When Prince Jackson was a little boy, his father took him along on a trip he never forgot. They spent a whole day at an orphanage, a dormitory-style place lined with beds, and Prince sat and played with the children there like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.
Here’s the strange part. He had no clue what country he was in.
Prince is Michael Jackson’s oldest child, born in 1997. Today he helps run the Heal Los Angeles Foundation, a charity he started with his friend John Muto to support young people around the city. Giving back was something his dad planted in him early, and Prince says it happened often. There were many trips, he remembers, to different countries, where the family would visit hospitals or orphanages.
As a kid, though, he just went where his father went. He showed up, stayed close to his dad and spent the day. Nobody hands a small boy a map.
So the location stayed a mystery for years.
Prince finally told the whole story on a podcast called “Humanitarian: The Real Michael Jackson,” sitting down with host Paul Dwyer to talk about the father most people never got to see.
You can hear Prince walk through the memory himself, in his own voice.
The podcast where Prince tells the story (audio, not video)
Watch it here: The podcast where Prince tells the story (audio, not video)
The answer came to him as a grown man. Prince was paging through a book about his father’s charity work when he stopped on a set of photos. Something clicked. The country was Japan. He’d been halfway across the world as a boy and never known it, until a picture finally told him.
Michael is known to have visited a Tokyo orphanage in 2006, one of a number of such stops he made over the years.
Then there’s the line Prince still repeats today. Whenever the kids went on those visits, his father would tell them the same thing. You don’t understand it now, Michael would say, but you will when you’re older. As a boy, Prince admits, that answer frustrated him to no end.
It made sense later. After his father passed away in 2009, Prince moved in with his grandmother, Katherine Jackson, started going to a regular school and saw for himself how differently other children lived. Only then did his dad’s words finally land. His verdict now is short and sure. His father was right.
There was a reason Michael pushed his children to give their time and not only their money. Time, Prince learned, is the one thing you can never get back. He explains what all of it taught him in the full episode above.