“I think that sanctions are a two-edged sword. I think that threatening countries is often an unsuccessful way to get them to cooperate with us, because most of the relationships that we have are very complex and involve many issues.”

- Susan Jacobs, in response to a request for the State Department’s opinion of the threat of sanctions to oppose Japanese International Parental Child Abduction

1 – “Nix” to Sanctions?
The U.S. Department of State sent Advisor Susan Jacobs to the hearing of the Congressional Subcommittee on Global Human Rights on May 9th, 2013 to tell the Congress, the public, the parents of abducted children, and most importantly, the government of Japan, that parental child abduction is at best a low-level priority to policy makers in the U.S. Department of State. The designated advocate and representative of parents and their kidnapped children, Ambassador/ Advisor Jacobs spoke for 15 or 20 devastating minutes at the hearing and surrendered the lives and fates of hundreds of American children and thousands of children worldwide without a fight by declaring that the world’s most powerful state would not resort to the threat of sanctions even if the Congress makes the administration a gift of the ability to sanction Japan for continuing to provide safe haven for thousands of child abductions, hundreds of which originated from within the United States. (You can see the hearings in their entirety by clicking on this link. There is wonderful, constructive testimony from David Goldman, Patricia Apy, Bindu Philips, Colin Bower, and Michael Elias.)

In her most bizarre response to questions from members of the Subcommittee, Jacobs belittled the importance of stealing and kidnapping children by comparing it unfavorably on a scale of importance and impact to trafficking and other illegal cross-border activities, and said directly that the Department of State will not comply with the will of Congress that it  entertain the threat of sanctions,  should Congress successfully act to make them possible by enacting reintroduced children’s and parents human rights legislation, The Sean and David Goldman Child Abduction Prevention and Return Act, this year.  Jacobs, apparently seeking to preempt efforts to support such enabling legislation, said that this was because U.S.  military and business ties in Japan are more precious, more vulnerable, more delicate, and more precarious than the lives of 4 and 6, 8  and 10 year-olds who have been kidnapped, hidden, and kept out of contact with their parent and families. According to Jacobs, these all-important business and military relationships with Japan would be damaged and falter if children were to be  firmly protected from kidnapping.

I’m left to wonder what could possibly constitute a more malignant child-state policy? The United States, possessor of the world’s largest and most overtly activist criminal justice and military apparatuses is not behaving this way out of weakness, as officials imply when bowing to the sovereignty and inadmissible jurisdictional claims of Japan and other abduction-friendly states. The Department of State, which knows a thing or two about historically threatening and/or sanctioning countries large and small from Russian to Greece to Iran to Syria to Afghanistan to Pakistan to Yugoslavia to Vietnam to Laos to Cambodia to Cuba to Chile to El Salvador to Nicaragua to Panama to Honduras to Grenada to North Korea, suddenly becomes shy about appearing to be too assertive when it comes to protecting children from devastating harm. This is how it appears, until one begins to study the actual policies pursued by the United States with regard to  the delicate areas of jurisdiction, sovereign rights, and enforcement of international law and treaty obligations. The U.S. commitment in these areas has long been dubious at best, self-serving for the rest.  See note (1) below.

Because we intend for it to be known that we are real advocates for our children, we ought, in my opinion, to be asking for Ambassador Jacobs’ job. It simply is not acceptable for such a callous and openly indifferent posture to be taken from the key representative diplomatic post in the US government regarding the protection of children from international kidnapping. 

2 – Slick Fumbling
There were other low-lights during the Department of State representative’s performance at the session.  Global Human Rights Subcommittee Chairman Congressman Christopher Smith repeated the request he had made of the State Department a year earlier in his capacity as Chairman, to provide public information about the numbers of abducted children being held by both Hague and non-Hague treaty partners.  Special Advisor Jacobs was not only unable to provide those numbers, but had no guess as to whether or not that was something that the State Department wanted to do, or had acquired the capacity to do, despite the Congressman’s repetition of a request  that has also been frequently advanced by parents and activists.  Parents of kidnapped children have for years insisted that the US Government has distorted, hidden, or refused to explore or keep proper records of the number of abductions in order to evade the appearance of supporting or insufficiently opposing a grave human rights violation in countries the Department of State considers friendly, “mature democracies,” such as Japan, Mexico, and India. With a polite but dismissive smile, Jacobs told the Congressman for the second year in a row since she took the job that she would “take [the Congressman's request for numbers] back to the office.”

To many of us, Susan Jacobs’ unique qualification for her job seems often to be her sloppy imprecision, her ability to undermine any interlocutor’s confidence that she would ever have a substantive answer to a question so that henceforth they will give up on asking anything further from her.  As one fellow parent recently wrote, this is the DOS/OCI “way of sapping the strength and spirit of LBP’s by forcing them to deal with … indifference, incompetence and hostility…  In this way they can “resolve” abduction cases without ruffling any diplomatic feathers by grinding the LBP’s into the ground.” I cannot help but agree. Stupidity is a blameless vice, unless it is a pose of power.  - See note (2)  -In this case, it masks non-cooperation with Congress and much darker motives that aim at disciplining dissent with indifference to the perpetuation of trauma to mere children.

David Goldman reminded us all at the close of the hearing that Jacobs was appointed to her newly-created position in the Department of State only hours before legislation was introduced into the U.S. Congress to create a far more powerful and independent “Ambassador-at-large” to organize and discipline the prevention of abduction and the return of internationally abducted children.  The creation of the position and her subsequent appointment appeared therefore to constitute an attempt by the Department of State to wrest control of the issue from political accountability among members of Congress in order to prevent effective action against international abduction from arising to inconvenience the Department of State in the pursuit of its usual business and military goals. That the move was a success is evidenced by the fact that the rate of international parental child abduction has continued to rise unabated into the thousands every year. This is how the Department of State defines success.

3 – Real Advocates Needed

Susan Jacobs should resign her post. And the Department of State’s Office of Children’s Issues, – which by servicing corruption and crimes against children in Japan, India and elsewhere  is an enormous threat to U.S. children –  should either be eliminated or relieved of its position as the agency designated with primary authority within the U.S. government over international parental abduction.  The office could be relegated to the role of the adoption services management agency with which it currently masks its cynical operations against children, and the matter of international kidnapping should be restored to those who are willing to recognize the need to protect children with a sense of strength and purpose. Economic and political sanctions, and at minimum the engagement of the most active, assertive, risk-taking criminal justice agencies of the U.S. government at least have the virtue of collectively providing potential means to achieve the aim of protection and return of the children we love from intolerable circumstances.
Our children deserve so much better.

See additions  in the notes:

Notes:

(1) See Human Rights in the United States: Beyond Exceptionalism,  Hertal and Libal, editors; Cambridge University Press, 2011.

(2)  It appears the Ambassador/ Advisor may have been unable to graduate from law school:

“Ambassador Jacobs graduated from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she was a Regents Scholar, and later studied at Georgetown University Law School and the George Washington University.”

From the “About Us” bio-page of the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs website: http://adoption.state.gov/about_us/our_leadership.php

(3) Patricia Apy testified at the hearing that the Department of State has repeatedly opposed a provision of the offered child abduction legislation under which members of Congress would be informed that there is a pending international child abduction case in their district. Now, why would the Department of State be opposed to informing members of Congress who might like to know how people in their area are being treated by and in a particular country with which the U.S. or the Congressperson might have dealings?
The State Department wants the information suppressed. It does not want people to know about this enormous human rights abuse, the kidnapping of our children from the U.S. to Japan, etc. If there were a groundswell against the thousands of international child abductions that happen every year, it would be “detrimental to the relationship” that DOS wants to maintain with members of those responsible governments.
This is precisely what Susan Jacobs and the Office of Children’s Issues represent; the suppression of information about International Parental Child Abduction.

Click here:

City of Ruins

There’s a blood red circle
On the cold dark ground
And the rain is falling down
The church door’s thrown open
I can hear the organ’s song
But the congregation’s gone

My city of ruins
My city of ruins

Now the sweet bells of mercy
Drift through the evening trees
Young men on the corner
Like scattered leaves
The boarded up windows
The empty streets
And my brother’s down on his knees

My city’s in ruins
My city’s in ruins

Now with these hands,
With these hands

I pray for the loved, Lord
Pray for the lost, Lord
Pray for the saved, Lord

Come on rise up!
Come on rise up!

Now there’s tears on the pillow
Darling where we slept
And you took my heart when you left
Without your sweet kiss
My soul is lost, my friend
Now tell me how do I begin again?

My city’s in ruins
My city’s in ruins

In a brief statement with many highlights, Ms. Apy pointedly stated :

Japan: The current status of the resolution of existing abduction cases and the promise of the ratification of the Hague Abduction Convention must be considered illusory at best and deceptive at worst… This (Japanese) legislation expressly encourages self help and potentially criminal behavior by assuring the abducting parent a safe haven where Japanese parents that they will not be prosecuted. “

With regard to the Department of State Office of Children’s Issues, which is the sole government agency responsible for the management and pursuit of the interests of U.S. parents of internationally abducted children, she said:

“Actions of OCI/ State Department Japan Desk: Parents who have pending abduction matters have been sent, from time to time, “urgent” time- sensitive updates , repeatedly announcing the proximity of the Hague ratification and the launch of various “Hague Convention pilot programs”… .Keeping in mind, that this is going to desperate parents, who have had no contact with their children in years the “encouragement” to participate by our government “ in preparation for joining the Hague Abduction Convention” seems as though advocacy for the left behind parent is about to occur. In fact, parents were “encouraged” to abandon their request for the return of their abducted children and to offer to support the abducting parents with financial assistance.

She is completely correct in this assessment of the actions of the State Department.

Ms. Apy also reminded those listening that criminal prosecution of crime is a policy of government, which forms a part of the basis of the rule of law:

“Particularly in addressing the threat of international abduction to Non Treaty countries the partnership of the FBI and the United States Attorney is crucial… I propose that where the child has been located, and indictments issued, the message to the foreign government must demonstrate that here in the United States we value our children and will work tirelessly for the return of every abducted child. The actions of the United States attorney in prosecuting pursuant to the International Parental Kidnapping Crime Act makes it clear that international parental kidnapping is a crime and should be treated as such.”

This is a matter of crime and punishment, but the US and Japan have colluded in making conspiracy to internationally abduct children and provide safe haven for abductors in Japan into a “civil” matter – a matter of private, family concern, rather than a police matter.
This is a grievous, unbearable wrong. Child abduction, a gravely serious, child-abusive crime, must be treated as crime – and punishment unfortunately provides certain manifest advantages.

 ”Punishment strongly affirms the rule of law and the norms that protect human rights. Even if liberal legal institutions are not yet in place, the very aspiration to seek punishment can sometimes summon them into existence… It restores a victim’s sense of dignity and worth, thereby preempting the tendency of victims to seek their own revenge. Punishment separates collective guilt from individual guilt, thus ending seemingly endless cycles of group recrimination. It functions as an effective insurance against future repression.”

from “Human Rights in Political Transitions” by Carol Hesse and Robert Post.

Find a .pdf of Patricia Apy’s testimony, brief and well-worth reading in its entirety, here:
HHRG-113-FA16-Wstate-ApyP-20130509

Tagged: Attorney Patricia Apy, Brian Prager, child abduction, custodial interference, Hague Convention, Japan Child Abduction, Japanese Family Bar Aassociation, Japanese International Child Abduction, Louis Prager, Machico Terauchi, Office of Children's Issues, parental alienation, Rui Prager, Rui Terauchi, State Deparment, Susan Jacobs, Tokyo child abduction, 寺内真智子, 寺内真智子 Child Abductor, 寺内真智子 Kidnaps Children, 寺内真智子 Spousal Abuser ]]> http://forruiboy.com/2013/05/09/illusory-at-best-deceptive-at-worst-japan-continues-to-offer-itself-as-a-haven-for-child-abduction-house-subcommittee-on-global-human-rights/feed/ 3 black flag bwprager123 visit Japanlogo D http://forruiboy.com/2013/04/26/preparing-for-japans-hague-ratification-vital-legal-assistance-is-available-now/ http://forruiboy.com/2013/04/26/preparing-for-japans-hague-ratification-vital-legal-assistance-is-available-now/#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 22:39:03 +0000 Brian Prager http://forruiboy.com/?p=11397 Continue reading →]]> Preparing for Japan’s Hague Ratification

This is information provided and organized by BAC-Home to assist any and all parents who are seeking their children’s return, seeking access to their children, and / or seeking to test the level of commitment which the Japanese make to the provisions of the Hague treaty to repair the destructive course to children which they have pursued to now.  Membership in or allegiance to BAC-Home is not necessary or required. The point is to restore the children’s relationship to their parents, and ours, their parents, to them.

Friday, March 15, 2013

http://www.hark.com/clips/syrjrmshjl-if-i-only-had-the-nerve

I’m afraid there’s no denyin’
I’m just a dandelion,
A fate I don’t deserve.
I’d be brave as a blizzard….
I’d be gentle as a lizard….
I’d be clever as a gizzard…

<3

I may not always love you,
But long as there are stars above you,
You never need to doubt it;
I’ll make you so sure about it!

God only knows what I’d be without you

If you should ever leave me,
Though life would still go on, believe me,
The world could show nothing to me,
So what good would living do me?

God only knows what I’d be without you

The world could show nothing to me,
So what good would living do me?

Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures: Narratives of Youth and Violence from Japan and the United States

By Adrienne Carey Hurley

It pains me that more people won’t read this book, because they may never hear of it. It is richly suggestive and descriptive of the way that frustrated psychological need is disavowed and blown back from generation to generation among Japanese and American youth and their parents. It is an astute and deeply felt text that ties political, literary, psychological narratives together to create a compelling and convincing case that education systems, media regimes, inherited, repetitious ideologies that force victims to author their own oppression can and must be critiqued, as we and our children are paying heavily for the poor regard in which children are held, unbeknownst to ourselves.

 I cite the case of Japanese international parental child abduction and the lack of any law supporting, enforcing or even legally sanctioning joint custody of children in divorced or separating families in Japan. That is a significant current battle ground of the phenomenon Professor Hurley is evoking in this text: lack of authentic protection of children’s right to full, subjective interaction with both of their parents, lack of authentic institutional defense of family relationships against an onslaught of education system life management, discipline and control of children; excessive time-controlling workplace slavery; and media habituation to empty, often violent, control of children’s inner lives. Couple these with and use them to inculcate and enforce rigid gender identities on children, and you have a recipe for the disastrous loss of human feeling and narcissistic damage that characterizes the relations described in Professor Hurley’s book.

This text provides an important antidote to the reductionist arguments about guns and gun violence today, and forms part of just the sort of conversation that ought to be going on instead. Her discussion makes many of the very arguments I most want to make, linking political repression, corruption,  contamination, problems attributable to or related with the Japanese and U.S. relationship, controlling and numbing education systems, incarceration of youth, and lack of any real opportunity for children and adolescents to develop an analysis of “what’s wrong,” of what is perpetuating the inter-generational cycle so that they can acquire enough agency to offer some self-preserving resistance.

The conditions producing parental abduction and the absence of joint parental custody in Japan fit neatly into this argument, lack of attention to which produces deep misrecognition that  lack of time for and investment in subjective interaction of parent and child on a mass scale has fatal consequences.

 From the concluding sections of the book:

 ”If the state, as a parent, harms, how are individual parents, victims of poor parenting themselves, in any position to provide or create spaces in which their own children can thrive? They cannot unless they create corrective opportunities for intersubjective connection.” p. 214

“This book has addressed the desperate measures to which we, adults in the U.S. and Japan (as well as in other places) , make our youth resort. We bombard them with mixed messages that aggravate and exacerbate alienation, oppression, exploitation, and abuse. Their ability to identify and respond to what actually grieves them is severely compromised because we blame them for their struggles and, simultaneously, limit their available means of expression. We then call their occasionally violent attempts to express something “inexplicable.”"We do not prevent violence when we deny youth the opportunity to identify why they are angry and organize relevant strategies to challenge the conditions that fuel their anger; we only guarantee further rage and violence. We do not prevent violence when we tell youth to shape up and get their acts together. Yet it remains acceptable to blame youth for our own failings, to blame then when they poke holes in the screen on which we project a distorted picture of their lives and experiences.” p. 216

This is not a book, despite the title, about suicides; not at all. The title is adapted from Huey Newton, who devised the practice of “revolutionary suicide” to express the level of commitment before far greater, more destructive forces, required of those engaged to bring love, respect and social change to those in need . But in my opinion, the ideas in this text can help to bring some light into the dark corners of the rooms of left behind parents and abducted children. As professor Hurley wrote, only by “lingering for a while in even the most uncomfortable and awful speculations can we begin to identify the messages (about “personal responsibility” for example) we send that make youths and parents [forced apart by workplace enslavement, and by family court exclusions of parents] want to die.” p. 220.

Here is a link to an interview with the author, discussing her book on the Pacifica program, Against the Grain. An appropriate name for a program discussing this much maligned and misunderstood group of people, our kids.

Dear Rui

I am writing you this note today because I find that I don’t know any other way to reach you than this. I have been trying for nearly three years now to find out where you are, where your mother and her conspirators are keeping you. I have sent messages and presents to the only addresses your mother has ever given to me,  and they never reached your house. There was always some reason that the shipping company could not find it, or you; and I assume that that is because the addresses I had were either false or missing some information.

 But the truth is that sending you presents is not what I really want to do.

 What I wanted from the very first day that your mother took you to Japan in June of 2010, was to see you, be together, and have you return home.

 Your mother knows this, and has refused to bring you back.

 And because Japan is a criminal state with a government that does terrible, terrible things to people in and outside of Japan, there is too much power working against us for me to successfully recover you to me, so far.

 But our home is here, in New York, in the United States, where our life was before it was interrupted; where you are a citizen and a full-fledged Prager family member, too. Of course, I have your birth certificate from here in Queens; and I have your custody papers from the courts here, saying what really did not need to be said, which is that  you are my son, I am your father, and by laws created to protect you, we belong together. For you to be kept in Japan away from me is a violation of the law, and a failure of family and governments to protect you. And that makes your mother, grandparents, aunts, and the Japanese government, criminals.

 I can only imagine your life in Japan with the Terauchi family; I can only imagine that they show you some fun, some love, and that they feed you and are giving you what the Japanese think of as an education.

 But I am 99% sure of one thing, and that is that they have told you a very bad lie about us, about your family, and your identity; and that because you were so small when they took you, you’ve had no choice but to get used to it and believe and accept it.

So the most important message I have for you, a message that I am in so much pain to give  you every single day, is that I love you, that I always have loved you and nothing else; the only reason I am not with you, reading books, playing, experiencing everything and helping you get through your life and being your Daddy every single day, is because you were stolen from me by your mother and her family.

 I know that you love her, and that you need to believe that she will take care of you.

But what you might not know is that your Daddy has been fighting for  your return at every opportunity, because we have a right to be together as a family. I have never done what your mother did; I have never tried to keep you separated from her, and I would never have considered doing such a violent, unloving, and selfish thing to you. But it’s the most deeply important thing I can say to tell you that I love you, I am your Daddy, I still want to be your Daddy, and that I have been prevented from being your Daddy during the last 2 ½ years by bad people; and that is the only reason that we have not been together through it all.

 I am also absolutely sure that what I am saying to you here is not a happy thing for you to hear. You and I haven’t seen each other for such a long time that you may not remember the feeling of being together that we had before you were kidnapped. So for you, it is strange to hear me say that I love you; it makes you uncomfortable, because of the distance in time and space between  you and me.

 But unless your mother wants to help you to recover from this terrible event which has damaged your life and destroyed mine, we will only be able to know each other through the dark cloud of a bad fight between your mother and me.

 Another urgent message that I want you to feel is this one: You must not blame your self for all of this. I know that it’s impossible for words alone to do this for you. But somehow, through thinking and feeling very deep down, you must eventually learn to understand, at a much younger age than it is normal for you to have to think about such things, that your mother is a human being with very serious human flaws, and that all human beings have flaws. That doesn’t excuse her; but it excuses you. There is NOTHING that you have done to cause this division in your life history; it is something that an irrational, ignorant and self-absorbed side of your mother has caused to happen, encouraged by narrow-minded  people in Japan; and now that it has happened, she would rather not have to face the reality of what she has done to you, and to me. So she continues to justify it, to explain it in terms that make her feel like a hero,  because that’s what she wants to be  in your eyes, and especially, in her own mind. 

