‘It was kind of like the end of a battle’
Five B.C. families issued travel visas to bring their adopted babies home from Japan
Five Canadian families who have newly adopted children but were grounded in Japan because of Canadian visa issues are finally on their way home.
The families received notice from the Canadian embassy in Manila — there is no visa section at the Tokyo embassy — on Saturday that their children’s paperwork had been cleared and they could head for home.
Ryan Hoag of Coquitlam immediately forwarded the message to his wife, Wiyani Prayetno, who has been staying in Japan with their daughter, who was born in April.
“It was kind of like the end of a battle and I was just so overwhelmed with actually seeing the finish line,” Hoag said, shortly before flying back to Japan on Sunday.
The couple originally arrived in Japan in early May to meet their daughter, but Hoag had to return to Canada a month later for work.
Three families have been stuck waiting in Tokyo for more than two months, while two other couples have been waiting six weeks — a debacle that has caused the new parents serious financial and emotional strain.
With their 12-week Japanese visitor visas running out soon, time was of the essence, said Alex Stojicevic, the Vancouver immigration lawyer who has been working with the families.
Stojicevic said once the visas were approved for the children, the Canadian embassy in Tokyo moved mountains, opening up on Saturday to help complete the paperwork and that officials had also worked to get photos, passport photographs and the like shipped to Manila and back in just a couple days; usually that takes a week or so.
“We greatly appreciate that,” he said.
He said that one family had already flown home to B.C. and that the Canada Border Services Agency had designated a liaison officer to work directly with the families upon their arrival at YVR in finalizing their children’s status as permanent residents.
All of the families followed a process that has been in place for at least a decade, he said, which includes getting a letter from the provincial government saying there are no objections to the adoption.
After getting that letter, the Canadian visa for the child usually only takes a few weeks.
But in these cases, the process took longer, because the federal government was seeking clarification from the Japanese government to ensure adoptions respect Japanese laws.
Stojicevic said the delay appeared to be prompted by a change in American policy around adoptions from Japan, which had led to the Canadian government seeking an opinion from the Japanese Ministry of Justice.
Despite granting these families visas, he said it appears Canada is still waiting on that opinion, which creates some uncertainty for other Canadian families planning Japanese adoptions.
“The program is still under a question mark ... it still looks like they’re making inquiries as to what the Japanese government’s position is,” he said.
“There are other families involved in this process who are in the pipeline as it were and have children identified, who do really want to get on with this.”