US says Japanese laws on child custody raising concerns in Washington, could affect ties
By Malcolm Foster, APTuesday, February 2, 2010
Child custody battles could raise US-Japan tension
TOKYO — Japan should work to solve problems in international custody cases so that children of broken marriages have access to both parents, a senior U.S. official said Tuesday, hinting the issue could hurt bilateral relations.
Visiting U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said that Japan’s position has “raised very real concerns among senior and prominent Americans in Congress, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.”
Japan has not signed an international convention on child abductions and its domestic family law permits only one parent to have custody of children in cases of divorce — nearly always the mother. That leaves many fathers, including foreigners, unable to see their children in Japan until they are grown up.
There are about 70 cases of American parents who are kept from seeing their children in Japan, and Campbell met with several of them in a group earlier Tuesday. He called their situations “heart-breaking.”
Steve Christie, an American university instructor who lives in Japan and met with Campbell, said he has only rarely been able to see his son the last four years ever since his wife, whom he has since divorced, suddenly left him with the boy.
“This is our life and blood, this is our offspring, and we’re being denied a chance to see them,” said Christie, 50. “It’s not right, it’s immoral, it’s unethical. What amazes me is for how long it’s been going on in this country.”
In some cases, Japanese mothers living overseas have fled to Japan with their children and kept the fathers from having any contact with the kids, even if court rulings abroad ordered joint custody.
“This situation has to be resolved in order to ensure that U.S.-Japan relations continue on such a positive course,” Campbell told reporters in Tokyo. “The United States government strongly believes that these children have a right to enjoy the love of both parents and the benefits of both cultures.”
Campbell’s comments are the strongest to date on this issue, with Tokyo coming under increased international pressure to sign on to the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction, which is designed to address such international custody disputes.
Japan is the only Group of Seven nation who has not joined the convention, signed by 80 nations, with Tokyo arguing that it could endanger Japanese women and their children trying to flee abusive foreign husbands.
The issue gained attention last year when American Christopher Savoie was arrested in Japan after he snatched his two children from his Japanese ex-wife’s hands as they walked to school. His ex-wife Noriko Savoie had violated a U.S. court custody issue by taking the children from Tennessee to Japan a month earlier.
Savoie was eventually released and allowed to return to the U.S. on condition he leave his children behind.
During his meeting with the American “left-behind” parents, as they call themselves, Campbell said that if Japan didn’t make changes within four months on the issue, Washington would rachet up the pressure on the Japanese government, according to Christie’s account.
“He said that we should be expecting changes, and that if we don’t see significant changes, more actions will be taken,” Christie added.
U.S. Embassy officials declined to confirm Campbell’s comments, but the secretary did stress that the issue has risen on Washington’s priority list — and at least twice suggested it could complicate ties with Tokyo that are already strained over a dispute on reorganizing American troops in Japan.
“It’s been striking to me at how rapidly this issue has gained support in Congress,” Campbell said.
While emphasizing the importance and strength of the U.S.-Japan relationship, he said that the child custody issue “has been left unaddressed for a long period of time and is gaining momentum in the United States.”
Japan needs to take steps to “avoid a situation where this in any way complicates the smooth running and the important nature of our overall strategic relationship,” he added.
Tokyo has argued in the past that signing the convention could endanger Japanese women and their children trying to flee abusive foreign husbands, although the government is studying the matter.
The U.S. isn’t the only country that feels strongly about this issue.
On Saturday, ambassadors from the U.S., Britain, Australia and five other countries met with Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada to urge Tokyo to join the Hague convention.
Campbell said he was hopeful about Tokyo’s response, saying that he sensed a recognition in Tokyo’s new government that steps needed to be taken. He raised the issue with Okada during his visit and said the two countries had set up a process of bilateral meetings to address the issue.
Kazuaki Kameda, who heads a department of child custody issues set up at the Foreign Ministry in December, declined to comment. He said officials from the Foreign Ministry and the U.S. Embassy had their first meeting recently to discuss ways to improve the situation.
Tags: Asia, Divorce And Separations, East Asia, Embassies, Geography, Japan, North America, Tokyo, United States