Unfortunately, that lie will not last; but the damage the lie causes, will endure long after you’ve learned the truth. So my next task in life is to help you with that big problem.

 I had nothing to do with this happening to you and me. If I could have prevented it, I would have. The worst that a person could say is that I was worried and distressed to an extreme by the possibility that it could happen, and that that distress made me unable to believe what my eyes were seeing. No one can predict the future; neither could I. Even though I knew your mother well, I could never believe that she, no matter how crazy or how much ill will towards other people she has, could do something like this to a little guy like you. It’s simply so abnormal that it was impossible to conceive what it would be like if she tried. So I accepted her lies myself: that she was bringing you back home in a couple of weeks; that her working life had reached a crisis; that she had decided to put some of our home things in a “storage” place here in New York; that she was looking for work that would allow her to come back and continue our lives here, and for you to start school in the fall. All of this, and more, she lied to me, and to you, to trick us into believing that there was no danger, when in fact, she was preparing to do us this harm all along.

So there is a war going on, and you are its victim. I am so sorry that I could not prevent it that it is truly very, very difficult to live on. But I am living on, because I want to restore the love of father and son that was so brilliant in us before you were kidnapped.

I love you now; I loved you then. I will love you as long as I draw breath. And after I’m gone from the world one day, I will be in your heart and memory, somewhere hiding, loving you still.

Your Daddy
January 9, 2013

1

This is how it works; a look inside the role of the Japanese government ministries, embassies and consulates in the international abduction of children. It shows quite clearly that the kidnapping of Rui and others have taken place now in large measure because of the collaborative efforts of the Japanese government to inform its citizens of the pressures that should one day change the system of child custody and cross-border abduction controls, adding special urgency to get the abductions done, now, in order to gain exclusive control over children and relieve non-Japanese parents of their custodial rights. In a country whose nationalist revanchism is increasingly on display, a country a portion of whose political class exploits waning definitions of nationality and citizenship based on myths of race and blood, (encoded as ethnicity, custom, and immutable, unassailable culture),  abductors know that the current regime of “family law” and the sentiments of uncontrolled family court judges will protect them if and when they abduct their children.  And this continues unchallenged, until the Diet gets around to signing the Hague Convention, and the mind-numbingly slow bureaucracy drags itself into some form of enforcement of international standards. Today, Japan remains the Child Abduction State of choice.

The documentary also tells the tail end of Eric Kalmus’s 14-year long quest to recover his relationship of father to daughter, which motivated him in his long journey into activism on behalf of parents and children, victims of the Japanese Child Abduction State and beyond. All the veils are off of that story at last, something of a relief from a long-endured burden. I salute you Eric, my friend.

– — – –

2

Audio and transcript from ABC Australia, below:

Documentary Special: Anatomy of a kidnapping

Sarah Dingle reported this story on Monday, December 24, 2012 08:21:00

Bed? Bed? I couldn’t go to bed.
My head’s too light to try to set it down.
Sleep. Sleep.
I couldn’t sleep tonight.
Not for all the jewels in the crown.
I could have danced all night.
I could have danced all night,
And still have begged for more.
I could have spread my wings
And done a thousand things
I’ve never done before.
I’ll never know
What made it so exciting;
Why all at once
My heart took flight.
I only know when he
Began to dance with me
I could have danced, danced, danced
All night.

1

“When they were gone away, I studied my books, and at night I went to school. I was unhappy. I looked at a map. An ocean stood between me and the place I came from, but would it have made a difference if it had been a teacup of water?”

- Jamaica Kincaid, from Lucy (1)

Rui, Lost Baby
Your Daddy misses you every day, but worst of all this time of year – from November to New Year. I will find where they are keeping you, my darling son, and will find a way to help you discover  who you really are, and to know what  was stolen from you, and how.

Rui, it’s not your fault!  I’m absolutely certain that deep down, you feel that it is, because that’s how young ones are wired to perceive such things. The circumstances of your sudden departure, and what followed, led inevitably to that conclusion. There is no cure for a misbegotten fate, once it’s happened. But I am holding to the hope that I will find you at last, and that somehow I’ll impart to you how  deeply I hold the wound in my heart, and that I know about the wound in yours. One day-  in the future – we will work on the understanding that the injury began well before the day your mother took you to Japan, and that the knowledge and feelings you still have, feelings that you can learn to rely on, were planted in you then, as well.

2

“The road started with the most obvious kind of trauma — my son’s head — and then to get to a place that had been just so devastated and traumatized, and then to see that in fact most of the trauma actually predated the earthquake.”

Actor Sean Penn, after his divorce, son’s injury, and earthquake in Haiti.

Adrianne Carey Hurley explains. “Like Orpheus, who was instructed not to look back, an abused child is taught to look forward and away from traumatic experiences.”
As the early psychoanalytic theorist and student of Freud, Sandor Frenczi, wrote in his treatment diary:

Such things are simply hidden in a deadly silence; the child’s faint references are ignored or even rejected as incongruous with the unanimous concurrence of those around him, and with such consistency that the child has to give up and cannot maintain his judgment. (2)

I long to show you not only that you are not strange, Rui, but that it is the ones who have closed you in their claustrophobic, high-walled world who are.  Again quoting Hurley,

When those motives to forget involve great personal or political interest – when the power and privilege of the traumatizers are threatened by disclosure – the efforts to silence those who have been victimized can be highly organized, [and] officially sanctioned…(3)

The key to the successful defense of child abduction in Japan is the effort to see that not only public expression about the rotten family arrangements that underlie it be suppressed, but that the conception of the trauma it induces be prevented even from being formulated. It is vital to the traumatizers, the abductors of children, the divorcees who deny their children the right to their parent, who demand of them that they dispose of their memories, their attachments, their love, and their emotional/ psychological security, that they not acquire a personal and/ or political analysis to explain their rage,  bewilderment, and loss. The existence of bonds with Daddy are the enemies of abducting parents like Machiko, her sisters and mother, who compel children to obey prescribed roles, not to resist or fight back to survive, or risk losing every remaining thing they hold precious and dear.

In this sense, it is not surprising that one thing American and Japanese youth have in common is the prevalence of certain kinds of violence. For both, the rhythm of violent outbursts is presumed to be undetected; the incidence of self-harm and hurting others has to remain “shocking” and “inexplicable.”
Perhaps when enough victims – both parents and children –  begin to see what these social and personal dysfunctions are rooted in – that they are, in fact, a form of “blowback” – then we will begin to deconstruct  the hold the traumatizers have on our collective understanding. The first step may be to let it be known to those people in Japan with short memories that conflict and contention between challengers and authorities are a normal part of  society, and control of the debate will be won back, by hook and by crook, or the price paid by Japanese society will be unaffordable.

