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The Stolen Children
“In total I have lived in Japan for 11 years now. I have recently married another lady (2012 feb) and we found out she is pregnant. We were both very excited about it and I supported her throughout the pregnancy and birth.
“After the baby was born, my wife started acting very different. She acted distant and not interested in our relationship anymore. When I say ‘After’ I mean the day she came out of hospital.
“She would only ever talk about the baby or her family or money for this and that. She started getting very angry if I even tried to interact with her.
“Then one night I was feeling ill and went to bed early. I woke up to find she had gone with the baby and left no note or any form of message. I panicked, I didn't know Japanese law regarding children but I know the UK law and the UK says it's illegal so I went straight to the police station (koban) at 3am.
“They told me to go and see the central police in the main office at 8 a.m. They said they would look out for her but can't do anything right now.
“It got to 5 a.m. and my wife's father called me. He said my wife is on the way to Hiroshima with the baby.
“I went back to the police again to let them know and they said there is nothing they can do at all.
“That leaves me at today. Her family are telling her to divorce me and keep the baby. I am not allowed contact with my child according to them.
“I feel completely helpless. It seems Japanese women can just up and leave any time they want and take everything with them. Nothing according to law can stop them doing that.”
Have a cigar, kid, and go have a few drinks with the boys. Then go home and stumble into bed and sleep the sleep of the damned. Then wake up, take two aspirin, and try to forget about that bizarre dream that somehow seemed so real. Shake it off, and then proceed with your day.
Actually, if that had been the real response I wrote to the writer of that sad tale, I would have changed the line “proceed with your day” to “proceed with your life.”
No, this isn’t a joke column and that isn’t a joke letter. Word for word, it’s exactly what I found myself reading this morning after popping half a Mirtazapine with my coffee. Mirtazapine is supposed to be a serious weapon in the fight against depression but in case you’re planning on suggesting to your doctor that he prescribe it to you, let me just assure you that it doesn’t work very well.
Nothing works very well against the kind of depression I have. I had to give up the love of my life, drinking, around 10 months ago, because it was either that or a future liver transplant, which would probably not only be messy and dangerous but something someone with my finances would have to transact with a Chinese lifer. But pills are the only weapon I have against the depression that I suffer, day in, day out, knowing that today is another day that will go by in which I will have no contact with my 11-year-old son.
And our dear old new dad up there is going to have to make very good friends with a doc who hands out prescriptions like candy, if his life goes the way I predict it will.
It’s just too bad I wasn’t in on the thing when he kissed the bride and danced an ersatz Western-style dance in an ersatz Japanese Western-style wedding; too bad I wasn’t there when he excitedly confided to the world that he “was pregnant!”
He may have been pregnant, but he was pregnant with what was to turn out to be a “ghost child.” At this point, not being privy to 100% of the facts, I can only predict with 99% certainty that he will never see his child except from a distance and even that will be highly unlikely. When the child turns 18 there is the off-chance that he/she will come a-knocking but even that is a pipe dream if what I know about these things is even half true.
Our friend — let’s call him Alex, for want of a name better than “Suckaaaahhhh” — is now the proud parent of a bag of flesh that shares 50% of his DNA and will suck him mentally, if not financially dry in the coming 18 years or so.
He is the parent of a half-Japanese child. His “wife” — probably more accurately termed his “sperm-processing machine” — has just kidnapped their child in Japan, has fled to the haven of her parents, and the chances are very good indeed that Alex will never see his child again in his lifetime. And there is nothing that he, his country of origin, his local embassy or F. Lee Bailey and a Dream Team of lawyers can do about it.
Japan is one of those nations that has chosen not to be a party to the Hague Abduction Convention, which “provides an expeditious method to return a child internationally abducted by a parent from one member nation to another.”
One would think that Japan, a “stable, highly developed parliamentary democracy with a modern economy” according to the description provided by the U.S. State Department website, would be party to most if not all international conventions with regards to the rights of children and their parents. But one would be very, very wrong. Egregiously, badly, sadly wrong. One thinks of countries like Saudi Arabia and Sudan as being the primitive backwaters and safekeepers of medieval laws that shouldn’t apply to the world of the 21st Century, but one would never suspect that one would have a better chance of getting one’s child back from Burkina Faso, Africa, than one would from Japan.
So if you are the father of a half-Japanese child, and the child holds a Japanese passport, if the child’s mother decides one day in a crowded shopping mall in downtown Harajuku, Tokyo to have a shouting match with you and then take your child into the subway, move out of your house with the child and refuse to let you ever see or contact the child again, she is not only perfectly within her rights to do so, but you would probably be arrested and possibly deported if you attempted to go against her wishes.
You can hire a small army of lawyers, either in your home country or Japan, you can get custody judgments giving you 50% custody of your child with the according visitation rights form your local family judge, you can get a signed, framed decree from the Prime Minister of Canada demanding the return of your child to you, but the only thing you can depend on is that if your child’s mother wishes it, on any grounds whatsoever, you may very well never see your child again or have contact with him/her until he/she attains the age of 18 and decides to track you down.
According to the U.S. State Department, “Abductions to Japan represent one of the largest portfolios in the State Department, Bureau of Consular Affairs, Office of Children’s Issues and are among the most difficult to resolve. Japanese law and custom favor one parent having sole custody, making it extremely difficult for foreign left-behind parents to obtain the return of or access to abducted children.”
Furthermore, “Foreigners have been arrested for attempting to flee Japan with their children.”
So what does this have to do with you? Probably nothing. But it has a lot to do with me. I consider myself lucky; I married my Japanese wife in 1990 and she moved with me to Canada. We had a son in 2001. In 2004, she decided she no longer wanted to live in Canada, and moved back to Japan after having met a Japanese man on the Internet. In Japan, she married the man and had two children with him; after that, he met another woman on a business trip and the two were divorced. Apparently her second husband, although Japanese, never contacts her or attempts to see his children.
My son, who is now 11, lives with his mother and her two children from her second marriage She earns money from a part time job. She recently refused to allow my son to leave Japan, citing “school obligations,” but does not disallow contact. Thus, I am able to travel, at ruinous expense, to Japan during his summer “holidays” and interact with him, have him stay with me at my hotel, and so on. He no longer holds a valid passport, although he is a legal citizen of three countries: The United States (I’m American), Canada (he was born in Montreal) and obviously, Japan.
Unlike our friend Alex, I’m fairly certain that when my son, who is well aware of his predicament, attains the age of 18, he will choose to move permanently to Canada. However, his English reading and writing skills will be severely lacking and only a supreme effort of study will bring him to a level in which he could function in a job here. It remains to be seen how that will play out. And every single day that goes by is a day in which I don’t see my only son play, learn, evolve.
However, to our plaintive Alex, the only solution I was able to offer him was to do exactly what I described at the beginning of this piece: Go out with your buddies, get horrendously smashed, wake up the next day and pretend that that “whole Japan thing” never happened. Because that’s pretty much the only thing that is going to get him through the next eighteen years.
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