My child has been abducted to Japan.  What do I do now?

UNDER CONSTRUCTION - Sorry, very USA centric at the moment.  I welcome volunteers who want to create a page with information for a different country, at which time I will create country specific pages instead of this one.

• If your child might still be on an airplane en-route to Japan, contact the FBI IMMEDIATELY!  If they will not listen, contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.  Contact the US State Department Office of Children's Issues.  Note that the pilot of an airline may have special legal powers to help you.  They may be able to turn back the flight or stop the abducting parent from leaving the airplane after arrival.  Be sure to ask about this.  It should also be possible to get passenger list information from the Department of Homeland Security in order to find out which flight the abducting parent is on, if any.
• Contact local law enforcement - Get them to open a case for an international parental abduction and work on prevention if the abducting parent may not have left the country yet.  See the country specific pages for information on who to call and information on local laws.
• Contact your lawyer and the local family court - Start things moving to get sole custody of your children.  Read about educating judges on the problems with Japan.  Once that happens, getting an arrest warrant for the abducting parent, should you decide to do so, will be easier.  You could even try registering your sole custody in Japan.
• If you believe a divorce will occur, consider initiating it in your home country BEFORE the abducting parent can initiate one in Japan.  Get jurisdiction before Japan does, otherwise your court may refuse.  But read about the anti-divorce form and not admitting you want a divorce first.
• Get a Japanese lawyer - get a copy of the Japanese parent's Family Registry and submit an "anti-divorce" form to prevent them from forging your signature on a divorce form.  If you do get into Japanese family court, mediation, or whatever, never admit that you want a divorce, because while married, legally you still have joint custody.  After divorce you lose all rights. Japanese courts are reluctant to grant divorces when one parent seems to want to keep the marriage together.  This has been known to go on for years.  5 or 10 years or more in some cases.  This may in the end be one of your few areas of  leverage to get an uncooperative abductor to negotiate.  (The other areas are money if the abducting parent does not have a steady income, and an arrest warrant in your home country if they like to or need to travel out of Japan where they may be arrested even in other countries by Interpol.)

Usually what happens in these situations is that you need to choose between three choices.

1. Use the Japanese court system to try to get your child back. - I have never seen this work. There are numerous examples of failures even involving cases all the way up to the supreme court of Japan.  The US State Dept says that there are no cases of children being returned.

2. Negotiate further with the parent to get the child back.- You are the only one who can tell whether this will work in your case.  If it is possible to fix things up enough to get them back to the original country, that's the best solution, but is unlikely in cases of a divorced parental abductor. It may work when the reason for the abduction was temporary, resolvable problems in an ongoing marriage.  Find a way to resolve the problems, for the sake of your children!

3. Press criminal charges against the parent. - This can be effective if the other parent needs to travel on business since they will be picked up in Interpol countries. They are stuck in Japan.  Depending on your country, the charges may be dropped when the child becomes an adult. (For example, 18 in the US, even though in Japan he or she is still a child until 20. This is a travesty. The charges should never be dropped, much less before the child is free to leave on his/her own in Japan.)

4. Go to Japan and live. - This is only an option for a very few, and usually the Japanese parent will prevent you from seeing the child anyways.  Courts will typically not order visitation if the other parent is not willing in the first place, and even if they did, they have no way to enforce the visitation.

5. Try to recover through other means. Although we have an essay on Non-Legal Options to Extract Your Abducted Child, this is not something we can recommend since depending on your situation, it may be illegal in Japan and could thus get you arrested in Japan.

6. Publicize the crime on crnjapan website and try to embarrass the parent into returning your child. -  is an option to consider even if you also try any of the other options. If he works for a well known company or an internet related company, sometimes this can help apply pressure to him, his relatives, or his company. I have attached a generic reply that I use to tell people about what info they can post on crnjapan.com website.