Our distance from home may be an ocean or a teacup of water. Either way, we can swim, or drown.

December 24, 2012
My love for you, Rui, goes on forever.

…

Notes:

1. Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy, (pp. 9 – 10) quoted in Gayatri Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2012

2.  Adrianne Carey Hurley, Revolutionary Suicide and Other Desperate Measures,  (p.36) Duke University Press, 2011. Quote from  Sandor Frenczi, Clinical Diary.

3. Hurley, p. 25

This note is for you and him, with some photographs of  your first meetings together, in 2006. Your grandfather was born in 1927. He had a birthday on December 12th – so there was a “12/12/12″ party for him, with your Aunt Karen, Uncle Neal, Uncle Greg, Jacque and your grandfather’s friends.

The first time Dad saved my life, I couldn’t have been more than about 5 years old. The family was pushing some little paddle boats around on Lake Texoma and when it came time to hop out of the boat and onto the dock after an hour of fun on the lake, little me managed to miss the wooden edge with both my feet. I fell feet first into the lake. I couldn’t swim yet. I still remember this event and the speed with which a fully-clothed Dad dropped into the drink to fish me out. I remember how strong was Dad’s hold on my little body. I hugged him for all I was worth, and he hugged me back, like I’d just missed a date with the grim reaper.
That strong hold stays with me. Everyone who knows the bolstering power of a father’s love, knows this feeling. That’s the imperative we fathers live with too – to hold our children tight and have joy in their existence. (Do you remember the days we spent at the beach, Rui?)
Since then, Dad has had many occasions to repeat his life-saving moves for me; not necessarily ones involving agility or swimming; but rescue, all the same. It would be unseemly to repeat them here! But suffice it to say, I gave  him more opportunities than I meant to, and Dad has always responded with love.  We had our version of the middle-age/ teenage war, and survived it with a whole lot of patience, all of it Dad’s.

—It’s hard to know how many people there are who know the depth and breadth of him. In my Dad, there are more luminous sights, more roads into integrity, more messages from the genius of tradition and of our country, more ways of modeling a thought, more ethical care and more devotion to principle than one person can ordinarily be credited with. In Dad, there are worlds; and worlds within worlds. I  have talked with Dad over more than five decades about Torah, Plato, Spinoza, Thomas Paine, Beethoven, Brahms,  Wordsworth, Dickinson, Darwin, Frost, and Shakespeare and more. Mostly I just listen. My shelves are groaning with poetry and philosophy because  my Dad raised me. It’s a great life-gift.

It’s not only the content, but the mode of delivery that made this work its way in the lives of my brothers, sister and certainly me. Any time I want or need to, I can conjure the image of Dad in his brown bathrobe, a favorite book of poetry in his hand, reading humorously and dramatically to us from poems about farmers, about revolutionary heroes, about the cruelty of war, the sorrow of facing death, about the carefree charms of every day, and the seductive pull of memory, while I wiggled under a sheet, my little head on a pillow, my heavy eyelids starting to lower, my faltering consciousness focused on Dad ’s words and the sound of his voice, as I faded into sleep. Rui – only the sound of your voice could match that sound for me, for the love and warmth it conjures.

So, for Rui and  Dad – the words of the old Longfellow poem:

And the verse of that sweet old song,
It flutters and murmurs still:
“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

Green leaves of summer turn red in the fall
To brown and to yellow they fade.
And then they have to die, trapped within
the circle time parade of changes.

The world’s spinning madly, it drifts in the dark
It swings through a hollow of haze,
A race around the stars, a journey through
The universe ablaze with changes.

Moments of magic will glow in the night
All fears of the forest are gone
But when the morning breaks,
they’re swept away by golden drops of dawn of changes. (1)

Leonard Cohen
Night Comes On

—

Notes

(1) Phil Ochs –  Changes.   Phil Ochs in Concert, Elektra Records, 1966.

“Symposium on the Hague Convention
– in Considering the Modality of International Family Mediation –”
Organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

December 12, 2012

The Government of Japan has been making efforts toward the conclusion of “the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (the Hague Convention)”. Should it be concluded, the Government of Japan will designate the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a Central Authority which provides assistance for securing the return of children and other objectives of the Convention. Under the Convention, the Ministry shall take, either directly or through any intermediary, all appropriate measures to secure the voluntary return of children or to bring about an amicable resolution of the issues. Mediation, a non-judicial form of amicable solution, encourages both parties to move voluntarily on to an agreement and often successfully avoids the increased complication of the issues. Contracting States have recognised the importance of mediation in this light and shared this view at such forum as the Special Commission Meetings. Nevertheless, currently in Japan, there are no sufficient experiences or knowledge accumulated in the field of international mediation concerning child removal issues.

The “Symposium on the Hague Convention – in Considering the Modality of International Family Mediation –” to be held on 16th January in 2013 will be a forum for discussing the modality of international mediation in Japan. The discussion will include sharing the experiences and knowledge of experts from the U.K. and Germany with a wealth of experience in mediation within the scope of the Hague Convention, and exchanging views on what modalities for international mediation should be in place in Japan after the Hague Convention comes into effect.

We are looking forward to your participation and please register your attendance as guided below.

Date

Date:

Wednesday 16th January, 2013, 13:00 – 16:30

Venue:

Mita 2-1-8, Minato-Ku, Tokyo, Mita Kaigisho
Map [PDF]

Organiser:

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan

Cooperation:

Japan Association of Arbitrators

Sponsorship:

Japan Federation of Bar Associations

Language:

Japanese and English(For those who wish to hear a simultaneous interpreting, the limited number of earphones will be available.)

Admission:

Free of Charge

Capacity:

Approximately 200 people

Registration for the Symposium

• To register for this symposium, please email us at hague.symposium@mofa.go.jp by 18:00 on Tuesday 25th December. Your email should include the following information:
  Subject:Registration for Hague Symposium
  1. (1) Name
  2. (2) Organisation
  3. (3) Position
  4. (4) Telephone number
     In the case of group registration, please provide the necessary information of all participants.
• Seating capacity at the symposium is limited (approximately 200 people) and we may be unable to invite all applicants if we receive more applications than available seats. We will notify you whether a seat is available or not by around a week ahead of the symposium.
• Information provided by you on this registration will be processed properly and only used for the purpose of this symposium.
• Please come well ahead of the starting time as we will confirm your name at the reception desk. Persons not following our staff’s guidance or instructions in the hall will be refused admission or asked to leave.
• Please come to the venue by public transportation if possible as the Mita Kaigisho has no parking areas.

