Christopher Savoie, with his son Isaac in August, is being held in Japan for trying to abduct his two children from his ex-wife who took them from Tennessee.

Photo courtesy of Amy Savoie

Amy Savoie, the wife of Christopher Savoie, the former Rhode Islander who gained international attention this week after his arrest in Japan for trying to recover his two children from his Japanese ex-wife, says she doubts she and her husband will see the children again before their 20s and she can “only hope” her husband will be released soon.

“I have to cling to hope and faith because otherwise I will absolutely fall apart,” she wrote in e-mail to The Journal.

Savoie, who like her husband is a native Rhode Islander, plans to speak at a rally in front of the Japanese Embassy in Washington, D.C., at 2 p.m. Saturday and a candlelight vigil in front of the White House at 7 p.m.

Both events, organized by the Children’s Rights Council of Japan, will call for Savoie’s release and for a change in Japanese law to allow parents, mostly fathers, to have access to their abducted children.

Christopher’s ex-wife, Noriko, had gone to his home in Franklin, Tenn., in late August, saying she wanted to take the children shopping, Amy Savoie said on NBC’s Today Show. Instead, she said, Noriko flew Isaac, 8, and Rebecca, 6, to Japan and has since refused to give them up despite an order from a Tennessee court bestowing custody to the father.

Savoie went to Japan and grabbed his children off the sidewalk as they were about to go to school and raced to the gates of the U.S. Consulate, where he was arrested by Japanese police.

Amy told The Journal that she now considers getting the children back almost a lost cause.

“Once an ex-spouse chooses to abduct the children, it is pretty much beyond hope,” she wrote. “[The Japanese spouse] has made a decision that your love is unnecessary to the children. The problem is that they make this unilateral decision without regard to the children’s feeling of abandonment … ‘Where is my daddy? I thought he loved me?’ ”

Amy’s maiden name is Vican. Her father owned Tony’s Pizza in Narragansett for a number of years starting in the 1970s and her mother still lives in South Kingstown.

She grew up on Indian Trail in Saunderstown and attended Narragansett High School. She also waitressed at her mother’s pizza place, Jeana’s Pizza in Wakefield. “I met Christopher because he worked at Donnelly’s, a men’s clothing store down the hill from my mother’s restaurant. He came up the hill to have lunch at the pizza place just a few times.”

Christopher’s mother, Crystal Ann Brown, died when he was eight days old, while his father, who died a few years ago, taught history for 25 years at North Kingstown High School.

Both Chris and Amy were biology students at the University of Rhode Island and both worked at an immunology lab at Brown University, though at different times. In fact, she replaced him in the post when he left for graduate school in Japan. There, he married Noriko, received a Ph.D. in immunology and started a highly successful pharmaceutical firm. He also became a Japanese citizen.

But after moving to Tennessee a couple years ago to start yet another business, Christopher’s marriage to Noriko ended. The couple were granted a divorce in January 2009, and a month later Christopher married Amy, bringing together his two children with her three.

Amy told The Journal she doesn’t know if Christopher’s Japanese citizenship helps or hurts him, but “it sure puts him in a highly unique position.”

“Straddling both countries in this way, and given what has happened, the press is forcing Japan to see the hypocrisy of their actions,” she said. “Is parental abduction a crime or is it not?”

She commented that while Japan refuses to extradite parents wanted in other countries for kidnapping children and taking them to Japan, saying parental abduction is not a crime, “it thinks nothing of holding distraught, heartbroken, desperate fathers in jail for allegedly committing crimes that Japan claims are not crimes.”

Savoie said she has become even more worried since talking to Kay Kephart, a grandmother from Atlanta who was arrested in Tokyo and jailed for 11 days in 2005 after making inquiries at a Japanese church on the whereabouts of her two grandchildren.

Kephart said in an interview Friday that her interrogators denied her sleep for three days and took turns “yelling at me.”

“They put sleeping powder in my soup and tried to humiliate me. They took my credit cards and asked me for my pin number. They sat me handcuffed on a wooden bench for six hours where they had me listen to the screams of other prisoners.”

She said she received just one five-minute visit from an official from the U.S. Embassy, who “told me, ‘Do everything they tell you to do.’ ”

rdujardi@projo.com