Family Reunited At Long Last
The mother everyone thought was murdered came from Japan to hug her long-lost children and heal wounds two decades old.
Tears leaked slowly from Kyoko Ishizuka’s eyes on Sunday as the middle-aged woman sat quietly inside a north Spokane home.
Joining her at the table were daughter, Diane Salinas, 26, and son Phillip Thompson, 25, both of whom Kyoko hadn’t seen since the early-1970s. Also present was another son, Matt Muta, 28. It was this Boise resident’s dogged perseverance that cracked the mystery of his ripped-apart family.
“This makes everything happen that I wanted to happen,” says Matt, smiling at the reunion he arranged after tracking down Phil and Diane three weeks ago.
“It’s a happy ending. It’s like reading the last pages of a book and being able to say, ‘What a great book!”’
There is no joy in what happened to this family 23 years ago.
Kyoko says she sent her four children to the United States from Japan after her American husband demanded them following their bitter separation. But the troubled man couldn’t take care of himself, let alone his kids.
Binge drinking. Scrapes with the law. Matt remembers police cars regularly pulling up to haul his dad away. He also recalls being left with strangers and having to scavenge food.
“My older brother, Bob, and I would scrounge around for bits of pizza out of trash bins,” says Matt, who believes the pain of those horrible times left its deepest scars on Bob Williston. The 31-year-old man has had a rough life and is doing time for burglary in a Washington prison.
“Because we were older it directly affected both of us,” says Matt, a computer programmer for the Albertsons’ corporation. “You go through so much you’re just a stone. I still have the hardest time trusting people.”
Northern California child protective authorities finally stepped in. The story should have ended there, with Bob, Matt, Phil and Diane heading back to their mother in Japan.
But for reasons still unknown, social workers handling the case wrote into the official file that Kyoko had been killed. The mistake set off a chain reaction that would alter the lives of all four children:
Phil and Diane were eventually adopted in 1976 by Dave Thompson, a sheriff’s deputy, and his wife, Mary. The couple moved to Spokane.
Bob and Matt were in foster care longer and then adopted in 1979 by a police officer who moved them to Boise. The two sets of siblings lost contact with each other due to the secretive nature of the child welfare system.
In Japan, Kyoko believed her ex-husband was keeping the kids from her. She grew despondent and refused to speak English until Matt tracked her down.
“Very sad,” says Kyoko, shaking her head when asked about the years without her children.
Matt found her in 1991. Haunted by a family tree that more resembled a barren stump, he decided to pay a visit to his mother’s grave.
After numerous calls he finally pestered a government worker into checking the death certificate. The worker told him flabbergasting news. There wasn’t one.
It didn’t take Matt long after that to find his mother and fly to Japan. Locating Phil and Diane wasn’t so easy.
After shelving his search for a few years he started again. This time he convinced a government worker to give him an important clue: Spokane.
A computer search led him to the Thompsons and then to his brother and sister. Everyone was stunned to learn that Kyoko was alive.
Stunned, yet ecstatic.
“All my life I’ve had an emptiness,” says Phil. “Now it’s like the emptiness I had is filled.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo