For Rui Boy

“Let the ears hearing this and its like be seared, for who has heard or seen the likes of it? … Why did the heavens not darken and the stars not withhold their radiance; why did not the sun and moon turn dark?”

Friday, November 19th, 2010

This is the 8th post I’ve written on this site. This is the sorrowful page I’ve most dreaded adding, identifying my wife’s family, the Terauchis.

[I’ve added a section below, elaborating on the narrative of relevant family history. 2023/08]

Why do these family members cluelessly join in setting a little boy on a path of emotional disturbance? Look beyond appearances. Do decent people allow such a terrible thing to happen in their own homes?

Any and all families have a skeleton or two in the closet. But the number of incidents of children having been permanently removed from one or more of their parents in this family is more than coincidental. There are three victims of this involving the people pictured below, prior to my boy, Rui. It has become a new normal for them.

What have they done? They have stood by and encouraged Rui’s mother to commit a deep, sad form of child abuse: kidnapping my small, preschool boy to a place thousands of miles from home, out of contact and out of reach. No one knows when we’ll play ball, read stories, or kiss goodnight again.

Kaori (Terauchi) Ozai & Machico Terauchi (Prager) /PRAGER, Machiko Terauchi – Child abductors

The following section is added on Sunday, August 27, 2023.

Parental Abandonment and Abduction As A Way of Life:
Terauchi Family History

Nearly thirteen years have passed since I posted the story above. It has always seemed incomplete to me. Now putting a few notions into practice here about adding later perspectives and elements of the stories that I had felt compelled to suppress for fear of backlash in the wake of the traumas of 2010, I’m now revising some of these old posts in hopes of making a more complete accounting of our story. Here’s one section I’m adding today to the Terauchi family story and the account of Rui’s abduction:

Machiko was raised in such an unstable family core when  she was small, that the effects of those traumas left a deep imprint upon her. Her mother Midori’s first husband, Machiko’s biological father, was accused by her mother of violence and drunkeness, and he was forcefully ejected from the family home when Machiko was an early-stage toddler. These accusations may have contained some real truth; Machiko had traumatic memories of moments of fighting and conflict from which she hid in a low kitchen cabinet as they took place around her. Many years later as young adults, Machiko’s older sister Kaori urged Machiko to alter this traumatic memory and imprinted understanding of what took place. Kaori claimed to remember the incidents more clearly, and told her they didn’t happen in quite the way Machiko recalled them. She urged upon her that she come to see that her father was not anything like the frightening and threatening monster he had grown into in Machiko’s memory and imagination in ensuing years. She defended him and urged Machiko to allow their father to get to know and reestablish a relationship with them; but Machiko could neither take in nor tolerate this notion. It was neither something she wanted, nor something was she able to absorb into her internal image of what she had experienced. During one or two meetings, Machiko was extremely defensive and agitated by his presence, and would not allow them to continue despite these attempts with her sister’s protective presence alongside her. For Machiko, there was nothing in it for her. Such a reconciliation of the past was inconceivable to her, and she pushed it away,  anger and disgust covering her fear of this man she did not want to know more about.

Machiko’s mother was a young ambitious woman and fashion designer trying to thrive in the extraordinarily patrriarchal business world of 1970s Tokyo. After those early incidents at home, she sent Machiko and her sister to live with their grandmother in Kyushu, where her mother’s youngest teenaged sister still lived at home. Jealous of the attention seeking and disruption brought by two new young girl children in the home, the teen won her way with her parents, demanding that the two sisters be taken away to somewhere, anywhere else. As a result, Machiko and Kaori were placed in a separate apartment, alone with a full-time live-in nanny who without the family’s knowledge, nearly starved the two children, mistreating them, frequently forcing them to feed on old, unappetizing food, and treating them to severe child-abusive, violent “discipline“. Machiko and her sister suffered many incidents of pathological brutality, including one which Machiko remembered as the nanny holding her up by her feet, head down over a balcony’s edge while her sister screamed in terror for the nanny to bring Machiko back to safety. It was a nightmare scenario for the little girls, who feared even to speak of the incomprehensible psychopathology of the nanny’s wrathful conduct.

This second moment of parental abandonment came to an abrupt end once they were able to reveal the violence and fear to which they were being subjected. Machiko’s mother Midori was repentant, but felt she could not care for the two girls alone in Tokyo. So while Kaori was brought to live with her, Machiko experienced yet another traumatic separation. Her mother placed Machiko in another of Midori’s sisters’ home, Machiko’s wealthy aunt to whom she was given in an outright adoption. Machiko recalled this period through the lens of the only internalized childhood ethic she could find, and looked back at this time as one in which she was on the one hand well-treated by her aunt, but on the other, a time filled with sadness, loneliness, and suppressed longing to be reunited with Kaori and Midori to live in a full “real” family. She cried quietly at school while trying desperately to hide her unfathomable grief. It was her good fortune to have been seen by a compassionate teacher whose inquiring after what was bothering her was at last revealed told to the preoccupied Midori. Machiko, she was at last told, longed to be with her mother and her sister again. This forced Midori to go into family court with Machiko’s aunt, the adopting mother figure. Conflict and difficulty ensued yet again. I could only imagine the guilt feelings Machiko must have internalized as a small, innocent child, repeatedly the object of adult conflicts and relational rifts among those closest to her. 

This period of strain finally came to an end when Machiko was still an early elementary school girl. Her mother managed to regain custody and bring her to live in her home at last. For Machiko, this memory of return made goddesses of her older sister and mother. A moment of bliss and transcendence covered the wounds of her toddling years with stardust and the protective gloss of a happy ending.