Enquiries about the Symposium

Hague Convention Division, Foreign Policy Bureau, Ministry of the Foreign Affairs of Japan
Tel:03-5501-8000 (Enquiries are accepted from 9:30 to 17:30 on weekdays.)
FAX:03-5501-8239
Email:hague.symposium@mofa.go.jp

In this March  2011  photo, young evacuees are screened at a shelter for leaked radiation from the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant in Fukushima, Fukushima prefecture, Japan. Influential Japanese scientists who help set national radiation exposure limits have for years had trips paid for by the country’s nuclear plant operators to attend overseas meetings of the world’s top academic group on radiation safety. Some of these same scientists have consistently given optimistic assessments about the health risks of radiation, interviews with the scientists and government documents show. Their pivotal role in setting policy after the March 2011 tsunami and ensuing nuclear meltdowns meant the difference between schoolchildren playing outside or indoors and families staying or evacuating. 

TOKYO (AP) — Influential Japanese scientists who help set national radiation exposure limits have for years had trips paid for by the country’s nuclear plant operators to attend overseas meetings of the world’s top academic group on radiation safety.

The potential conflict-of-interest is revealed in one sentence buried in a 600-page parliamentary investigation into last year’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant disaster and pointed out to The Associated Press by a medical doctor on the 10-person investigation panel.

Some of these same scientists have consistently given optimistic assessments about the health risks of radiation, interviews with the scientists and government documents show. Their pivotal role in setting policy after the March 2011 tsunami and ensuing nuclear meltdowns meant the difference between schoolchildren playing outside or indoors and families staying or evacuating.

One leading scientist, Ohtsura Niwa, acknowledged that the electricity industry pays for flights and hotels to go to meetings of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, and for overseas members visiting Japan. He denied that the funding influences his science, and stressed that he stands behind his view that continuing radiation worries about Fukushima are overblown.

“Those who evacuated just want to believe in the dangers of radiation to justify the action they took,” Niwa told the AP in an interview.

The official stance of the International Commission on Radiological Protection is that the health risks from radiation become zero only with zero exposure. But some of the eight Japanese ICRP members do not subscribe to that view, asserting that low dose radiation is harmless or the risks are negligible.

The doctor on the parliamentary panel, Hisako Sakiyama, is outraged about utility funding for Japan’s ICRP members. She fears that radiation standards are being set at a lenient level to limit costly evacuations.

“The assertion of the utilities became the rule. That’s ethically unacceptable. People’s health is at stake,” she said. “The view was twisted so it came out as though there is no clear evidence of the risks, or that we simply don’t know.”

The ICRP, based in Ottawa, Canada, does not take a stand on any nation’s policy, leaving that to each government. It is a charity that relies heavily on donations, and members’ funding varies by nation. The group brings scientists together to study radiation effects on health and the environment, as well as the impact of disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima. In Japan, ICRP members sit on key panels at the prime minister’s office and the education ministry that set radiation safety policy.

The Fukushima meltdowns, the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, brought a higher level of scrutiny to Japan’s nuclear industry, revealing close ties between the regulators and the regulated. Last month, some members of a panel that sets nuclear plant safety standards acknowledged they received research and other grant money from utility companies and plant manufacturers. The funding is not illegal in Japan.

Niwa, the only Japanese member to sit on the main ICRP committee, defended utility support for travel expenses, which comes from the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan through another radiation organization. Costs add up, he said, and he has spent tens of thousands of yen (thousands of dollars) of his personal money on ICRP projects and efforts to decontaminate Fukushima. All ICRP members fly economy, except for long flights such as between Argentina and Japan, he said.

The Federation declined comment.

Clouding the debate about radiation risks are the multiple causes of cancer, including diet, smoking and other habits. That’s why it is extremely difficult to prove any direct link between an individual’s cancer and radiation, or pinpoint where one cause begins and another ends.

The ICRP recommends keeping radiation exposure down to 1 millisievert per year and up to 20 millisieverts in a short-term emergency, a standard that takes into account the lessons of Chernobyl.

“Health risks from annual radiation exposure of 20 millisieverts, the current level for issuance of orders to evacuate an affected area, are quite small particularly when compared against the risks from other carcinogenic factors,” the ICRP says.

The risk of getting cancer at 20 millisieverts raises the already existing 25 percent chance by an estimated 0.1 percent, according to French ICRP member Jacques Lochard, who visits Japan often to consult on Fukushima.

While that’s low, he says it’s not zero, so his view is that you should do all you can to reduce exposure.

Kazuo Sakai, a Japanese ICRP member, said he was interested in debunking that generally accepted view. Known as the “linear no threshold” model of radiation risk, the ICRP-backed position considers radiation harmful even at low doses with no threshold below which exposure is safe.

Sakai called that model a mere “tool,” and possibly not scientifically sound.

He said his studies on salamanders and other animal life since the Fukushima disaster have shown no ill effects, including genetic damage, and so humans, exposed to far lower levels of radiation, are safe.

“No serious health effects are expected for regular people,” he said. (BP: Apparently children are not “regular people.”)

The parliamentary investigation found that utilities have repeatedly tried to push Japanese ICRP members toward a lenient standard on radiation from as far back as 2007.

Internal records at the Federation of Electric Power Companies obtained by the investigative committee showed officials rejoicing over how their views were getting reflected in ICRP Japan statements.

Even earlier, Sakai received utility money for his research into low dose radiation during a 1999-2006 tenure at the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, an organization funded by the utilities.

But he said that before his hiring he anticipated pressures to come up with research favorable to the nuclear industry, and he made it clear his science would not be improperly influenced.

Niwa, a professor at Fukushima Medical University, said that residents need to stay in Fukushima if at all possible, partly because they would face discrimination in marriage elsewhere in Japan from what he said were unfounded fears about radiation and genetic defects.

Setting off such fears are medical checks on the thyroids of Fukushima children that found some nodules or growths that are not cancerous but not normal.

No one knows for sure what this means, but Yoshiharu Yonekura, president of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences and an ICRP member, brushes off the worries and says such abnormalities are common.

The risk is such a non-concern in his mind that he says with a smile: “Low-dose radiation may be even good for you.”

]]> http://forruiboy.com/2012/12/06/fukushima-japanese-scientists-bought-with-nuclear-industry-money/feed/ 1 Nuke Kids header bwprager123 Radiation Check 2 http://forruiboy.com/2012/12/05/the-fukushima-nuclear-crisis-is-not-over/ http://forruiboy.com/2012/12/05/the-fukushima-nuclear-crisis-is-not-over/#comments Wed, 05 Dec 2012 19:33:58 +0000 Brian Prager http://forruiboy.com/?p=5941 Continue reading →]]>

This is a look into the impending election in Japan.

Stories of the type you see below were more abundant a year ago. This is now.

I saw this on the web, and thought I would share it with my U.S. friends. It deserves to be considered. The Fukushima radiation crisis is not over.
Unless  a magic dome has been over head, covering the cities and countryside, major radiation exposure has been and still is occurring in Tokyo, and all over Japan.
Our children’s chances decreased dramatically once disaster struck North East Japan.

