I am Rui’s Father: My interview on Paul Brown’s *LBP Stories*

http://www.lbpstories.com/episode-32-brian-prager/

Here, I tell the story of Rui’s abduction to Paul Dee Brown for broadcast and podcast on his program, LBP Stories.

Please listen, download, share. I’m still always trying to get the word out. This was a nice opportunity, provided entirely by Paul out of his own desire to insist that the cause of abducted children and left behind parents remains visible.
(I’ve uploaded a quick and easily accessible version of the interview file HERE , as well. The server is SLOW, but please be patient. It will eventually load and play.)

We skirt around many of the more private traumas I’ve encountered, some of which I’ve discussed here on my web page. In response to Paul’s questioning, we spoke uncertainly about marriage, then about the shameless trickery of Japanese family court lawyers such as the execrable Kensuke Ohunki, until we arrive at a discussion of neo-liberal subordination to provide the context of Japanese International Parental Child Abduction. It is always important in my view to keep the ways in which Japanese child abduction is a crime of opportunity provided by an American client, the Japanese state, a venture which is collaborated on with the support of the postwar masters of the Pacific, the United States.

It is also imperative to stress the ways in which it is the economic and social policies of the Japanese ruling class, forming the legal and societal structures of work and reproduction there, that have been the most active agents in creating and enforcing that environment.

Some of the ways in which the U.S. Department of State as well as the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense have insisted on leaving the issue untouched by serious opposition is discussed here as well. I certainly hope and wish that this discussion of some of my first encounters with the Department of State, the Office of Children’s Issues, and the F.B.I. were capable of bringing all of these institutions maximum discomfort.

I want to also mention here some of what is left undiscussed. Not everything can be reached in an hour, and there are feelings and pride to consider as well. The choice I made in the interview is one in which I finally have had to reckon with my own willingness or not to speak with something approaching fury and lingering, cyclical pain about my wife’s spousal abuse, directed at me. It would be so easy to skewer her for what she is and what she has done to our boy; but in the end that would only have made me feel worse, less worthy, maybe even ashamed of talking about it. So…. better to recall what I did admire about her then, and to speak about her untreated depression as the severe illness that it was, rather than solely as the site of a moral assault. In reality, it is both.

I also wanted to talk about how the patriarchal work order, the ruthlessness of capitalism and its destruction of family relations, in the context of the exercise of US global power, are integral to understanding the roots of our issue; I’m glad we touched upon those topics.

These have also been among the many painful aspects of the abduction of my son: the shock of finding that some uninformed or otherwise mistaken liberal feminists joined my accusers out of a misplaced solidarity with the women who abudct, took many years for me to understand; and in the process, it forced me to restore and strengthen my belief in the difference and values of socialist feminism. This is my life-long commitment.

It has never been particularly difficult on the other hand for me to ally my personal beliefs against Empire and militarism. But the conviction I now have is that these too are essential elements of the critical understanding of international child abduction, among many other elements. Against the neo-liberal order we strive to overcome, it is our obligation to identify the amorality of capitalism, and of the subjects global capitalism has produced. If we are subjugated by this power, then there would be nothing more for us but to be witnesses to a defeat.

Our dreams and hopes must not be allowed to die. Our children need for us to strive.