Friday 13 May 2022 11:13 PM Douglas Galbraith died without ever seeing his abducted sons. His sister is ... trends now

The first thing Douglas Galbraith noticed that warm night in 2003 when he arrived home from a work trip was that the curtains were open.

This was unusual. It was 10pm, and the two sons he shared with his Japanese wife Tomoko – six-year-old Satomi and four-year-old Makoto – should have been in bed.

With no key and no one answering the door, he took a screwdriver from the garage and forced his way in to the family home in rural Fife.

Inside he found a chilling scene. On the bedroom floor lay two small, crumpled pairs of pyjamas. Furniture, books and clothes were missing as well as photographs of the boys, a lock of Makoto’s infant hair and an ultrasound picture of Satomi before he was born.

On the doormat lay a single letter, from Royal Mail, confirming instructions for forwarding post to Tomoko’s new address, in Japan. The horrifying truth dawned: Galbraith’s wife had left him and taken both their children.

It was the start of a nightmare that would dominate the rest of Galbraith’s life. In the ensuing years he launched numerous pleas to Japanese courts for confirmation that his sons were safe, entreaties to the British government and letters to lawyers pleading for assistance in gaining access to his sons.

A respected novelist, he even wrote a book about the loss of his children in the hope that they might one day see it, and contact him. To no avail.

In 2018, Galbraith took his own life at the age of 52. He had not seen his children for 15 years.

Now, on behalf of the children’s grandmother and Galbraith’s remaining family, his sister Karen Macgregor has taken up the search. She has hired a private investigator in Japan in an effort to contact Satomi and Makoto, and is hopeful that, almost 20 years on, they may track them down.

‘We had never heard of such a thing,’ she says of the abduction. ‘I remember visiting his home and realising it had become nothing more than a shelter. It was devoid of life and love. We could not believe that anyone could be so cruel.

‘[Tomoko] was denying two children access to a loving father and family. She was denying a father the right to love and support his children and she was leaving a family broken and in limbo.

We were acutely aware of the great pain for Douglas. I also had a sense of guilt when he came to stay with us as I still had my children with me. At first, we did not know how to console and support him.’

Today, Karen lives in Glenborrodale in the western Highlands. On the bookcase she keeps a picture of 18-month-old Satomi, beaming at the camera and wearing a red jumper. Douglas was a keen photographer and as a proud father had taken hundreds of snapshots of his sons.

One memory, of a family Christmas, stands out. ‘All the cousins were together and were photographed on the sofa as a long, lopsided row of smiling children,’ says Karen.

‘We were delighted at Douglas becoming a father and were thrilled to have half-Japanese nephews and cousins.’

Galbraith met his wife, Tomoko Hanazaki, when the pair were at Cambridge. Brought up in Glasgow, Galbraith always stood out as a particularly bright student at Glasgow Academy.

He went on to study medieval history at St Andrews where he received marks ‘that his classmates could only dream of’, and from there went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he earned, in his own words, a ‘comically obscure’ doctorate. He later returned to St Andrews as a guest lecturer in creative writing.

In 2000, he came to national attention when his first novel, The Rising Sun, about the 17th-century Scottish trade expedition to Darien, earned the largest advance in Scottish publishing for a first novel.

The £100,000 fee allowed Galbraith to abandon a job in the wine trade to focus on full-time writing and the book won the Saltire Award for best first novel.

By then he and Tomoko – whom he described as ‘a cosmopolitan, impressive, intellectual woman who seemed to have freed herself from any cultural baggage’ – had married and had two sons, Finlay Satomi Hanazaki Galbraith, and Makoto Magnus Hanazaki Galbraith.

The family moved back to Scotland and settled in Fife, but there were already cracks in the relationship.

In his memoir, My Son, My Son, Galbraith described the marriage as having descended into ‘an openly declared and exhausting war for the past five years’.

Tomoko began showing disdain for their life in the UK, and as the children grew older she discouraged them from using English, installing a satellite dish so they could watch Japanese TV programmes.

Their English names – Finlay and Magnus – were dumped in favour of their Japanese ones, and eventually she would only speak to them in Japanese.

‘All that she had wanted to escape, the deep conservatism of Japan, it just reeled her back in,’ Galbraith said in 2012. In another interview he concluded his biggest failing was something he could do nothing about: ‘I was British, I wasn’t Japanese.’

The abduction, however, came as a tremendous shock. Galbraith had been in London for a few days on a research trip, and had left home with Tomoko’s final words, ‘See you Thursday. Have fun’, ringing in his ears. He had no idea she had been planning on taking their children not just out of the country, but out of their father’s life forever.

‘The signs were there, clear in retrospect, but in those days there were still things I didn’t believe people were capable of and I couldn’t read them correctly,’ he wrote.

‘It’s not easy to get yourself and two children, a few favourite possessions and a bit of money out of the country for good. She waited for an opportunity and seized it.’

Those early days were a nightmare. ‘Douglas tried everything,’ says Karen. ‘Within days of their abduction he had contacted the Japanese Embassy in Edinburgh, the British Consulate in

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