The Japanese Ambassador Story
1967
A true story about my embarrassing encounter with the Japanese Ambassador in Haiti
Written 2010 and Re-written 02/2016 unedited
Howard Yasgar
In 1967, I was working with my friend Lou Gladstein who had just been awarded the entire Haitian railroad.
The Haitian railroad had been built in 1908 and it was bankrupted by the government in 1920.
My friend Lou had tried negotiating with the Haitian Minister of the Interior for more than five months.
Lou had wanted to buy the steel railroad track for scrap metal.
Eventually Lou and his wife Gladys were totally disgusted with the corrupt politics in Haiti and they decided to depart the country forever.
They were actually on the Air Haiti airplane taxiing down the runway and leaving the country when the plane was stopped just before taking off.
Lou was then summoned to the palace and awarded ownership of the entire Haitian railroad.
That was when they contacted me to come to Haiti and help them to find a customer to sell all the railroad track to.
The railroad track had originally gotten Lou’s attention, because there was more than ninety kilometers of it all along the Haitian highway from the city of Port Au Prince to the city of Saint-Marc. Quite a bit of the railroad track was now buried or covered over by years of landslides.
Lou had known that each piece of track weighed around a thousand pounds and could be sold somewhere to reuse it, reroll it or to scrap it.
When I first got involved, Lou had told me that he never expected to be awarded the entire railroad, all he wanted was the railroad track.
Lou had heard rumors that years ago the railroad had a maintenance facility somewhere near the city of Saint-Marc, but its exact location had been long forgotten by everyone.
So out of curiosity, we took a drive to the city of Saint-Marc, our intention was to try following the railroad tracks into the jungle until we found something.
In the city of Saint-Marc we found remnants of the original railroad terminal building, and from there we followed railroad tracks leading into the jungle.
Lou used two young Haitian boys with machetes to cut their way into the jungle, as all the exposed railroad tracks were now covered with bushes and small trees.
After about two hours of following the tracks, we heard the boys screaming for us, and we followed the pathway they had cut .
There it was, it was a giant building all covered in jungle vines, it was certainly a very spooky looking thing.
There were two large 12 foot high corrugated metal doors that were locked by a chain and a very antique looking padlock.
The railroad tracks we were following ran under the doors and right into the building.
Lou picked up a metal bar and wacked the padlock three times until it broke, then, he took one of the kid’s machetes and hacked away at all the remaining vines on the door.
When we were able to pry the doors open, the two kids got real spooked and wouldn’t enter the building.
Lou gave each one of them the 5 cents or 10 cents he had promised them, and they both started running back to the city of Saint-Marc with their new found wealth.
Then one of them reconsidered and returned.
Lou and I squeezed into the building and just stood there in awe as our eyes adjusted to the dim light.
It was like entering into an Egyptian tomb.
The building was huge, and it was full of railroad repair equipment from one end to the other.
There were metal turning lathes, giant punch presses, also two diesel locomotives that were all taken apart and being overhauled.
Wherever I looked, every tool had been neatly set down in its correct place. It was as if time had just stopped 50 years ago and the people would all be back to work after lunch.
We walked the full length of the building and out the back door into what was once the railroad storage yard.
The yard, now all overgrown, but it had steel bridges, steel trestles, and giant car pulling winches.
There were box car axles and train car wheels, they were stacked there by the hundreds.
As we drove home to Fermathe, Lou was thinking out loud.
He said, “You know there are thousands of tons of iron and steel scrap back there, at the storage facility, I wonder how I can turn it into real money”.
The next morning, Lou said, “I have an idea, I always read in the papers that the Japanese are buying scrap steel everywhere, I wonder if they would be interested in buying all this stuff here in Haiti?
“Why don’t we go down to Port Au Prince and talk to the Japanese Ambassador, I bet he knows what companies would be interested in coming here to buy it.”
We went downstairs and got into Lou’s Toyota wagon and we headed down the mountain to the capital city of Port Au Prince.
Lou, was now on a mission, and it scared me the way he was driving down the mountain.
I wanted to tell him to slow down, but we finally made it to Port Au Prince and Lou drove directly to the Japanese Embassy.
At the Japanese Embassy, the big gate to the back yard was open and Lou drove right in.
He was driving like a stock car driver, with the wheels screeching as we turned in.
As Lou pulled in, the gardener who was trimming the flowers in a flower bed fell over, Lou had just missed hitting him, but fortunately he only fell into the flowers, but I could see it sure scared the hell out of him.
We parked the car and walked out of the embassy yard and into the formal front door.
The Ambassadors secretary was there and Lou asked her for an appointment, he explained what he wanted to ask the Ambassador about.
The girl got up and went into an office behind her.
After a few minutes a young Japanese fellow came out. He had slicked back black hair and was wearing those little round glasses you always see the Japanese wearing in the movies.
He said please come this way, and we followed him.
He sat us down in a hallway which I assumed was the right outside the Ambassador’s office, and he said, “The Ambassador will be with you in a moment.”
As we quietly sat there, there was an open doorway next to me and I heard a commotion going on, I got up and looked around the open doorway.
It was overlooking another hallway that was leading to the rear door of the embassy.
There, both the Ambassador’s secretary and the young man were helping the gardener out of his jumpsuit and into the formal ambassador’s suit.
It appears that the Ambassador was the guy Lou nearly knocked over in the flower bed in the embassy yard.
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