For Rui Boy

Santa asks: What do you want now, child?
I want the rightful return to me and to his home of my deeply loved son, Rui, who at any moment day or night – whether I’m laughing, crying, meditating, desperate to escape into some reverie, raging with bursting-at-the-seams angst at lies and unjust lives for me, my son, and for beasts like us everywhere- mostly for Rui- is never anywhere but foremost in my broken thoughts and  heart.

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Update:

I’ve had no contact and no communication with my son, nor with anyone in Japan who knows of his whereabouts, nor with anyone, official or otherwise, willing to try to assist in the discovery of his whereabouts nor in his return from the kidnapping for 4 ½ years. The indifference continues to be deafening.

I was forced this year to submit an application for “visitation” with my missing, kidnapped child by the US Department Of State/Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs agreement under terms set out in the Hague Convention, in a process (Japanese government agencies particularly love to designate as “system” and “process” when the naked coercive power of the state is activated) to support and sustain the June 2010 Japanese kidnapping of my only child, a citizen of the United States, and the kidnappings to Japan of hundreds of other kids. I did so under protest.

The application went to Japan in the spring, 2014 along with those of other parents, submitted as a group via a DC law firm. My application under the auspices of the Hague Convention was not acknowledged as having been received by the Japanese government until August 25th, 2014, a full five months after the fucked up US / Japan-brokered agreement to ratify Japan’s accesssion to the irrelevant and useless Hague Convention went into effect.

I was given nothing more in return than a MOFA-generated application case number.

I was told by the US Department of State to expect a response shortly from the Japanese pro-abduction advocate, twice disbarred lawyer Kensuke Ohnuki, and Rui’s mother, Machiko Terauchi. This is the calibre and level of integrity of persons relied on by the US Department of State.
Obviously the response, as expected, did not arrive.

RIGHT WING GOVERNMENTS S-L-O-W D-OW-N

Accustomed but never resigned to this bitter experience and abject, abusive and traumatic treatment, I eventually insisted in angry letters to the Department of State’s joke Office of Children’s Issues that a response be obtained. I was promised by the case officer there that the response from Japan would arrive in early November.
As in every instance prior to this, the response did not arrive. Surprised yet? You see where this is going.

In December 2014, on the 12th of the month, after scathing, bitter, angry letters from me to the DOS official, I at last received a reply: an invitation to communicate – voluntarily-  with the internationally known abduction advocate, Kensuke Ohnuki, about “visitation” arrangements with my son. This contact with the equally not-obligated-by-any-law-or-standard, senior advocates of kidnapping in Japan is known ironically by the U.S. and Japanese governments as “mediation.” The stated goal is a “conciliation” agreement of some kind. Imagine the laughs they are having over their Christmas dinners at that!

It is important to note that officials in DOS all know Ohnuki and his long-term involvement in the abductions of children very well: he is a sort of Adolf Eichmann of the Japanese child abduction process, in which the technology of international child abduction has been offered to induce Japanese people residing in the United States to abduct children to Japan. It is a narrative for another day to discuss the whys and wherefores of this. Why, particularly if there is no really great wealth to be made from this, would a person want to become a professional abductor of children? The rewards in Japanese society have to be other and more than monetary; and so, they are.

Ohnuki has made his career violating the sovereignty of the United States (something the US government is indifferent to, because coporations do this gladly with the support of the US government every day – and because violating other countries’ sovereignty is the USA’s stock in trade (heard of Henoko, anybody? How about Futenma?) and stealing rights of citizenship (something the US government also welcomes indifferently, provided the citizen in question is not economically or politically connected). This is where the juicy parts of the story lie in terms of the motivating elements, those noble human traits for which explanation is more death-driven and dark. (And it is vitally important, though certainly more speculative in nature.)

Department of State Steps In

In addition, I received another message from the Department of State, also in December 2014, in which I was told that, optionally, I can petition a Japanese family court with my choice of a Japanese family-law lawyer for entirely legally unenforceable “visitation & access” to my kidnapped son, along the lines of the usual Japanese family court parent-child access customs: typically, this is, say, 4 unenforceable, voluntary visits per year of about 2 or 3 hours each, to be held in Japan, at my expense, in custody of and under the watchful eye of the US-allied LDP-ruled Japanese state and the Japanese police. Keep in mind; a Japanese family court can adjudicate the case and decide on this sort of “visitation.” And having done so, it has no authority of any kind, none, on which to enforce such a shitty visitation schedule. So your big hope? It’s six or eight hours per year with your child, in a prison-like, two-way mirrored panopticon room. Or not. Your rights to this are worse than fictional; they cannot and will not be enforced, because the state… doesn’t wanna.

This is exactly the same Japanese family court system which illegally, routinely steals and stole jurisdiction from the US-based courts such as the one where my son’s case had been previously adjudicated, and has done so routinely for 40 to 60 years, issuing its own rulings, indifferent to the well being of the family involved, particularly the children involved, and declaring the complete removal of my and my son’s parent-child rights. This is the same Japanese “family court system” – with no rule changes, changes of point of view, or customary changes of any kind- that accepted and still now accepts completely fictional reports made by the abductor, Kensuke Ohnuki, and a series of paid abduction services.

More Human Rights Abuses to Target Children and Parents

The abuses to which I and my child have been and are still now being subjected are too numerous to ennumerate in toto today.

