In late November 1958, newborn identical twin boys were delivered to an orphanage on the southernmost island of Japan. The boys’ mother, unwed and abandoned by their father, had committed suicide upon their birth. She couldn’t bear the intense shame placed on women who raised children alone. A few months later, the twins were discovered by a sergeant from the U.S. Air Force named Claude Patterson, who was stationed in Japan. Claude and his wife had high hopes of adopting a child they could bring back home to the United States. The Pattersons fell in love with both boys and requested to adopt the pair. To their dismay, the orphanage offered just one boy, with the explanation that the older brother was already spoken for. Forced with the choice of dividing the twins or looking elsewhere, the Pattersons chose to adopt the younger twin. They raised him in rural Kansas and gave him an American name, Tom. The older twin was also adopted by a couple from the United States, who raised him in New Jersey and named him Steve. For the next forty years, Tom and Steve lived separate lives, each unaware that his identical twin was just six states away.
Both boys learned growing up that they were one half of an identical pair, but neither family knew anything of the other twin’s whereabouts. For most of their lives, the twins’ attempts to locate each other were futile, as the orphanage in Japan had been destroyed by a fire shortly after they left the country. Their paths finally crossed on the last day of June, 1999. Earlier that year, Steve discovered, through searchable adoption databases on the Internet, that his twin brother was adopted in 1958 by someone with the first name Claude and a last name of Patterson, Peterson, or Paulson. Steve emailed everyone in the adoption database who matched this description, with no luck. So he sent out hundreds of letters—one to every Claude Patterson, Peterson, and Paulson he could find an address for—seeking information on a twin adopted in southern Japan in 1958. One of these letters ended up in the hands of retired Air Force sergeant Claude Patterson, who was still living in rural Kansas, just a short drive from his son, Tom. When Claude read the handwritten letter, he could scarcely believe his eyes. Could this really be the same boy he was forced to leave behind in the orphanage more than forty years earlier? He had to find out. He drove straight to his son’s house, and they called the number given in the letter. Less than a week later, Tom and Steve stood face-to-face in the middle of terminal D at the airport in Philadelphia.
When they approached each other for the first time that day, the two buff men in red sweatshirts paused silently for a moment to size each other up. Seeing their spitting image standing in front of them was almost too much for the hulking, identical figures to bear. “I literally could not believe he looked exactly like me,” Steve recalls, “but when I did see him, I—I was in awe. I was just totally in awe about it. Even if you look at our teeth, I have a separation in the exact same place that he does. It’s . . . it’s just amazing how much he looks like me. It’s like looking into a mirror.”
Tom and Steve in 2003
