The Japanese Ambassador Story

1967

At true Story about the Japanese Ambassador in Haiti

Written 2010* 776 Words

By Howard Yasgar

In 1967, I was in Port Au Prince Haiti.

My good friend Lou had moved to Haiti several years before. He had told me that his intention was to go into the lobster business there.

One day while he was driving along the highway to the city of Saint Marc, it was when he noticed that there was an abandoned railroad track that was running along one side of the road.

Lou started asking around, and he found out that the track had once belonged to the Haitian National railroad and it ran all the way from the Capital city of Port Au Prince to the city of Saint-Mark, which was 95 km.

Lou felt that he could surely sell all the iron rail for scrap, so he made an offer to the Haitian Minister of the Interior.

Eventually after waiting several months, Lou was awarded the entire railroad as scrap.

At the time Lou assumed that he was buying only the iron railroad track, and that’s when he asked me to come to Haiti to assist him in taking the rail apart and selling it.

Once I was in Haiti, and after I had discussed the project extensively with Lou, we realized that he had been awarded much more than just a lot of used railroad track, he had been awarded the entire abandoned railroad.

After quite a bit of conversation, we decided to drive to the city of Saint-Marc and see if the railroad had left anything there.

Once we were in the city of Saint-Marc, we discovered that there was an entire railroad maintenance facility abandoned there, but it was now deep in the jungle and grown over with vines.

Not only that, but we found a giant storage yard behind the maintenance facility, it contained hundreds of tons of abandoned railroad machinery, including parts of steel bridges and all kinds of railroad car parts.

We immediately knew what a logistical nightmare this kind of scrap project would be in a country like Haiti.

The biggest problem was that Lou had to pay $2.00 a ton to the Haitian Minister of the Interior before any scrap metal could leave the island.

One evening, after supper, we sat around the table discussing the many problems that were facing us.

I had remembered reading an article in the Miami Herald, saying that the Japanese were looking everywhere for scrap steel, to be used in making cars. Lou said he had read the same article.

“Lou suggested that the following morning we should drive down-town to the Port Au Prince Japanese Embassy, perhaps the Japanese Ambassador could advise us of a company in Japan interested in buying all the scrap metal.”

So, first thing in the morning we got into Lou’s Toyota Station wagon for the drive down the mountain to get to the Japanese Embassy in Port Au Prince.

At the time Lou and his wife were leasing a house up in Fermathe, so to get to the Japanese Embassy in Port Au Prince, required us to work our way down the mountain and then drive through the Haitian town of Petionville.

That morning, I could tell Lou was excited. I could tell by the crazy way he was driving. He was blowing the

cars horn at every curve in the road, to warn everyone he was coming, but he never even slowed down even one bit as we drove down the steep mountain.

Eventually, Lou drove into downtown Port Au Prince and then straight to the Japanese Embassy.

We could see that the big iron gate to the Embassy parking lot was open, so Lou turned right in, he was driving like we were in a stock car race, with our wheels screeching.

I thought Lou was driving way too fast, and as we pulled into the parking lot, we nearly hit the gardener who was trimming the flowers.

I saw the gardener jump, then fall over head-first into the garden. I knew Lou had missed hitting him, but he had surely scared the hell out of the poor guy.

Lou then parked the car, and we walked out of the yard and into the embassy front door.

The Ambassador’s secretary was sitting at a desk as we entered the building, so Lou asked her for an appointment. He then explained to her what he wanted to talk to the ambassador about.

The secretary got up and went into another office that was right behind her.

After a few minutes a young Japanese fellow came out of the office, he had his hair slicked back and he was wearing the round eyeglasses like you always see the Japanese wearing in the movies.

He said, “Please come this way”, so we followed him.

He sat us down on a bench in a hallway, the bench appeared to be right outside the Ambassador’s office.

and he said, “The Ambassador will be with you in a moment”.

As Lou and I sat there waiting, I heard a commotion going on, so I looked around the corner into a hallway that led to the embassy back yard.

There he was, the ambassador standing there with no pants on, his secretary and the young Japanese guy were helping him out of his gardener’s clothes and into his formal Ambassador’s suit.

It was the Japanese Ambassador that Lou had knocked over into the flower garden.