By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 26, 2004; Page C01

Chris Takaishi devoured food-court sushi in a Bethesda mall one recent afternoon, then walked, robotlike, to his car.

Shoppers from many nations streamed past him, their foreign speech reminders that nobody here pays much attention to a 31-year-old Japanese man in a tall green fedora. He hopped into his Saturn and headed down a road fringed with birches, peering through the windshield at cloudless blue.

"When I see the sky," he said, "I think I will miss this country."

Tadakatsu Takaishi, as he was known then, came to the United States from Japan in 1989, a 15-year-old boy sent to military school by parents who thought he simply lacked discipline. In fact, those who know him say now, he had autism. Takaishi proved a survivor, learning English, eventually earning a college degree and finding a job in Bethesda.

He built a life, and at its center was Herb Stutts, a longtime American University dean who treated Takaishi like a son. Then this year, Takaishi's student visa ran out, and though everyone who knew him tried, he was not allowed to stay. So came his toughest lesson: Sometimes, hard work doesn't change things.

Tomorrow, after one last holiday with the Stutts family, Takaishi plans to leave his American life as it began, aboard a plane, bound for an uncertain future.

Takaishi is a compactly built man who speaks elegant English in a mechanical staccato. Sometime over these 15 years, people began calling him Chris, though he doesn't recall when. He sends dozens of e-mails a day to friends and acquaintances but finds conversation difficult. He speaks in bullet points, relaying an encyclopedic knowledge of cars, politics and, now, immigration law.

In the Stutts family's Potomac living room this month, he outlined Mexican President Vicente Fox's recipe for immigrant success. "One: He or she must not quit. Two: He or she must have a goal. Three: Even if he or she faces great difficulty, he or she must accomplish his or her goal."

When he gets emotional, Takaishi squeezes his eyes tight. Losing the battle this time, he wiped them fiercely.

Takaishi's American memories begin at Oak Ridge Military Academy in Oak Ridge, N.C., where he was sent by his family, owners of a Tokyo-based newspaper, after failing Japan's high school entrance exams. He knew barely a word of English. When he wasn't in class or alone in his room, he was walking -- across the drill field, through the forest, alone in a school where "no one desired to talk to me."

After three years at Oak Ridge, Takaishi was still in ninth grade, and Herb Stutts got a call from a friend who insured international students. Stutts had retired from American University two years earlier and founded a business assisting students in their adjustment to academic life. Would he, the friend wanted to know, help a Japanese student who was failing and had nowhere else to go?

Stutts arrived in North Carolina to find a quiet, well-dressed boy. Though Takaishi refused to make eye contact, Stutts recalled, he noticed the teenager was squinting. "Chris, have you ever worn glasses?" Stutts said he asked.

He took Takaishi to an optometrist, who diagnosed severe nearsightedness. It was the first of many difficulties Stutts noticed in Takaishi, who did not like being touched and rarely laughed, except in a movie theater, where he guffawed uproariously at cartoons.

"He had the social skills of a 7-year-old," recalled Stutts, now 75. "But he never cut a class, never lied. . . . He would not give up. He was everything you'd want out of a young man."

Stutts enrolled Takaishi in an English language program offered through Yokohama Academy, at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County in Catonsville. Stutts noticed that, if material were presented in clear steps, Takaishi could learn it.

It took three tries, but in 1994, Takaishi passed the test for his high school diploma. Stutts and his wife, Marilyn, a professor at Montgomery College in Rockville, drove Takaishi, wearing Marilyn's cap and gown, to a state office in Baltimore for his certificate.

Stutts then helped Takaishi enroll at Montgomery College for an associate's degree. Bill Patterson, one of Takaishi's professors, noted his withdrawn behavior and his focus on tasks rather than relationships.

"When I met him, I wasn't sure if it was cultural stuff or what," Patterson said. "But I have a grandson who's autistic, and I saw some of the same things. Chris is a very bright guy and a really nice kid. His brain's just not wired the same way other people's brains are."

Patterson helped Takaishi overcome a fear of computers by showing him how to look up statistics about cars on the Internet. After getting his associate's degree, Takaishi, once afraid to touch a keyboard, enrolled in the management information systems curriculum at the University of Maryland's University College in Adelphi. He graduated in 2003, with a 3.2 grade-point average.

Patterson spoke with Takaishi last week to say "I was really proud of all the things he'd accomplished. I was really hoping Chris would become a citizen."

Now, he said, "I hope he'll be welcomed by his family."

