The way Emi (not her real name) tells it, she was in the bathroom the first time her husband of 10 years tried to take the children away. Hearing a commotion, she ran out to the street to find her 8-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son being bundled into a taxi.
"As soon as I heard my daughter's voice I rushed outside without shoes and saw the cab was moving, and I just jumped into the front door (of the car). My daughter was shouting and crying and my son was puzzled. I took my daughter first and my son followed, and we went back to the house," she said.
According to Emi, who lives in Tokyo, her marriage had been on the rocks for some time. Even so, her husband's action came as a complete surprise. She said she begged him not to try to take the children away again, and he promised he would not.
Emi recalled that she later went out to buy milk at a convenience store for the children's breakfast the next morning. When she returned, they had vanished.
Since that night more than a year ago, Emi claims she has seen her children only a handful of times--at the whim of her now divorced husband. She says he used the children as bargaining tools to get the divorce, promising to surrender custody if she signed the papers. She says he then failed to honor his promise.
"What I want to say is that my case is not special," she said. "It could happen anywhere."
According to Tokyo-based attorney Michiko Kanazumi, cases of parents being unwillingly shut out of their children's lives by other parents are on the increase in Japan--and many are tantamount to abduction. "In Japan, parental child abduction is not a crime," she said.
Statistics compiled by the Health and Welfare Ministry reveal that about 207,000 couples divorced in 1996, of whom 60 percent had one or more children. In about 77 percent of the cases, custody went to mothers.
Kyoko (not her real name) was one of the other 23 percent. By her own account, she agreed to give her husband custody of their son when they divorced because her job involved extensive travel. The only condition was that she be guaranteed visitation rights. But he later reneged on the agreement, she said. Since then, Kyoko says she has seen her son just once--when she secretly dropped by his school.
One of Kyoko's greatest fears is that the longer access is denied her, the more her son will come to feel she abandoned him.
"The most important thing for children is that they know they are loved from both sides and that they still have a chance to contact both parents," she said.
The Japan chapter of Children's Rights Council (CRC), a Washington-based nonprofit organization committed to giving children access to both parents, estimates that thousands of cases like Kyoko's take place each year.
"I think the Japanese who are in this situation tend to give up because they feel the social pressure and it is just accepted. It's not a crime (to deny a spouse access to a child) and they're conditioned to think that this is one of the things that happens to you in a divorce sometimes," said Walter Benda, cofounder of CRC-Japan, which campaigns on behalf of both Japanese and non-Japanese involved in custody disputes.
Benda, who is currently battling to gain access to his own two daughters, helped set up the chapter in 1995 after he discovered that no such organizations existed in Japan. To some extent, divorce is still a taboo subject, he explained, and many parents are reluctant to come forward.
Compounding the problem is the enduring belief that after a marriage breaks down, access to more than one parent can be confusing for a child, Benda added. Consequently, there is little concept in Japan of shared custody, increasingly common in many countries, including the United States and Britain.
Japan is, however, a signatory to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified in 1994. Article 9 states that parties to the convention "shall respect the right of the child who is separated from one or both parents to maintain personal relations and direct contact with both parents on a regular basis, except if it is contrary to the child's best interests."
CRC-Japan is currently lobbying lawmakers to introduce a legal basis for shared custody. The organization also seeks to give civil courts more power to enforce rulings. As Kanazumi said, "There is no way for a court to enforce 100 percent whatever ruling they make regarding visitation rights or custody."
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Kids suffer psychologically
According to CRC President Lady Catherine Meyer, many parents who are suddenly cut off from their children find themselves banging their heads against a wall of suspicion, making it all the harder to assert their right to see their children.
Meyer, now married to the current British ambassador to the United States, is author of "They Are My Children, Too: A Mother's Struggle for Her Sons." The book describes her efforts to recover her two sons, abducted from Britain to Germany in 1994 by her former husband.
"Parents are often not believed, and I know about it because at the beginning when I talked about my case, people simply wouldn't believe me...Either I had an idiotic lawyer who couldn't help me, or I did something wrong, or maybe even worse--there are two sides to the story. Maybe I was a bad parent," she said in a speech at CRC's annual conference in Washington, D.C. in September.