Then came Shunsuke. Machiko’s mother was professionally successful at last, and chose to remarry with fashion magazine editor Shunsuke Terauchi, who adopted the two girls and made them his own. Shunsuke has a history in Japan’s alienating and calculating family law as well. Like Midori, he too had two children by a previous marriage. And like Machiko’s birth father, Shunsuke was forced into a complete separation from his children that wounded him deeply. He wanted to reunite and remain a father to his girls, the two sisters, but alienation under the Japanese system of forced parental separation and termination of parent-child rights ruined their trust just as it had done to Machiko and her father. Shunsuke pined for children of his own; and in order to reconcile him to the new familial arrangements wtih Midori and his newly adopted daughters, he insisted that he wanted one more child who would be a living product of his new marriage. And so they had another daughter, Ai, a girl ten years separate in age from Machiko.

Their story continues with more troubles. Not the least of these saw Shunsuke involved later with Yakuza, Japan’s loan shark mafiosos, forcing upon the newly recomposed family a debt which they would never be able to pay. Brought upon them by the necessity of market growth required to the survival of their small fashion business, Shunsuke and Midori borrowed startup cash from a man associated with one of Japan’s many small business loan companies who disappeared with the debt money they’d endeavored to repay, leaving the family vulnerable to the original source of the loan, Tokyo’s Yakuza and their enforcers.

This turn of events caused the ruin of the family’s security once again. Machiko tremulously recalled the day that Yakuza thugs came to the door of the family home to muscle the parents over the debt they owed. Finding the daughters Machiko and Kaori there alone, they made an attempt to get the debt paid by the two girls,  threatening to take them to work it off  in a Yakuza-controlled brothel. 

The terrified girls managed to get the Yakuza thugs to leave them to talk to their parents later that day. Once they spilled their terrifying story to Shunsuke and Midori, Kaori’s new husband Jun lost no time in acting to spirit them into hiding. That night, Jun and his friends brought moving vans to their home, loaded up all the possessions they could manage to pack in a few hours, and left their family home forever. They relocated within Tokyo quickly, keeping their new address and telephone numbers quietly undisclosed to anyone. Hiding in plain sight, the family acquired a new set of skills that became useful to them again later when Machiko set herself upon the course of kidnapping Rui from the United States, again hiding their identifying data and home address from the state. They kept these secrets as long as they could, hoping that the debts they owed to the loan sharks would eventually be forgotten. 

These latter events took place in the mid to late 1980s as Japan’s economic boom crested,  faltered, and stagnated. As international luxury trades began to lose value, the long-term capacity of a small fashion company to thrive in that environment was severely compromised. As the family experienced many financial pressures and crises, it became the daughters’ duty to keep Midori’s design and outfitting work afloat with the sweat of their labor. Keeping nothing for herself, Kaori remained unfree in the servile role of Midori’s servant and worker, while Machiko earned an independent income, starting up with a partner in the then new fashion consulting firm Steady-Study. Steady-Study soon acquired high end clients from Japan, Italy, and France. Their reputation grew and Machiko became a successful press agent for new high-end street and business fashion design figures in Tokyo. Ten years of this work made them successful, all the while Machiko accepted a subordinate role in the PR firm. Through Machiko’s service and sparse-enough style of living, the family’s financial status was shored up to a sufficient level of stability that Machiko was able to decide to realize a dream with her family’s blessing, and take a break from her nerves-challenging, intense public relations work to move to New York for a time where she hoped to learn English and get to know another side of both the fashion industry and life in general. 

Things didn’t go exactly as planned in New York, although in retrospect one could say that any number of goals were realized for her. Machiko studied English at the City University’s Hunter College campus. She made friends among the students and crushed on a teacher she’d met there. It was as if at the ripe age of 30, she allowed herself at last to slow the frenzied pace of making it in a cut throat business to support herself and family,  and to finally relax and experience some of her to-then suppressed human feelings and vulnerability for the first time in her life. Having long withheld fundamental elements of young adulthood from herself under the weight of the psychological and emotional traumas of her youth and the intrusive and dominating demands of success-seeking in niche-market economic ventures in global fashion, Machiko allowed herself to fall in love.

A new arrival in New York only a few months after 9-11 had changed the face of the city and made the prospects of future economic beginnings very, very precarious, Machiko began attending classes after a freak curbside accident twisted her ankle so badly that she became hobbled and forced to walk on crutches for the first months of her new venture. Evidently no stranger to adversity, she limped to classes at Hunter where she was quiet but, to all external appearances, happy to be there and open and friendly to classmates. 
Some months later, close to the end of the semester, she approached her professor, joined him alone in an elevator cab, and shyly confessed to him that she liked him. She told me this calmly and sweetly without any accompanying suggestion or demand for reciprocation. Largely out of politeness, I smiled, shook her hand and thanked her, telling her I liked her too without a hint of expectations of any kind. It seemed like an adult student in a class filled with younger students was offering appreciation and support from one working person to another having experienced and understood the cost of the daily grind. We parted ways when the elevator doors slid open, and it wasn’t until many more days had passed and the end of the semester drew near that anything more was spoken or shown between us. And that is a story for another day, and another moment.

Who could have known then that the history of family trauma, abuse, and abandonment that Machiko and her family had learned to hide so well was set to produce another generational wound only a few years afterward? What this family’s history does do is provide evidence of theories of inter-generational trauma and the Freudian notion of repetition compulsion. Having been victims and perpetrators of child abduction and aggressive alienation, the ensuing generation abducts and alienates again, replaying the story to make it “come out right”, to satisfy an emotional and psychological desire felt by the parent and forced upon the children.

The family photo album of people who can’t conceive that my right and Rui’s right to be together must be respected and my Rui must be returned home to the Daddy who loves him.