Takaishi's parents, who live outside Tokyo, did not attend his graduation from Montgomery College, nor from the University of Maryland system. Takaishi's father and sister traveled to the United States in 2000, but Stutts did not meet them. The family does not speak English and communicates with Stutts through a neighbor in Japan whom Chris recommended, Jimmy Abe.

With Abe acting as interpreter, Chris's father, Matafumi Takaishi, said yesterday that he now realizes Chris has had a developmental disability since childhood. "Now [Chris] is an adult, and we are leaving up to him to make his own decisions," he said.

The Takaishi family, Abe explained, is well-known in Japan, and as their only son, "Chris has to be a success." He was sent away, Abe said, "to become strong and to break up his so-called shyness." To support him, the family has spent the equivalent of $40,000 a year.

Now, Matafumi Takaishi said, he plans for his adult daughter to live with Chris in downtown Tokyo.

For more than a decade, Takaishi's family was the Stuttses. He spent Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve with Herb, Marilyn, their four grown children and six grandchildren. They've celebrated milestones together.

Herb and Marilyn Stutts remember 10 years ago, on their 40th wedding anniversary, Takaishi hurrying their children to the party. "Herb will be very angry if we are late," Takaishi warned them.

When they were babies, the Stutts grandchildren played with Takaishi and wanted to kiss him. Instead, he shook hands.

Over time, Takaishi matured and began to be more comfortable away from the Stutts family. He has lived in a rented room in a Gaithersburg house for the past 10 years. He joined a health club. He spends hours on the Internet, downloading music, reading about world affairs, politics, and autism, which he calls "the mysterious illness."

"I like Sting," he said. "His music is quiet and calm. Music may be able to heal me."

In April, he bought a Saturn Ion, "a 2004 dent-resistant vehicle," he said, researched on the Internet "to eliminate the pain of purchasing the vehicle."

About that time, Stutts contacted former colleagues, neighbors and friends to try to find Takaishi a job. Weeks into the search, Ed Downey, a former classmate who owns Empower IT, a Bethesda business that sorts information from product bar codes, said he had an opening. It was a repetitive keypunch job, but the small company was warm and casual, roamed by the Downey's two spaniels. Everyone wears jeans and often socialize together.

"We decided we'd only give him a job if he could do it, or it wouldn't be fair to everyone else," Downey said. "He focused on it as if his life depended on it."

Takaishi developed an error rate of zero and won the company's PRIDE award, which stands for Production Really Is Dependent on Everyone, colleagues said. "I was like, 'Good for you, Chris,' " recalled Tracy Marquette, Takaishi's supervisor. "That's when . . . we became his close friends."

In May, Marilyn Stutts sat down in her den, under a delicate Japanese mobile, to write to Takaishi's mother. Chris, she wrote, "has a disability that affects the way he reacts with others, the way he learns and the way he is able to apply his knowledge. He has had to work much harder [but] he has faced his handicap and learned to reach his potential."

Through Abe, Takaishi's mother, Shizuko, said yesterday that she replied in a letter she sent to the Stuttses through Chris, thanking them for their help. Marilyn Stutts said she did not receive it.

Herb Stutts knew that under a student visa, Chris Takaishi was allowed a short period of training after graduation. But he had never seen a student barred from staying longer. So it was a shock when Stutts learned this summer that Takaishi's prospects for a long-term visa were grim.

Empower and Stutts put two law firms on the case but were told that particularly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services requirements for a visa "are a backbreaker, especially for someone like Chris," Stutts said. They looked into having Stutts adopt Takaishi, but at 31, he was too old.

So in September, Mary Lesh, Empower's human resources director, told Takaishi what the others could not bear to say. "Chris, you have to go back," she recalled saying. "He was quiet and sad, thinking about it. Then he said, 'Probably I can't come back.' "

Takaishi had mostly forgotten how to write or read Japanese. He was, Stutts said, "right back where he started when he came to this country."

In October, the Empower staff gave Takaishi a clock they'd all signed, and a cake decorated with the words "Good Luck." Takaishi told them: "Don't forget me, okay?"

The week after Thanksgiving, Takaishi arrived at the company's office with gifts for his co-workers: silk roses and candy, and a white toy Scottie dog that sang, "I love Christmas, doggone it."

Takaishi's U.S. days, as he wrote in an e-mail at the time, were numbered. But Stutts had one last gesture. "He's always enjoyed Christmas with us. Let's have him here, and then send him home."

One day last week, Takaishi passed by the family's Christmas tree and patted the toy reindeer beneath. "Stay," he said, "until I return to this house."

"Love hasn't been in his vocabulary," Herb Stutts said. "Only since he's going home has he hugged me."