Japan Children's Rights Demonstration at German Children's Day Festival

Left behind father Stefan Born held protest demonstrations on 5 May 2004 (Japan's Children's Day :  “Kodomo no hi" ) in front of the Japanese Consulate General and on “Japan day”, 5 June 2004 near the Rhine river in Düsseldorf.  

In his own words:

On the two days we distributed German fliers and the report from the Japanese magazine Hiragana Times (in Japanese, English and German language) from December 2003 about international child abduction in connection with Japan.  

The feedbacks of the people were extremely positive.  We had a lot of discussions and conversations on this days over the most different topics as custody, child adduction, international law, divorce and so on.

Completely unexpected were that a lot of young people showed large interest in our topic.  We asked the young people to take our fliers into the school to put them to black boards and perhaps to discuss about it in school lessons.

I also spoke to many people, which live in a bi-national relationship. Most of them never thought about divorce and what could could to the children. For a lot of them it was a impetus to talk  with their spouse and partners about it.

Full size pictures from these Japan Children's Day demonstrations  are also available at Stefan's website.