(Thanks and appreciation to the author, whose original post is here:
 http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/09/fukushima-radiation-japan-irradiates-the-west-coast-of-north-america.html

Fukushima Radiation: Japan Irradiates the West Coast of North America

The U.S. Senate passed Resolution 543 today, condemning International Parental Child Abduction, and identifying Japan three times – more than any other country – as a haven for parental abductors which fails to recognize international parental  abduction as a crime, and mocks parents and children’s pre-existing custody rights and default custody rights, in defiance of even those already given special recognition in courts of the countries from which the children have been abducted.
It’s high time.

Sponsor Senator Barbara Boxer said she is proud that today the Senate took a stand to condemn the tragic and devastating crime of child abduction,”  and that “this resolution is a resounding call to the international community to join together to prevent and resolve abduction cases.”

The resolution clearly not only calls for abductions to cease;  it also states that “the United States should vigorously pursue the return of each child abducted by a parent from the United States to another country through all appropriate means,  - and  seek the extradition of the parent that abducted the child.”

Further, it demands a “review [of] the advisory services made available to United States citizens by the United States Department of State, the United States Department of Justice, and other United States Government agencies— to improve the prevention of international parental child abduction from the United States; and to ensure that effective and timely assistance is provided to United States citizens who are parents of children abducted from the United States and taken to foreign countries.”

And with these elements of the resolution, I could not more wholeheartedly agree.
Along with all parents of internationally abducted children, I appeal to everyone to work to make the terms of this  resolution an immediate reality.

http://boxer.senate.gov/en/press/releases/120412b.cfm

Press Release of U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer

Boxer Praises Senate Passage of Resolution Condemning International Parental Child Abduction  

(1) the Senate—

(A) condemns the international abduction of all children;

 (B) urges countries identified by the United States Department of State as noncompliant or demonstrating patterns of noncompliance with the Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, done at The Hague October 25, 1980 (TIAS 11670) (referred to in this resolution as the “Hague Abduction Convention”) to fulfill their commitment under international law to expeditiously implement the provisions of the Hague Abduction Convention;

 (C) calls on all countries to become a party to the Hague Abduction Convention and to promptly institute measures to equitably and transparently address cases of international parental child abduction; and

 (D) calls on all countries that have not become a party to the Hague Abduction Convention to develop a mechanism for the resolution of current and future cases of international parental child abduction that occur before those countries become a party to the Hague Abduction Convention in order to facilitate the prompt return of children abducted to those countries to the children’s countries of habitual residence; and

(2) it is the sense of the Senate that the United States should—

(A) vigorously pursue the return of each child abducted by a parent from the United States to another country through all appropriate means, facilitate access by the left-behind parent if the child is not returned, and, where appropriate, seek the extradition of the parent that abducted the child;

 (B) take all appropriate measures to ensure that a child abducted to a country that is a party to the Hague Abduction Convention is returned to the country of habitual residence of the child in compliance with the provisions of the Hague Abduction Convention;

 (C) continue to use diplomacy to encourage other countries to become a party to the Hague Abduction Convention and to take the necessary steps to effectively fulfill their responsibilities under the Hague Abduction Convention;

 (D) use diplomacy to encourage countries that have not become a party to the Hague Abduction Convention to develop an institutionalized mechanism to transparently and expeditiously resolve current and future cases of international child abduction that occur before those countries become a party to the Hague Abduction Convention; and

 (E) review the advisory services made available to United States citizens by the United States Department of State, the United States Department of Justice, and other United States Government agencies—

(i) to improve the prevention of international parental child abduction from the United States; and

 (ii) to ensure that effective and timely assistance is provided to United States citizens who are parents of children abducted from the United States and taken to foreign countries.

###

 

The center of  Japanese national politics has been trending to the right –  with the ruling party most recently pushed into bellicose exchanges with the Chinese and Koreans over island territorial disputes by perennial national embarrassment Shintaro Ishihara, and over a longer term, the emergence of noisy, nationalistic right wing flag-waving demonstrations, unabashed (and unembarrassed) patriotic display by members of the Diet, and the demagogic swaggering of Osaka Mayor Hashimoto.

But there are also emerging opportunities.  For us, parents of children abducted to Japan, hopeful news comes into the crowded field in the form of a new party that is  to some extent entering into a space created by large anti-nuclear power protests and the abandonment by the atrophied DPJ of its progressive agenda. Joined now by Ichiro Ozawa, formerly of the DPJ and still a voice in Japanese politics, the party, Nippon Mirai, is making the protection and support of children’s lives a significant part of its platform, alongside the anti-nuke stance.

Bringing the psychological violence that the family courts direct against children into the political dialogue, and calling for measures to end Japan’s reputation as “the child abductor state “are causes we should support, and urge our friends in Japan to do the same. Here is how the Japan Times reported this:

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20121204a7.html

Kada’s party backs Hague treaty, monthly child support

But ¥312,000 a year may be just as hard to offer as it was for DPJ

Shiga Gov. Yukiko Kada wants the nation to provide better child-rearing support, become a society that allows participation by everyone, and join the Hague Convention against abductions by estranged parents.

Yukiko Kada

One of the main goals pledged by Kada’s new Nippon Mirai no To (Tomorrow Party of Japan) for the Dec. 16 general election is annual benefits of ¥312,000 per child, the same amount the ruling Democratic Party of Japan promised but, lacking the finances, failed to deliver after it won the previous poll in 2009.

During an interview and briefing with media Sunday, Kada voiced alarm over the nation’s low birthrate, warning Japan’s population is set to shrink to a third of what it is now by 2100.

“Japan has no future without its children. . . . Investing in children means investing in our future,” Kada said, explaining why her party is promising the child allowance.

Although the hastily compiled policy platform lacks details, it stipulates the party will help women so they are not placed at a disadvantage in their careers when they marry or give birth, and vows to ensure child-rearing becomes a shared responsibility involving the home, schools and communities.

Nippon Mirai also declared that Japan would sign the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction to prevent cross-border parental kidnappings, so the nation will no longer be called the “child abduction state.”

But Kada’s goals of creating a female- and children-friendly society and investing ¥312,000 annually per child, or about ¥5.5 trillion in financial resources, will probably face the same problems the DPJ suffered — a lack of money.

Nippon Mirai’s leader insisted, however, that she could finance the program by cutting wasteful spending. Kada added that as Shiga governor, she was able to make ¥60 billion by stopping shinkansen and dam projects.

“What the DPJ tried and failed to do was carry out political leadership to rearrange the structure of the budget. . . . We will make each ministry come up with a plan to cut expenditures and form a path to a 20 to 30 percent decrease,” Kada said.

Nippon Mirai was just formed last week with the primary goal of ending nuclear power in Japan. It has added recruits, including members of small parties, among them Ichiro Ozawa, former head of the DPJ and Kokumin no Seikatsu ga Daiichi (People’s Life First), and other ex-DPJ lawmakers.

