日本語をお読みになる皆様へ。
このサイトは、日本で急増している「連れ去られた子どもたちと会うことが出来なくなった親たち」
の問題について広く認識をして頂くために役立つはずです。
日本では、両方の親が子供たちに会う権利、あるいは、子供が両方の親を知りながら成長する権利が
尊重されていないのです。
http://www.crnjapan.com/ja/index.html
By MICHAEL HASSETT
“Sport at its best obliterates divisions between peoples, such as ostentatious flag-waving and exaggerated national sentiment.” New York Times senior writer Howard W. French — who has covered China for the past five years, was Tokyo bureau chief from 1999 to 2003, and has lived overseas for all but 3 1/2 years since 1979 — made this astute observation last month after staying up most of the night in Shanghai to watch the remarkable five-set Wimbledon final between Spain’s Rafael Nadal and Switzerland’s Roger Federer.
Only four days into the long-awaited Beijing Olympics, we can only lament the regression that has taken place after only a month and will most certainly intensify over the next 12 days, in what media often infuses into our very beings as “us vs. them.” Unfortunately, here in Japan, it is not only the media that eagerly participates in this engine of propaganda — it’s the education system itself.
As many may know, in response to new curriculum guidelines introduced in the 2002 school year that included the fostering of “feelings of love for one’s country” as an objective for sixth-grade social studies, students at a number of public elementary schools around the nation have since been subjected to evaluations on their love for Japan. Moreover, in December 2006 this country’s basso ostinato of excessive pride bordering on jingoistic fanaticism ground on as the ruling bloc in the Diet forced through revisions to the Fundamental Law of Education by removing a reference to “respecting the value of the individual” and instead calling on schools to cultivate in students a “love of the national homeland.”
But what impact does this have on families here in which one parent is Japanese and the other is not? A relationship between individuals from different countries will generally experience great friction when one or both of the partners remain more committed to their nationality than they do to their spouse — in other words, when they are more married to their country than they are to each other. And this can become exacerbated when children are encouraged to side with one country or the other. Or, in Japan’s case, taught to love Nippon and then graded on patriotism.
One year ago, The Japan Times (Zeit Gist, Aug. 7) printed some findings of mine that showed that there is a 21.1-percent likelihood that a man who marries a Japanese national will do the following: create at least one child with his spouse (85.2 percent probability), then divorce within the first 20 years of marriage (31 percent), and subsequently lose custody of any children (80 percent). And in a country such as Japan — one that has no visitation rights and neither statutes nor judicial precedents providing for joint custody — loss of custody often translates into complete loss of contact, depending on the desire of the mother. Read more…
Randy Collins says his ex-wife kidnapped his son and fled to her home country of Japan, which does not allow abducted children to be returned to overseas parents. Now, Collins is on a quest to change the law, and reunite with his son.
JapanChildAbduction.com : Im sorry for his story, but glad to see the local news helping to get his story known. Each of us need to work our local news sources to help push this further and further into the National and Worldwide press.
Goto this link to see the interview with Randy.
Staff writer
Foreigners who have divorced their Japanese spouses are often denied access to their children.
This is because Article 819 of the Civil Code
stipulates that only one of the parents can have parental rights following a divorce, causing family courts to rule against dual custody of children.
Thierry Consigny, an elected member of the Assembly for French Overseas Nationals for Japan and North Asia, promised Monday in Tokyoto “raise awareness of the issue among lawmakers, the government and media.”
While he spoke at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, Consigny was joined by several foreign and Japanese parents who have been unable to see their children for years after divorce and who spoke of their tragic experiences.
Consigny emphasized that this is not just the problem of foreigners, but it is also a Japanese problem. More than 160,000 parents in Japan are unable to meet their children after separation or divorce. More than 10,000 dual citizenship children living in Japan cannot see their foreign parents.
