戦場に取り残された外交官、ビジネス関係者、宣教師、留学生、ジャーナリスト、その家族を第三国を介して相互に送り返す仕組みであり、戦争の中に残された限られた移動の回路でもあった。
一見すれば人道的な例外措置である。しかし『Safe Passage』が示すのは、その裏側で進行していた「もうひとつの現実」だった。人道を実現するために、国家はいかに非人道的になり得るのかという現実である。
交換は二度行われた。1942年にはスウェーデン船グリップスホルム号などで約1500人が移送され、1943年には「帝亜丸」などによる第二次交換が実施された。しかし実態は、戦争を継続しながら人間を分類し、移動させる営みの積み重ねで成り立っていた。
この現実を日本側から描いたのが『日米交換船』（鶴見俊輔・加藤典洋・黒川創）だった。
そこでは国家ではなく、その狭間に置かれた個人が中心にある。開戦直後、ハーバード大学にいた19歳の鶴見俊輔は、友人から「憎しみの時代になるが、いつか戻れる」と告げられる。その言葉は、戦争の始まりにおける最後の人間的残響のように響く。
その後、鶴見は戦争への立場を問われ、自らを無政府主義者としつつも明確な忠誠を避けた。しかし収容を経て交換船に乗るか問われると即座に「乗る」と答える。「日本は負ける。そのとき負ける側にいたい」という判断である。そこには単純な帰属ではなく、歴史への距離感と責任意識が交錯している。
イリタニと鶴見らが記録した現実は、「重要なのは個人ではなく、国家が人間をどう扱うか」という論理だった。
戦争は人を国籍と忠誠によって分類し、その分類はしばしば本人の自己認識と一致しない。交換船はそのずれを可視化した制度であった。
さらにイリタニの記述は、中南米日系人の扱いにも踏み込む。ペルーでは、長年生活基盤を築いていた日系人が突然拘束され、アメリカを経由して交換対象として移送された例がある。そこには日本語を十分に話さない人々や、日本との結びつきが薄い人々も含まれていた。
彼らは個人としてではなく、「交換枠を成立させるための数としての人間」として扱われたのである。
この論理は過去の特殊な例ではない。国家が危機に直面する時、「人道」「安全」「秩序」といった言葉は同時に叫ばれるが、その運用は常に線引きの問題を伴う。
宗教や文明の言語も同様である。本来は倫理体系であったものが、政治の場では対立の説明材料へと変化する。問題はそれ自体ではなく、それがどのように政治化されるかである。
国家もまた同じ構造を持つ。国家は抽象的な存在でありながら、記憶や未来世代を紡ぐ長い時間軸を持つ。そのため人は国家に強く結びつき、時にそれに従わざるをえない。
しかしその力が強まると、「敵」と「味方」は単純化されやすい。交換船はその初期的な制度化の一例であった。
今起こっているAI化は、この構造に新しい要素を加えている。AIはすでに軍事領域に入り、データ処理によって標的選定を補助し始めている。重要なのは、そのテクノロジーを国家がどう運用するかである。
『Safe Passage』に登場する外交官ジェームズ・キーリーの事例も、その文脈で浮き彫りになる。
彼は人命救助に尽力したが、それは国家間の制度と交渉なしには成立しなかった。善意だけでは機能しない領域が国家という存在にはある。
国家は目に見えないが、その結果は常に具体的な人間のかたちで現れる。移動させられる人、分類される人、帰属を失う人。それぞれが現実の主体である。
こう考えると、交換船は過去の制度ではない。それは形を変えながら、現在の国際政治の周縁にも反復される論理である。
最後に残るのは、結論ではなく問いである。国家が人道を語るとき、その言葉をどこまで信じうるのか。そしてその信頼そのものが、別の線引きに加担してしまう可能性はないのか。
The New Yorker誌の書評は、この種の構造について「人道を貫こうとするほど、その実践が別の非人道性へと傾斜する危険」を指摘している。
その逆説こそが、この時代の核心である。
そしてこの構造は、過去の記録の中に封じ込められたものではない。移民政策、戦時下の安全保障、あるいはテロ対策といった名目のもとで、「誰を保護し、誰を排除するのか」という線引きは、いまも現実の政治過程の中で反復されている。
交換船は歴史の逸話ではない。それは、危機の局面において国家がいかなる論理で人間を再分類し得るかを示すひとつの原型なのである。
■参考文献
Evelyn Oritani 『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
鶴見俊輔・加藤典洋・黒川創 『日米交換船』、新潮社, 2006年
加藤哲郎 『日米交換船』、講談社学術文庫
黒川創 「波」2006年4月号掲載エッセイ（『日米交換船』関連評論）
2016 MAY | A Japanese View From America | How Inhumane Can a State Become in the Name of “Humanity”? — The U.S.-Japan Exchange Ships and the Wartime Logic of “Exchanging Human Beings”
By Tato Takahama
May 25, 2026
PACIFIC RESEARCH INSTITUTE -- Evelyn Iritani, a Japanese American journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has published a new book, Safe Passage, examining the hidden realities of the U.S.-Japan exchange ships during World War II. What emerges from its pages is the wartime logic of “exchanging human beings.”