It was not possible to get comments from any of the alleged abductors alluded to in this article, but experts agree there are many reasons why a parent might deny a spouse or former spouse access to their child. They may be using the child as a bargaining tool, or simply trying to punish their estranged partner. Sometimes, the anger resulting from an acrimonious breakup may lead to the genuine belief that the child is better off without access. In their minds, the person they see as a lousy spouse must also be a lousy parent--which may or may not be the case.
But unless there is a history of violence or abuse, psychologists warn that the ultimate victim is likely to be the child.
It is increasingly common to speak of parental alienation syndrome (PAS), which describes the way a child may be systematically turned against the missing parent. In parental abduction cases, PAS has been compared to the "Stockholm Syndrome," in which hostages eventually come to side with their captors.
"I think that any time a parent...attempts to turn the child against the other parent, some kind of psychological damage to the child (results), because the child simply wants to identify with each parent in a healthy way," said Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, associate professor of clinical psychology at Tokyo University.
In cases involving the breakdown of international marriages, things are even more complicated. Children, many of whom are dual nationals with bicultural upbringings, may feel their own identities have been slashed down the middle.
"I can't even begin to think of what the psychological implications are going to be," said Tokyo-based freelance journalist Margaret Layman, speaking of her 13-year-old son. Although the boy lives with her Japanese former husband a mere 45 minutes away, she said she has not been able to see him for the past six years. In addition to the confusion of being denied his biological mother, she said, he has lost an entire extended family in the United States. "Everybody loses. It's not just about me."
This is a point emphasized by CRC-Japan cochair Brian Thomas. The Welshman, who moved to Japan in 1988 with his Japanese wife after marrying in London, said he has been struggling to see his son, now aged 9, since April 1993.
"It's not me fighting to see my son as if he's an object," Thomas said. "It's me fighting for my son's right to have access to me."
After much legal wrangling, the Supreme Court recently upheld a high court ruling that reversed a lower court's decision to grant his wife a divorce, thereby reinstating Thomas' right to equal custody.
'System protects abductors'
No statistics are available for the total number of custody disputes in Japan involving international couples, but experts agree the problem is growing worldwide. In the United States, where parental child abduction is a federal crime, the Virginia-based nonprofit organization National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimates that out of about 165,000 children abducted by parents yearly, more than 10 percent are taken abroad.
Several conventions exist to facilitate the return of abducted children across borders, but even with treaties in place, judicial returns vary between 5 percent and 95 percent depending on the country, according to the American Bar Association.
The major treaty is the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, currently ratified by 58 countries, which seeks "to secure the proper return of the children wrongfully removed to, or retained in, any contracting state."
Though it helped draft the convention, Japan has yet to sign. Asked why, an official from the legal affairs bureau of the foreign ministry commented that Japan already has legislation to deal with child abduction. He cited the Protection of Personal Liberty Act, enacted shortly after World War II primarily to prohibit the buying and selling of people.
Pressed further, the official admitted current legislation may not always be sufficient. In certain cases of international parental abduction, he said, "I think in Japan there is no way to bring back the child. It's true, yes."
The official added that the ministry has invited experts on international law to discuss the practicalities of joining the Hague Convention. "I cannot promise when Japan will enter this convention," he said.
All of which comes as little comfort to Benda, who has not seen his U.S.-born daughters, aged 9 and 10, since July 1995. By his account, they were taken by his Japanese wife when she walked out on him and effectively disappeared. The family was living in Tokyo at the time.
Thus began an expensive and exhausting legal battle that continues to this day. "The family court told me, all my demands are reasonable. I want to have phone contact with my children. I want them to be able to call me anytime they feel like it. I want them to be able to exchange letters with me and to have personal visits with them. They say all those are reasonable requests but there's no way to enforce it, even if they issue an order," Benda said.
When his spouse visa expired, Benda had no choice but to return to the United States. Since then, his wife, who was a permanent U.S. resident, has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Virginia for international parental kidnapping. If convicted, she could be imprisoned for up to 3 years and/or fined 250,000 dollars.
As long as she is in Japan, however, she is immune to prosecution or extradition.
"The system protects abductors," said Benda, in Tokyo recently to start new legal proceedings. "So we need to change the system, and I guess the change starts by changing people's attitudes."