Here are a few of them:

My son was subjected to a faked, highly destructive and negative psychological evaluation, which made a wholly erroneous diagnostic description and applied an openly, blatantly inadequate procedural standard of examination, complete with absurd and baldly misconstrued conclusions – all of which was accepted as fact by the Japanese family court. Why? To provide the necessary ritualized cover that the US/ Japan constitutional government- liberal democratic veneer requires in order to legitimize to themselves the US-Japan partnership. (See? Treaties! Elections! Rule of law (big joke?). Now they can demonize and / or ally against China and Russia.)

The abuctor, Machiko Terauchi, made multiple false statements, concocted exaggerated scenarios, and intentionally distorted claims in order to justify to the family court judge in Japan that she was acting in good faith in kidnapping my son. Of course she was not, and it was and is painfully obvious; but that didn’t matter then, and it matters to the US  and Japanese states even less now. (Together, they have driven social democratic challenges to LDP dominance of previous decades under the rails, and can now proceed with the alliance, the establishment of newly intensified, 21st century hyper-intrusive trans-national economic agreements, the arms build up, the militarization of E. Asia, etc. that US and Japanese rulers want to profit from). Now I have been given the opportunity to re-enter the SAME Japanese family court system with the SAME lawyers, judges and court procedures and rules, in order to negotiate a mediated agreement with the hostage-takers who are holding my lovely, loved and bewildered son.

As of this date, I have not responded to these two messages from the Department of State. I’m at a loss as to what to do. This is not a movie.

The corecion involved in forcing this “application for visitation” on my son and me should be regarded as extreme and criminal. Having had no meaningul assistance from either (and concerted delay and dissimulation by the agencies of both) the United States and Japanese government – no contact or location attempts with my child; no follow up on the criminal charge of international kidnapping levied here in NY; no request for extradition on the criminal charge of kidnapping my child; multiple repeated refusals of cooperation from Japanese authorities and from Ohnuki and his people; refusal of all repeated requests for contact, for welfare reports, for whereabouts reports, and for any report on his well-being during, before, or since the 3-11 triple disaster earthquake, tsunami and atomic irradiation of Japanese agriculture, and all south and western urban areas. After all this, I know of no recourse for my and my son’s defense.

However I see nothing but repetition and compulsive coverups in any and all of these more recent developments which would entitle the Reichsführers’ representative Kensuke Ohnuki, the kidnapper Machiko Terauchi, the Ministry of Justice or of Foreign Affairs, and significantly the US Department of State and the Embassy to pretend that they have attempted to bring about a just resolution to my son’s kidnapping. The US State Department and embassy are full partners in the crime, and they have always been.

I received, for example, a pretty letter some two or so years ago from the celebrity U.S. ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, promising continued efforts to secure our rights and protect our children. Pretty, but completely without grounding in any material reality or juridical support, aside from the material reality of pleasure-cognition in the brain cells of those who feel better for having written a letter promising false hopes and making false promises. She has done absolutely nothing since having this letter written by her servants but suck up to the neo-fascist Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, as he seeks to rewrite the history of modern Japan from that of an imperial power intent on conquest, mass murder, and enslavement. Her presence at Abe and the LDP’s elbow has a particularly poignant and ugly irony given the politically and physically hideous murder of her father and U.S. President.

What can you distill from this long message? By their indifferent and callous actions in relation to Japan, US government officials have garnered only the enmity of the Japanese people who have to live with the humiliating and destructive presence of US military bases, and who are incrementally subjected to coercion and brainwashing on behalf of an avidly American state-supported LDP-dominated Japanese government that sustains  anti-democratic, culturally and politically stifling actions and sentiments and distorition of the modern history of Japan and its relations, not only as a client of the ruling class privileges of elites in the United States, but in sustaining bad relations with elites and multitudes alike in its neighboring states.

We Know About Them By Now:

If there is anything I would like to convey, it is that that are those among us who know:
We know that the US Department of State is not in Washington nor in Tokyo to protect ordinary people, nor decent American people’s interests;
We know also the very, very basic element in the existence of relations between states: that there is no law without both powers of enforcement and a degree of popular consent; in the absence of these, there is only coercion.

Neither I and the US parents, nor the parents of Japan, have consented to this rape of our children and destruction of our families. And none of us are so stupid or foolish as to believe that our interests are served by the increasingly coercive and illegitimate power exercised against us by the US state.

I want my child returned home. I cannot negotiate with criminals who hold a gun to my head, and to my son’s head, or threaten either of us with a locked prison cell.

I cannot negotiate peaceful terms with the vicious and criminal ones who committed the abduction. It is not within my powers to offer them terms for negotiation over my son’s body and well being. I cannot make offers to drop charges on behalf of states that do not even deign to represent me: the US and Japanese states, constituted states as they are. If the State offers Ms Terauchi the right to a consideration of a jail sentence or a mediation of the responsibility of her crimes against our son and me, then that is their decision to make, not mine. I want my son back. My life and his can never be righted; but for this crime to go on unpunished and unacknowledged is no less a crime than that that is played on the victims of war, rape and sexual enslavement, military occupation, drone strikes on family picnics and atomic and incendiary bombing of wooden cities.

There are fates worse than death. The abduction of my son is one of them.

*end*

John Coltrane: Lonnie’s Lament