Such situations are seldom observed in Europe, where no laws stipulate that the single parental right is mandatory, or the United Sates, where divorcing parents can choose dual or single parental rights, according to Hiroaki Morita, chairman of Separated Children’s Support, a Tokyo-based nonprofit organization.
Japan has indicated it may consider signing the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Abduction.
However, Takao Tanase, a professor at Chuo University in Tokyo and a member of the Committee on Family Law Legislation in the Japan Federation of Bar Association, told the FCCJ that the government’s position is that it already complies with the convention because it serves the “best interest” of the children in these disputes.
Tanase said Japan’s judicial interpretation of the “best interest” is that once children are securely placed in a new environment, it is best for them to stay in that environment, while the U.S. and European interpretation is simply that children should be free of abuse.
Tanase said he agrees with Consigny that the Civil Code should change because it is obsolete considering that the number of divorces in Japan has increased.
Linked from JapanTimes
Anywhere in the world, noncitizens have fewer legal rights than citizens. Japan’s Supreme Court would agree: On June 2, in a landmark case granting citizenship to Japanese children of unmarried Philippines mothers, judges ruled that Japanese citizenship is necessary “for the protection of basic human rights.”
A shortage of rights for some humans is evident, however, whenever police partake in racial profiling — for example, stopping you for walking or cycling while “gaijin.” Japanese citizens are protected against such random interrogations by the “Police Execution of Duties Act,” which requires probable cause of a crime. But noncitizens, thanks to the Foreign Registry Law, can be questioned at anytime, anyplace, under penalty of arrest.
The societal damage caused by this is not so easily compartmentalized by nationality. Denying legal rights to some people will eventually affect everyone, especially since non-Japanese (NJ) are being used as a proving ground for embryonic public policy.
Let’s look closer at racial profiling. Mark Butler (a pseudonym), a 10-year Caucasian resident of Japan, has been stopped by police a lot — 117 times to be exact. He cycles home at sunrise after working in the financial night markets.
Never mind that these cops see Butler every night. Or that the same cop has stopped him several times. Or that they sometimes make a scene chasing him down the street and interrogate him in the cold and rain like a criminal suspect. The real question is why they do this.
Cops generally claim a quest for bicycle thieves, never making it clear why Butler arouses suspicion. When pressed further they admit: “Sure, we know you’re not a crook, but Chinese gangs are causing trouble, and if we don’t crack down on foreigners, the public thinks we’re not doing our job.”
But at stop No. 67, at a police box that had checked him more than 40 times already, a nervous junior cop admitted that this was his “kunren” (training).
“It seemed the older officer there remembered I wasn’t a thief,” said Butler, “and saw an opportunity for some on-the-job training — without the risk of dealing with an actual criminal.”
“I’d be happy to serve as a paid actor who rides past police stations and cooperates (or not, as directed) with the trainees. But these are officials making use of innocent people — and foreigners at that — for their kunren, with small and large risks forced upon the innocent party.”
No larger risk imaginable was recently forced upon a gaijin gimp by Narita Customs.
On May 26, a customs official planted 124 grams of cannabis in a NJ tourist’s bag. Why again? It was to train the sniffer dog.
Unbelievably, the bag got lost. Customs later tracked down the tourist and his bag at a Tokyo hotel. They publicly blamed one bad egg — and one bad dog.
However the Kyodo news agency now reports Narita has laced bags 160 times since last September. The Mainichi in English called it “common practice.”
Never mind that anyone else doing this would be committing a crime. If the bag had got on a connecting flight to a place such as Singapore, the unwitting possessor could have been executed!
Japan also has stiff penalties for drug possession, so imagine this being your bag, and police on the beat snag you for some questioning. Do you think “how’d that get there?” would have sufficed as an excuse?
It did not for Nick Baker, arrested shortly before World Cup 2002, and sentenced to 14 years despite evidence he was an unwitting drug mule.
