Fighting in vain for custody
Tough laws in Japan leave foreign parents losing access to their children
TOKYO: Emmanuel, Stephane, Henrik and James come from very different backgrounds, but they share the same painful experience of battling Japan’s legal system – in vain – for access to their children after divorce.
Once married to Japanese women, they say they were prevented from contact with their children when their relationships disintegrated, sometimes even after court rulings in their favour.
Tough laws and patriarchal cultural norms that overwhelmingly see mothers granted sole custody after a divorce – 80% of the time, according to official figures – mean that fathers rarely see their children again.
Frenchman Emmanuel de Fournas has spent years battling for access to his daughter after his Japanese ex-wife moved back to Japan.
Despite winning a court order in France and filing a case under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction in September 2014, he is still fighting for the right to see his daughter.
“I thought I could benefit from the clear rules of the Hague Convention, but ... they aren’t respected in Japan,” he said.
“I’ve lost everything, my savings, my job,” he said tearfully.
His experience is not unusual. Henrik Teton from Canada and James Cook from the United States have similar stories to tell.
“What kind of justice system is it if decisions are not implemented? There is room to do more and bet- ter,” says Richard Yung, a French senator who came to Japan to plead the cases of several French parents.
Although Japan has signed the Hague Convention designed to prevent a parent from moving a child to another country and blocking access for the former partner, Tokyo demonstrates “a pattern of noncompliance” with the pact, according to the US State Department.
For foreign parents, most often fathers, “this poses major problems, because they have a different mentality and they can’t comprehend losing custody or the right to visit their child”, said Nahoko Amemiya, a lawyer for the Tokyo Public Law office.
Even when foreign parents win their case in a Japanese court, enforcement is patchy.
“It’s not that Japanese courts favour the Japanese parent, it’s that they favour the ‘kidnapper’,” who is living with the child, said John Gomez, founder of the group Kizuna, which advocates for parents separated from their children.