Early Life
After the death of her mother, Mary Ann Vaughn was placed under the guardianship of Professor John Wilson, with nanny Fumi Kaneko (later Fumi Yamaguchi) in custodial care. Due to the privations of the postwar period, John Wilson sailed to Sweden with his wife and children in 1952. Mary Ann was to accompany them, but due to an outbreak of whooping cough, she was to sail on the next ship. However, Yamaguchi absconded with Mary Ann, and Yamaguchi destroyed the child's records, raising her under claim of an abandoned American orphan in the slums of Yokohama.
John Wilson continued to search for Mary Ann, and with the intervention of the AJCAJAO (American Joint Committee for Assisting Japanese-American Orphans), the Red Cross of Sweden and the International Red Cross, found and identified her in Yokohama in 1955. The AJCAJAO identified her residency with Masakatsu Yamaguchi and wife in Yokohama. The Consul of the Royal Swedish Legation attempted to negotiate a custody settlement with the Yamaguchi family, but was unsuccessful. The Crown then brought suit on behalf of Wilson for custody.
According to Fumi Kaneko (reading from her interview in Asahi Shinbun and Shukan Shincho), the baby was entrusted to her by Vivian at her death bed. There was no mention of a search for the baby; instead Fumi Kaneko said she was the one who approached Swedish Embassy to recognize Mary Ann before she entered into grade school.
Read more about this topic: Sweden V. Yamaguchi
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Even today . . . experts, usually male, tell women how to be mothers and warn them that they should not have children if they have any intention of leaving their side in their early years. . . . Children don’t need parents’ full-time attendance or attention at any stage of their development. Many people will help take care of their needs, depending on who their parents are and how they chose to fulfill their roles.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“The nature of women’s oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)