And it did not suffice for a Swiss woman, arrested in October 2006 on suspicion of smuggling meth from Malaysia. Despite being found innocent twice in court, she has not been released.
Narita Customs said reprimands would be issued, paychecks docked, but nobody fired. That’ll learn ‘em.
But still the lack of transparency, such as whether Mr. Bad Egg knew the suitcase owner’s nationality from the bag tag, is indicative. It is not inconceivable that his bag selection was judicious: If he had egged a Japanese, think of the lawsuit.
Mr. Bad Egg had spiked bags 90 times according to Kyodo. Apparently he was determined not to follow what customs officials claim is standard procedure (such as stashing the contraband in a dummy bag; although common-sense precautions, like including a GPS locator or labeling the box “Property of Narita Customs,” apparently are not), it seems logical that he would target a gaijin guinea pig and safely hedge his bets.
But why should citizens care what happens to NJ? Because NJ are crash-test dummies for policy creep.
For example, systemic full-time contract employment, or “ninkisei” first started with the foreigners. In Japan’s universities (and many of its workplaces), if a Japanese was hired full-time, he got lifetime employment — unable to be sacked unless he did something illegal or really stupid (like, um, planting drugs?).
However, NJ educators and employees were given contracts, often capped at a certain age or number of renewals. And they didn’t get “fired” in legal terms — their contracts were merely “nonrenewed.” There was no legal recourse, because you agreed to the poison pill by signing the contract. Thus nationality and job stability were correlated, in a practice long derided as “academic apartheid.” Who cared? NJ were supposed to go back to their home countries someday anyway.
However, in the 1990s, with the low birthrate and declining student numbers, Japan’s universities found themselves in trouble. So in 1997, a new law was passed enabling full-time Japanese educators to be hired on contracts like foreigners. Hey, it had kept the gaijin disposable for the past century — why not downsize everyone?
Eventually the entire job market recognized how “temping” and “freetering” workers empowered the bottom line. Contract employment is now universal — applied, according to Louis Carlet of the National Union of General Workers, to 20 percent of Japanese men, 50 percent of Japanese women and 90 percent of NJ workers.
Another example occurred back in 2003 when the government tried “gaijin carding” the entire population with the Juki-Net System. However, it faced a huge (and rare) public backlash; an Osaka High Court Judge even ruled it unconstitutional in 2006 as an invasion of privacy. Oddly, the judge died in an apparent suicide four days after his ruling, and the Supreme Court reversed his decision last March 6. Now the decks are legally cleared to track everyone.
Meanwhile, new, improved, centralized gaijin cards with computerized chips are in the pipeline to keep the policing system evolving.
More examples that show how Japanese citizens being subjected to treatment traditionally reserved for NJ include police stopping Japanese and rifling through their backpacks (vernacular articles are now advising readers that this is still illegal).
Also, more public surveillance cameras are appearing nationwide, after Japan’s first neighborhood “foreign crime” cameras were installed in Tokyo’s Kabukicho district in February 2002. According to NHK, Tokyo is getting 4000 new ones for the Group of Eight Summit — temporarily, we hope — as Japan has been converted into a temporary police state for the sake of catching “terrorists” (foreigners, naturally).
What’s next? How about fingerprinting everyone and forcing them to carry tracking devices? Hey, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear from extra surveillance, right? Besides, the gaijin have already set the precedent.
The moral here is that our fellow native residents should not think that they won’t be “gaijinized” just because they are citizens. No matter what the Supreme Court writes about the power of citizenship, when it comes to the erosion of civil rights, noncitizens are the canaries in the coal mine.
But I managed to do another video for the cause. Digging through the family pics and video wrenches my guts out, and my tears are hard to see through, but here is a new one.
Song by One Republic. Title Come Home..
[Verse 1]
Hello world
Hope you’re listening
Forgive me if I’m young
For speaking out of turn
There’s someone I’ve been missing
I think that they could be
The better half of me
They’re in their own place trying to make it right
But I’m tired of justifying
So i say you’ll..
