Emotional Reunion in Amritsar: After 20 Years, Japanese Son Reunites with Punjabi Father. In a touching reunion, a Japanese student by the name of Rin Takahata, who is 21 years old, finally met with his biological father, Sukhpal Singh, in Amritsar after a gap of 20 years. Rin was just one year old when his parents Sukhpal and Sachiye Takahata pulled off, and he had no contact with his father since then.
A student of Osaka University of Arts, Rin was inspired to find his father while working on a family tree project. “I could list everyone in my family except my father, Sukhpal,” Rin said in broken English. With old family photos and an address in Amritsar where his mother once lived with Sukhpal, Rin set out for his journey.
But he found that Sukhpal had moved from the address he had. Undaunted, he showed his father’s old photos to the locals, and as luck would have it, someone recognized Sukhpal by chance and gave his new address to Rin. A few other turns in the chase followed and finally, on August 19, on Raksha Bandhan, Rin had the reunion with his father SSB and his half-sister Avleen Kaur.
Sukhpal told that it was a surprisingly happy reunion, “I could never have expected this to happen, but it did. I’m happy that my present wife, Gurvinderjit Kaur, and my daughter Avleen welcomed Rin into our family wholeheartedly.” Sukhpal also said that Rin was doing ok during a subsequent phone call with Sachiye.
Although he had already fixed his return to Japan for the next day, Rin decided to postpone the return journey to spend more time with his father. In order to consume the number of days he had free, Sukhpal took Rin to the Golden Temple and on to watch the Beating Retreat at Attari border.
“It was like old times,” recalled Sukhpal, “the time when I, in early 2000, first met Sachiye at the airport in Thailand.”. They met on a flight, and Sachiye stayed on in Amritsar; the romance blossomed and they got married in Japan in 2002 by traditional Sikh rites; a year later, Rin was added. The marriage could not be sustained for long and both divorced by mutual consent in 2004. Sukhpal spent three more years in Japan before returning to India in 2007, efter getting remarried, is now settled in Amritsar.
Sukhpal was equally glad to see Rin again and remarked, “We’ll stay in touch.”.