Brig, Soren and Reidar-
Not the Haute Savoie, but Chris Savoie. He was also arrested in Japan by his wife just for trying to see his kids… so he must be monster right?
No, he is another extraordinary man, extraordinary father. He is brilliant, has a quantum computing company.
TOKYO(AP) An American father was arrested in Japan after snatching his children from his ex-wife, who had taken the kids to her native country without telling him.
Photos: Father’s Fight to Rescue Children
The back-and-forth exposes a simmering diplomatic dispute over Japan’s traditional favoritism toward mothers in custody battles. While the father was apprehended by Japanese authorities, a U.S. court has issued an arrest warrant for the mother.
Christopher Savoie grabbed his two children — an 8-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl — while they were walking to school on Monday, forcing them into a car and driving away, Akira Naraki, a police spokesman in the southern city of Fukuoka, said Wednesday.
His former wife, Noriko, then called the police. Savoie, a 38-year-old technology executive from Franklin, Tennessee, was arrested just as he was about to enter the U.S. Consulate in Fukuoka with his children, said Tracy Taylor, a spokeswoman at the consulate.
Savoie is chief executive officer of Franklin-based Tazzle Inc. Tazzle makes data sharing devices for BlackBerry mobile phones and has an office in Tokyo that looks after manufacturing in Asia, according to the company’s Web site.
The divorced couple and their children were living in Tennessee, but Noriko came to Japan with the kids in August without telling her ex-husband, Taylor said.
Christopher Savoie only discovered his children were gone when their school called him Aug. 13 to say they had not showed up, according to an affidavit filed with the arrest warrant against his ex-wife for violating the terms of custody.
Alarmed that he would no longer be able to see his children, Savoie flew to Japan to reclaim them, said Jeremy Morley, one of his lawyers.VIDEO COURTESY OF CBS AFFILIATE WTVF NASHVILLE
Divorced fathers in Japan typically don’t get much access to their children because of widespread cultural beliefs that small children should be with their mothers.
That stance has begun to raise concern abroad, following a recent spate of incidents involving Japanese mothers bringing their children back to the country and refusing to let their foreign ex-husbands visit them. The United States, Canada, Britain and France issued a joint statement in May urging Japan to address the problem.
“Japan is an important partner and friend of the U.S., but on this issue we have quite different points of view,” said David Marks, U.S. Embassy spokesman in Tokyo.
Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen’s office has not been contacted and has not become involved in the case, a spokeswoman said.
Japan has had close ties to Tennessee since Nissan built its first U.S. manufacturing plant in suburban Nashville in the early 1980s. Nissan relocated its North American headquarters from California to Franklin in 2006, and the Japanese consulate for five southern states was moved from New Orleans to Nashville early last year.