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.
Chris Takaishi sobs in the basement bedroom at the Potomac home of Marilyn and Herb Stutts, where he had been packing for his return to Japan.
(Photos Michael Williamson -- The Washington Post)
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"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."
Seeing Progress
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."
