For Rui Boy

TIME MAGAZINE has followed ABC into exposing the sad stories of child stealing  and abduction as practiced by the Terauchis and their friends in the Japanese international kidnapping network. The media is gradually awakening from  its no-longer-eternal slumber on this awful, long-standing situation, and we are grateful for that.

The article in TIME reports on the activities of a group we’ve known about for some months, called the Safety Network for Guardians and Children,  which claims to be a support group whose purpose is to defend child abduction and keep Japan in its current status as an international pariah outside humane norms, stealing little guys like Rui from their parents, and keeping them hidden behind walls erected by the Japanese state. The TIME story also introduces readers to the activities of Kensuke Onuki (Ohnuki), quoted in the article,  a lawyer who is a well-known entity among left-behind parents.  Mr. Onuki (Ohnuki) is notorious for his leading  role in the network of child abductors, and  famously advises and assists them  in building long-term cases  that conjure and  falsify  stories of victimization within Japan’s weak domestic abuse laws. Onuki (Ohnuki) is in fact so notorious that  his name was stricken from the US Embassy’s list of recommended attorneys in Tokyo, for which he sued members of the community of left-behind parents  in an attempt to silence them from revealing the form of  chicanery he and his cohort practice.

Finally it quotes “Keiko,” a pseudonymous persona likely to be familiar to readers of this blog. Keiko is Machico Terauchi, Rui’s mother. The words and pattern of emotional and psychological abuse, right down to the fine points, are  familiar .  She “discovered” that her son was being abused she claims, and says tearfully  that she didn’t want to leave the United States, but had to do so to make her son feel safe. For me, the lies and active alienation visited on my son are transparent. I know “Keiko.” Everyone knows “Keiko.”

To our government we must say: sometimes, even in the midst of international relations so corrupted by moneyed interests and cynical calculations of power, it is necessary in extreme cases such as these to demand adherence to a standard  and to take an ethical position. How can we go on living passively  while our beloved children are being flagrantly abused by groups of people who are in open rebellion against international standards established by the United Nations and the Hague?!

It is inconceivable that a people can have no tradition in place to protect the rights  and needs of children from being ignored, misunderstood, foolishly misinterpreted, and undermined. And what’s more, principle demands that we recognize that it is the toleration of and practices of a  particular and peculiar professional class within Japan, and  in the United States, among the apologists and pragmatists, that enables and promotes this abuse and destruction of children’s lives.