[Chorus]
Come home
Come home
Cause I’ve been waiting for you
For so long
For so long
And right now there’s a war between the vanities
But all i see is you and me
The fight for you is all I’ve ever known
So come home
Oooh
[Verse 2]
I get lost in the beauty
Of everything i see
The world ain’t as half as bad
As they paint it to be
If all the sons
If all the daughters
Stopped to take it in
Well hopefully the hate subsides and the love can begin
It might start now..Yeahh
Well maybe I’m just dreaming out loud
Until then
[Chorus]
Come home
Come home
Cause I’ve been waiting for you
For so long
For so long
And right now there’s a war between the vanities
But all i see is you and me
The fight for you is all I’ve ever known
Ever known
So come home
Oooh
[Interlude]
Everything i can’t be
Is everything you should be
And that’s why i need you here
Everything i can’t be
Is everything you should be
And that’s why i need you here
So hear this now
[Chorus]
Come home
Come home
Cause I’ve been waiting for you
For so long
For so long
And right now there’s a war between the vanities
But all i see is you and me
The fight for you is all I’ve ever known
Ever known
So come home
Come home
Fathers Day Demonstration 2008, U.S. Capitol - Patrick Braden’s daughter was illegally taken to Japan in March 2006 by her mother. Japan has the worst record of all nations for harboring fugitive parents who abscond with children out of the U.S.
Here are the videos of Patrick Speaking in D.C. I want to take a moment to thank Patrick Braden, and Walter Benda for continuing to push this issue. I wish more of us could get this involved but unfortunetly we can’t all be as involved as they are. I try to do my part by pushing this issue on the internet and getting the necessary information in front of as many eyes as possible. I encourage everyone to do as much as they can until Japan and the U.S. make this as much as a priority to be resolved as it should be.
A happy day for most fathers, a sad day for those of us afflicted with being a left behind parent. While there IS good news on the horizon we hope, yesterday isn’t soon enough. I miss my kids. :( Erika, Alyssa, and Collin I love you more than life and I ache until I can hold you again. Love your Dad..
I am very happy to report that today should mark a significant turning point for the way the US Congress views our issue.
I am in DC today at the invitation of the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee to attend a hearing on Japan. The Chairman and his staff have made some exceptional offers to me for work on our issue. I am almost skeptical to report them, until after they have actually followed through with their offer. I have 3 other left-behind parents participating today. Anyone who would like to participate is welcome to contact me directly and we can discuss participation in the ongoing efforts here. We are at a major turning point…. watch for my next posting if you are not in regular contact. I want to urge everyone in our group to get involved.
Sincerely,
Patrick Braden
Two weeks ago, the Japanese government made a notable
announcement that may make Japan more compatible with the
legal conventions used internationally, and will be of
particular benefit to non-Japanese spouses of Japanese. The
announcement was that by 2010, Japan would sign the the
1980 Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of International
Child Abduction, an international legal construct that
attempts to deal with the thorny issue of court
jurisdiction when children of international marriages are
moved cross-border, often by a parent trying to thwart a
court ruling in the previous jurisdiction.
Currently, Japan is known as a haven for disaffected
Japanese spouses who, in getting divorced, abscond with
their kids back to Japan. Once in Japan they can dare their
foreign spouses to try getting the kids back — something
that despite around 13,000 international divorces a year
in Japan and more overseas, has NEVER happened.
The reason for this astounding statistic, that of zero
repatriations of abducted children from international
marriages after the kids have been abducted to Japan, is
entirely to do with the attitudes of the Japanese judiciary
and their wish to maintain 19th Century customs in the face
of international pressure. Japan has ratified many parts of
the Hague Convention treaties over the years, but in terms
of repatriation of kids, they have been claiming for 20
years now to be “studying” the issue. That’s Japan-speak
for “we’re not interested in making any changes”.
