Divorced From Their Children

Foreign spouses in Japan frequently lose their children when their marriages collapse. There is no shared custody in Japanese divorces, and visitation rights are minimal and unenforceable. The wife gets the children in an estimated 80 percent to 90 percent of the cases, according to divorce lawyers, and fathers are expected to drop out of sight.
"In court, when I said I wanted to see my kids every weekend, they laughed at me," Reedy said.
Family experts say divorce carries a stigma of shame in Japan, so ex-spouses avoid seeing each other. The workaholic hallmark of post-World War II Japan resulted in a clear division of responsibility, they say, in which husbands belong to their job and children belong to their mothers. The mothers take total responsibility for the children -- mothers are blamed, for instance, if their children get bad marks in school -- and are expected to retain that role after divorce. In addition, some experts argue, children's loyalties are less divided if the father is not around.
Even if children are taken away from a parent abroad who has legal custody and are brought here, Japan is a haven from international law.

Japan is one of the few developed countries that has refused to sign the 1980 Hague Convention promising to return abducted children to the rightful custody of an overseas parent. So a Japanese parent is not prosecuted for bringing children into the country in violation of a foreign court's custody order. Japan ranks second, behind Mexico, in the frequency of parental abduction

Japan's stance that parental abduction is not a crime can change when a foreigner is the abductor. Engle Nieman, 46, was arrested at the Osaka port and spent four months in jail for trying to go home to the Netherlands with his 1-year-old daughter after his wife moved in with her parents.


"People in the West don't understand," lamented Reedy. In Japan, "it has nothing to do with whether the kids would benefit by being with another parent. Once there is a divorce, the line is cut. That's it."
Very sad how primitive Japan is on a human perspective...