For Rui Boy

Dear Rui

I am writing you this note today because I find that I don’t know any other way to reach you than this. I have been trying for nearly three years now to find out where you are, where your mother and her conspirators are keeping you. I have sent messages and presents to the only addresses your mother has ever given to me,  and they never reached your house. There was always some reason that the shipping company could not find it, or you; and I assume that that is because the addresses I had were either false or missing some information.

 But the truth is that sending you presents is not what I really want to do.

 What I wanted from the very first day that your mother took you to Japan in June of 2010, was to see you, be together, and have you return home.

 Your mother knows this, and has refused to bring you back.

 And because Japan is a criminal state with a government that does terrible, terrible things to people in and outside of Japan, there is too much power working against us for me to successfully recover you to me, so far.

 But our home is here, in New York, in the United States, where our life was before it was interrupted; where you are a citizen and a full-fledged Prager family member, too. Of course, I have your birth certificate from here in Queens; and I have your custody papers from the courts here, saying what really did not need to be said, which is that  you are my son, I am your father, and by laws created to protect you, we belong together. For you to be kept in Japan away from me is a violation of the law, and a failure of family and governments to protect you. And that makes your mother, grandparents, aunts, and the Japanese government, criminals.

 I can only imagine your life in Japan with the Terauchi family; I can only imagine that they show you some fun, some love, and that they feed you and are giving you what the Japanese think of as an education.

 But I am 99% sure of one thing, and that is that they have told you a very bad lie about us, about your family, and your identity; and that because you were so small when they took you, you’ve had no choice but to get used to it and believe and accept it.

So the most important message I have for you, a message that I am in so much pain to give  you every single day, is that I love you, that I always have loved you and nothing else; the only reason I am not with you, reading books, playing, experiencing everything and helping you get through your life and being your Daddy every single day, is because you were stolen from me by your mother and her family.

 I know that you love her, and that you need to believe that she will take care of you.

But what you might not know is that your Daddy has been fighting for  your return at every opportunity, because we have a right to be together as a family. I have never done what your mother did; I have never tried to keep you separated from her, and I would never have considered doing such a violent, unloving, and selfish thing to you. But it’s the most deeply important thing I can say to tell you that I love you, I am your Daddy, I still want to be your Daddy, and that I have been prevented from being your Daddy during the last 2 ½ years by bad people; and that is the only reason that we have not been together through it all.

 I am also absolutely sure that what I am saying to you here is not a happy thing for you to hear. You and I haven’t seen each other for such a long time that you may not remember the feeling of being together that we had before you were kidnapped. So for you, it is strange to hear me say that I love you; it makes you uncomfortable, because of the distance in time and space between  you and me.

 But unless your mother wants to help you to recover from this terrible event which has damaged your life and destroyed mine, we will only be able to know each other through the dark cloud of a bad fight between your mother and me.

 Another urgent message that I want you to feel is this one: You must not blame your self for all of this. I know that it’s impossible for words alone to do this for you. But somehow, through thinking and feeling very deep down, you must eventually learn to understand, at a much younger age than it is normal for you to have to think about such things, that your mother is a human being with very serious human flaws, and that all human beings have flaws. That doesn’t excuse her; but it excuses you. There is NOTHING that you have done to cause this division in your life history; it is something that an irrational, ignorant and self-absorbed side of your mother has caused to happen, encouraged by narrow-minded  people in Japan; and now that it has happened, she would rather not have to face the reality of what she has done to you, and to me. So she continues to justify it, to explain it in terms that make her feel like a hero,  because that’s what she wants to be  in your eyes, and especially, in her own mind. 

Unfortunately, that lie will not last; but the damage the lie causes, will endure long after you’ve learned the truth. So my next task in life is to help you with that big problem.

 I had nothing to do with this happening to you and me. If I could have prevented it, I would have. The worst that a person could say is that I was worried and distressed to an extreme by the possibility that it could happen, and that that distress made me unable to believe what my eyes were seeing. No one can predict the future; neither could I. Even though I knew your mother well, I could never believe that she, no matter how crazy or how much ill will towards other people she has, could do something like this to a little guy like you. It’s simply so abnormal that it was impossible to conceive what it would be like if she tried. So I accepted her lies myself: that she was bringing you back home in a couple of weeks; that her working life had reached a crisis; that she had decided to put some of our home things in a “storage” place here in New York; that she was looking for work that would allow her to come back and continue our lives here, and for you to start school in the fall. All of this, and more, she lied to me, and to you, to trick us into believing that there was no danger, when in fact, she was preparing to do us this harm all along.

So there is a war going on, and you are its victim. I am so sorry that I could not prevent it that it is truly very, very difficult to live on. But I am living on, because I want to restore the love of father and son that was so brilliant in us before you were kidnapped.

I love you now; I loved you then. I will love you as long as I draw breath. And after I’m gone from the world one day, I will be in your heart and memory, somewhere hiding, loving you still.

Your Daddy
January 9, 2013