Quote:
Originally Posted by Nyororin
I agree that Japan should stop turning a blind eye to child abduction...
On the other hand, I think the real issue is that in the case of an international divorce, the parent who doesn`t receive custody is going to be likely shut out of the child`s life. Not by laws or actions of the custodial parent, but by the difficulty of having a parent living in a different country than their child.
Countries have a strong tendency to grant custody to the native parent. This is true outside of Japan as well as in. What is best for the child in the long run is very hard to determine (impossible, really) if both the parents are normal and decent. But one side has to be chosen, so local courts favor the native over the immigrant/foreign resident/visitor. Add in language and cultural things, and the non-native is often at a severe disadvantage even if the native parent is NOT a good person for children to be with. Again, this is not a Japanese issue - it happens everywhere.
Anyway, in the case of Japan, you get far far more non-Japanese husbands with Japanese wives than the other way around... And they tend to head back to their own country after a divorce. A LOT of these divorces happen very soon after a baby comes into the picture - and taking an infant from a mother is harder than granting the father visitation and keeping the baby with the mother. The thing is, the dad usually heads back home... There is no easy way to keep up visitation if he lives in another country.
Not to mention that in any and every case I have heard of where custody was granted to the Japanese mother, when the child went to visit the father in another country... Somehow the custody agreement was annulled and custody was granted to the father in his home country if he took any interest in obtaining it. Even after years and years of no absolutely no contact. A woman who lives quite close to me took her 3 children to visit their father in the US 6 years after she`d been granted custody (and 5 years after he`d stopped providing support and contacting them at all, but 6 months after he remarried and took a sudden interest in seeing them again). And she was met at the airport by him, a lawyer, and police to remove the children from her custody. Apparently he`d convinced them that her not having enough money to fly all of them to the US every 6 months to see him was her denying him access, so she was deemed unfit. She`s now fighting to gain access to children who only knew her for most of their lives, but are now blocked from even speaking on the phone to her.
There are huge problems on both sides, really.
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That sounds to be a dreadful situation. Poor kids pulled between two parents like that.
Even here in the UK it can be awful for fathers-- too often not allowed contact etc-- that is why we have Fathers for Justice, On the whole the dads get a very raw deal.
International marriages must bring up many problems if the parents separate or divorce in any situation.
Parents AND children can suffer especially those of a different religion.
I don' t know if there can be any protection and warning-- when couples actually marry.
It really is a difficult situation.