Our guess is that the recent announcement occurred after
pressure from the USA and Canada, in particular. Things
started to come to a head about 5 years ago, when fed up by
repeating occurences of child abductions from both of those
countries, and despite court decisions there for custody to
go to the local parent, the consular staff of a number of these
foreign embassies started holding annual summits to discuss
the problem. These discussions escalated to pressure on
foreign governmental agencies and politicians in some of
Japan’s biggest trading partners — and finally someone
spoke to the Japanese government at a sufficiently high
enough level to get their attention.
The subject became especially sensitive when the Japanese
were at the peak of their indignation over the North Korean
abductions of Japanese citizens several years ago, and were
seeking international support. All the while, Japanese law
allowed similar types of abductions here.
In case you’re not up on the state of play, there were
44,000 international marriages registered in Japan in 2006,
and probably a good percentage of that number again of
Japanese marrying overseas but not bothering to register
back in Japan. The divorce rate within Japan is about 30%,
and for Japanese living overseas (take the US as an
example), it is typical of the local population, so more
like 50%-60%. Thus there are a lot of international
separations — many of which are not amicable.
But it’s when the kids are involved that things start
getting really nasty. Usually in the case of a divorced
international couple going to court overseas and after
custody is awarded, if one of the parents fears a possible
adbuction situation, the couple can be placed under a
restraining order not to travel without the other spouse’s
consent. The USA, Canada, Australia, and UK all do this.
The kids’ passports will often be withheld as well.
Unfortunately, there have been a number of cases where the
Japanese spouse then “loses” the kids Japanese passports
and applies to the local consulate for replacements — only
to hop a flight back to Tokyo a few hours later, with the
kids in tow.
Once in Japan, the jurisdiction suddenly falls to the
Japanese courts, even if there is a foreign arrest warrant
out for the absconding partner, and in several cases, even
if there is an Interpol arrest warrant out. In Japan,
there is no concept of joint custody, and the partner
allowed to keep the kids is the one that has held them for
the previous few months.
The courts’ opinion here is that kids need a stable
environment, and the act of being the only guardian for a
period of time, even if that guardian was in hiding,
qualifies for this — unless the kids are under 5 years
old, in which case they will typically be returned to the
mother (if the father is the abscondee), or to the father
if the mother has deceased. But not always. There are
cases where the Japanese mother has died and the
Japanese grandparents have kept the kids, instead of
returning them to the foreign father. You can read more
about this sad state of affairs at
http://www.crnjapan.com/en/.
You won’t believe that this kind of thing is still going on
in a first-world country like Japan in the 21st century.
The Japanese court attitude thereby encourages Japanese
spouses wanting to hang on to their kids to hightail it
back to Japan and lie low for 6 months. Currently there has
been no case, even after the Japanese Supreme Court has
awarded rightful custody to the foreign parent, where
that aggrieved foreign parent has been able to go get their
kids back. The reason is quite simply that Japan doesn’t
have a mechanism for properly enforcing civil suit
judgments, and typically a breach of an order in a civil
suit does not result in the offender being subject to a
subsequent criminal suit.
Thus, the Hague Convention on child abduction provides a
mechanism whereby if children are illegally removed from
their country of habitual residence, they must be
returned, and the jurisdiction for subsequent court
decisions is taken out of the hands of the Japanese courts.
This is the first step in making international court
rulings involving kids, stick.
We believe that this is going to be a long and slow
process, but once the treaty is signed and the first few
cases start to be heard, either the kids involved will be
returned or the parent trying to hang on to them will
create an international brouhaha that will highlight to the
world the lack of protection of rights for international
parents here in Japan. Who knows, maybe this will start
another process — that of allowing foreigners actually
residing within Japan to also regain the simple right of
access to their children after a divorce.
But in reality we think this level of change will take
several more generations and a lot more foreigners living
in Japan to achieve…
