One stopped flight

A Boeing 747 was flying across the East China Sea, from Tokyo’s Narita International Airport to Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila when one of the plane’s passengers begun to have a heart attack. Despite efforts to resuscitate her by a dermatologist who happened to be riding on the plane, Valerie Fukazawa gasped her last breathe just 45 miles shy of landing on the closest airport located at Hualien, a province at the eastern coast of Taiwan. Normally, when an onboard situation was over the plane would postpone its emergency stopover and fly back toward its original route so as not to further delay arrival at the intended destination, however, the fact that there was now a dead body on board made that option all too cumbersome and more complicated. Tower officers from Hualien advised the plane to pursue landing in order to covey the dead passenger to Taiwanese paramedics waiting at the airport. A request was made to the military hospital right across the street from the airport to temporarily store Valerie’s body at their morgue until further notice and the request was approved. Meanwhile, that evening the hospital head contacted the Filipino embassy to turn over the responsibility of determining where Valerie’s body ought to go. While investigating the circumstances of Valerie’s death, it came to the attention of the Philippine Embassy that she was a Japanese citizen holding a Filipino passport. Valerie is the widow of a well-known Japanese painter who had died in a car accident just two days after her naturalization was approved. Just a week more, she was supposed to have surrendered her Filipino passport and was supposed to have received signed documents declaring that she had given up her Filipino citizenship and was taking a Japanese citizenship exclusively. Her husband’s untimely death made her anxious to flee the country and the final procedure was never done despite the fact that she had already taken her oath. After Yusuke Fukuzawa’s burial, she hastily booked a flight to Manila, made reservations in a hotel, packed a few of her clothes into a suitcase and left the following morning. The day she left, she locked up her apartment in Shibuya and surrendered the key to the caretaker. It was beginning to look as though no one was fully informed of her departure. Her phone indicated that her last few calls were for the travel agency, a few hotels in Manila and an orphanage in Tokyo where she had been making anonymous donations to. With that, the investigation came to a halt when the officer handling the case felt that he needed to confer with his superiors before making the necessary arrangements, whether Valerie’s body ought to be sent back to Japan or to the Philippines. When word got to the Japanese embassy, the head of the consulate expressed his deep sympathy but was apprehensive to receive the dead body of a dead artists’ spouse who had no family waiting for her in Tokyo. The Japanese press got a hold of a tip of this peculiar incident and the story was run on the evening news.