In the midst of the Second World War, the United States and Japan, despite being at war, continued negotiations over the transfer of civilians. These were the so-called “U.S.-Japan exchange ships.” Diplomats, businesspeople, missionaries, students, journalists, and their families—individuals stranded by war—were transported through neutral third countries and exchanged between the two nations. It was one of the few remaining channels of movement left open in wartime.
At first glance, the exchanges appear to have been humanitarian exceptions. Yet what Safe Passage reveals is another reality unfolding beneath the surface: the reality of how states, in the process of carrying out humanitarian acts, can themselves become profoundly inhumane.
The exchanges took place twice. In 1942, roughly 1,500 people were transported aboard the Swedish vessel Gripsholm and other ships. In 1943, a second exchange was carried out aboard vessels including the Teia Maru. In reality, however, the system functioned through the continuous classification and movement of human beings even as the war itself continued unabated.
What Iritani depicts is not an abstract diplomatic history. At the center are the concrete lives of people suddenly pushed into the category of those to be “exchanged.” One American female journalist working in Asia found herself reclassified overnight as an “enemy national” after the outbreak of war. Her reporting career and daily life were abruptly severed, and she was placed aboard an exchange ship. For her, the voyage represented not merely a return home, but the experience of having the life she had built cut apart by the state itself.
Iritani also turns her attention to Japanese communities in Latin America. In Peru, Japanese shopkeepers and their families—people who had established lives deeply rooted in local society—were suddenly detained, transported to the United States, and incorporated into the exchange program. Some barely spoke Japanese. Some had never even been to Japan. Yet they were treated as “Japanese” necessary to complete the numerical balance of the exchange.
Children cried inside trucks bound for the ports, unable to understand where they were being taken. Families, forced to leave behind their stores and belongings, were treated almost as numbers rather than as individuals. What existed there was not a sense of “returning home,” but the silence of people suddenly categorized and relocated by the logic of the state.
This same reality was explored from the Japanese side in Nichibei Kōkansen (The U.S.-Japan Exchange Ships) by Shunsuke Tsurumi, Norihiro Kato, and So Kurokawa.
There, the central focus is not the state itself but the individuals caught in the space between states. Shortly after the outbreak of war, the nineteen-year-old Tsurumi, then at Harvard University, was told by a friend: “This will become an age of hatred, but someday you will return.” The remark resonates like one of the final human echoes at the beginning of the war.
Later, Tsurumi was questioned about his political loyalties. Though identifying himself as an anarchist, he avoided declaring any explicit allegiance. Yet when asked, after internment, whether he would board the exchange ship, he answered immediately: “Yes.” His reasoning was stark: “Japan will lose. And when it does, I want to be on the losing side.” What emerges there is not simple national belonging, but a complicated intersection of historical distance and moral responsibility.
What matters here is not merely the individual, but how the state handles human beings. War classifies people according to nationality and loyalty, and those classifications often fail to match the way individuals understand themselves. The exchange ships made that disjunction visible.
This logic is not merely a peculiar relic of the past. Whenever states confront crises, words such as “humanity,” “security,” and “order” are invoked simultaneously, yet their application inevitably involves drawing lines between those who are protected and those who are excluded.
The same is true of the language of religion and civilization. Ideas that originally functioned as ethical systems are transformed, in political contexts, into instruments for explaining conflict. The issue is not the ideas themselves, but the manner in which they become politicized.
States, too, carry this same reality within them. Though abstract entities, states exist across long stretches of historical time, binding together memory and future generations. For that reason, people become deeply attached to states and, at times, feel compelled to obey them.
But as that power intensifies, the distinction between “enemy” and “ally” becomes increasingly simplified. The exchange ships represented one early institutionalization of that tendency.
The rise of artificial intelligence is now introducing a new dimension into this reality. AI has already entered the military sphere and begun assisting in the selection of targets through data processing. What matters most is not the technology itself, but how states choose to employ it.
The case of diplomat James Keeley, who appears in Safe Passage, also becomes significant in this context.
Keeley devoted himself to saving lives, yet his efforts could not have succeeded without systems of negotiation and agreement between states. There are realms within existence called the state where goodwill alone cannot function.
The state itself may be invisible, but its consequences always appear in the form of concrete human beings: people who are relocated, classified, and stripped of belonging. Each remains a living subject within reality.
Seen in this light, the exchange ships are not merely institutions of the past. They are a recurring logic that continues to reappear, in altered forms, at the margins of contemporary international politics.
What ultimately remains is not a conclusion, but a question. When states speak in the language of humanity, how much faith can be placed in those words? And might that very trust itself become complicit in yet another act of exclusion?
A review in The New Yorker observed, regarding this kind of reality, “the more one attempts to uphold humanitarianism, the greater the danger that its practice may slide into another form of inhumanity.”
That paradox lies at the center of our age.
And this reality has not been sealed away within the archives of the past. Under the banners of immigration policy, wartime security, or counterterrorism, the line between “who is protected” and “who is excluded” continues to be redrawn within contemporary political life.
The exchange ships are not merely historical anecdotes. They remain an archetype revealing the logic through which states, in moments of crisis, can reclassify human beings.
Note: English translation prepared by the author. Translation assistance tools may be used.
