On Sept. 28, 2010, The Japan Times ran a feature article titled "Behind the Facade of Family Law" in which the author, a man writing under the pseudonym Richard Cory, detailed the recovery of his 12-year-old daughter, who had been abducted by her mother from the family home two weeks earlier:
"At 2:30 on this sunny Wednesday afternoon, uniformed students started to flood out of the school," Cory wrote in The Japan Times in 2010. "Two teachers monitored the street, warning children to be aware of occasional traffic. One of these teachers even started to use more foreign words as my presence became more noticeable. A few minutes later, my daughter appeared at the school exit, beamed me a giant, wide-eyed smile, and the two of us simply walked away from an awful nightmare."
Missing from this story are the 18 hours between his daughter's exit from that school and her walk out of this horror — a period highlighted by an attempt to rescue her two abducted brothers. As the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction enters into force in Japan and parents of taken children around the world begin to submit Hague Article 21 applications for access to Japan-domiciled children, Cory recounts for the first time the details of those 18 harrowing hours: