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THE FAST FEW MONTHS have been unbelievably demanding and traumatic. Allow me to explain, and perhaps my experience could be used to focus attention on similar situations.
Firstly, my daughter Rachel, who resides in England, e-mailed a friend in Japan (this makes it incredibly faster to receive messages) to inform me that my mother died on 10 December 2018…just two days after her 89th birthday.
Since there is no access to telephones, not even for “compassionate grounds”, I had to resort to “postal letters/airmail” to inform family and friends of this unhappy event.
This is made much more difficult by the rule that we are only allowed five letters per month…only one per week. If you want to send more than one letter per week, a special request (gansen) must be submitted which takes 2-3 weeks for approval, so the request becomes obsolete over that period.
Moreover, it is forbidden to include a message for “someone else” in a letter. In effect, I cannot send a letter to a designated person and request that brief messages be passed on to other recipients. This ban even extends to sending a letter to “Mr and Mrs J. Smith” – since the Japanese authorities consider this to be two separate individuals, even though they are married and living together!! Have you ever heard of anything more ridiculous than that?
As you will appreciate, my “letter allowance” for January and February has been primarily devoted to contacting family and friends to inform them of the news of my mother’s demise.
Secondly, and much more agreeable and pleasant, was the notification on January 24 that the Japanese authorities have finally approved, in full, my application for ‘PTA’ or “Prisoner Transfer Agreement”. You will note the emphasis on “finally”. This is because the British authorities have been trying to obtain this transfer acceptance agreement for me since early 2014. They sent a full government approval which involved several separate government offices/departments, the Foreign Office, and the British Police to the Japanese Ministry of Justice (or should that be Injustice?) on 7 February 2018.
In effect, it has taken the Japanese authorities 12 months to respond! However, as you will note, even though all of the “acceptances” came from various government departments, after almost eight weeks, I am still incarcerated in a Japanese prison.
There can be little doubt that the authorities have only the greatest contempt for the responsibilities contained in a State-accepted treaty. More letters needed to be sent to various family members and friends to prepare them for my arrival in England…whenever that happens. Thus, with these two events occurring almost simultaneously, there has been a scramble to use the “letter allowance” to inform people of the unfolding events. This accounts for the very extreme delay in my reply.