Kada blamed the Liberal Democratic Party for building a society that for decades relied heavily on nuclear power.

“There are so many people in Fukushima still suffering and already, (Japan) is starting to forget,” Kada said. “LDP President (Shinzo) Abe says Japan was able to achieve economic development because of the reactors. Is this right?”

Kada, who holds a doctorate in agriculture from Kyoto University, also clearly stated that her party is against Japan joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade process, which aims to eliminate all tariffs among member states.

“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.”
-Jean Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract)

“Some people are beginning to catch on; they will no longer take banging for music.”
- Denis Diderot (Rameau’s Nephew)

There is now more than ever a need to renew our efforts to create  a movement here to reunite children and parents, and to oppose  state-supported, state-sanctioned Japanese International Parental Child Abduction (JIPCA). Two and a half years after Rui’s abduction, children and parents have none of the protections they need today, and the Japanese government has made zero progress towards addressing the issue; the result is the continuation of cross-border and internal parental abductions in Japan.

Every week on the mailing lists of Japan-focused, left-behind parent groups, I see another newly uninitiated parent lamenting his or her fear of the now-present threat of parental abduction and wondering what if any recourse he or she has. This should be a matter of worldwide public concern, a problem in international relations with a “friendly” State that harbors and rewards child abductors from without and within  the country with the termination of the child’s and the other parents’ familial rights – at an estimated rate of 150,000 children per year. Any person with a Japanese spouse at one or another time of conflict finds him or herself having to weigh the probability of whether his or her spouse will discover and act on the power that the Japanese state provides to prevent him or her from ever seeing his child again. Virtually anyone with a whimsical resentment of a husband or wife (-and what married person has never felt any resentment?-) and a bit of determination to separate his or her life from his or her spouse can construct an abduction of his or her child in this way. A brief search of the internet provides the tools to carry it out. One only needs to find the resources, or to get a child behind the Japanese border where the parent can be provided with them by a state official, legal professional, or family court judge who has them to give.

Japan’s government, via its Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Justice, via its news media, even via its universities, puts many agents into the field to offer the world misinformation and deception about the scale, frequency and impact of this mass human rights violation, undoubtedly because it is a widespread but disavowed phenomenon within Japan. The numbers continue to be staggering:  between 2 1/2 and 3 million Japanese minors have no meaningful access to one of their parents because of Japan’s winner-take-all custody rules and the self-interested, jealous bigotry of its courts. The maintenance of this system has depended for its survival on relative invisibility to the world at large, and suppression of discussion of the issue to the Japanese public itself. Silence reinforced with shame weighs on the parents of abducted children. To speak out is frowned upon and suppressed, and brings more shame on the complaining victims than on the perpetrators, who have the family judiciary, Diet members, and members of the Japanese academic and legal professions for allies. They also have the cooperation of numerous governments and international agencies that are beholden to Japanese financial interests to keep them afloat. This applies to the United Nations, United States, members of the European Union and countless others. It seems the price of complicity in the abuse of children and families is not so high that it can’t be paid.

Stop Being  Quiet

One of the primary communication goals we take on as parents and activists  is to bring this silence to an end. Not until victims speak up loudly and in greater numbers can  the key shift in awareness take place, from regarding parental abduction as  a “normal social custom”, to a criminal activity that is brutally detrimental to children and adults, with wide-ranging psychological and social-institutional ill effects.

Speaking up has always been transformative, as it is for us. It turns victims of crime into agents of change.

There are precedents. An obvious parallel to this  internalized silence about a criminal enterprise in modern Japanese history that is still fraught with political danger and controversy  is the Japanese military’s use of mass rape as a weapon of war during the attacks on Japan’s Asian neighbors throughout the era of the 2nd World War.  For decades, this internationally well-known decade-long regime of war crimes could scarcely be discussed within Japan – and even today it is best known euphemistically as the “comfort system” that brought “comfort” to Japanese soldiers in the field, engaged in a brutal war against China, with the Korean people its unwilling subjects.  That women from China, Korea and Japan were pressed into sexual slavery –  euphemistically called ”service” - and turned into prisoners of rape camps was not widely condemned as a crime until the surviving victims themselves were able to gather the courage given to them by the solidarity of  the Korean feminist movement to testify publicly in the face of pressure to keep silent. It has not been a smooth process for them. Japanese officials and conservative ideologues fought against them by claiming that the women were “prostitutes”  - in order to place them into a category that would taint their testimony as that of undeserving women whose deficient “purity and credibility” cast doubt over the reliability of their stories. It’s easy to see how tradition can be brought to bear on popular sentiments in an extraordinary case like this. A rich legacy of patriarchal relations were brought to bear in defense of the conduct of war, conquest, domination, terror  and pacification.  Patriarchal power relations are in play again now, protecting Japanese officials in today’s disputes over nuclear power and the collusive co-responsibility of private enterprises and government regulators for the consequences of the nuclear radiation disaster that followed the earthquake and tsunami of March, 2011. That the United States and its military’s continuing expectation of a monopoly on nuclear capability plays a super-ordinate role  adds a layer of patronage, protection and justification to this disastrous arrangement. We have to intensify our efforts and speak out against our government for this exchange of courtesies.

Our obligation to care for our children is not blunted by the prolonged pain we are still suffering today.  We are faced with endless delays, foot-dragging, resistance and inactivity on the part of the U.S. and Japanese governments. And we have got to push back in order to restore the dwindling hopes of our destiny, which is to reunite with our children.

Social Ills – Social Roots

A recognition that this problem is shared, and is social and political in origin and nature,  is still lacking potency among the community of left-behind parents. It requires a solution based on group interest – shared and social- even though the groups are large ones: divorced or divorcing Japanese, non-Japanese, parents,  and children.  As parents and active members of a community of persons whose lives intersect on the basis of international and court-derived child abduction and termination of parental rights, we have an obligation to provide renewal which may only come from a refreshed and revised look at the issue.  When my son, Rui, was first captured, withheld and hidden from me in Japan, fellow sufferers – parents who lost their children to Japan – warned that the abduction would challenge all of my beliefs. That has turned out to be maximally true for me. The psychological trauma of child abduction morphs into physiological symptoms and pain many a parent has had to run from. It interminably wrenches our insides, alters the nervous system, and wears  the parent down until it  bleeds us white . But eventually, we have to either die or regather ourselves to counteract the anemia. I think it’s time now – time for us to ask each other whether or not we know what there is left for us to do.

Reframe the Issue

We can do a lot. Breathing life back into the conversation requires us to listen and study,  and successfully reframe the genealogy of the issue. The ever-rising rate of international abductions  is a symptomal reaction to many, various stimuli. It’s not enough to say that it is related to a poorly-defined, hysteria-driven “crisis of family” – a  known political and social current (or subcurrent) that has played since well before our time.  It’s not only a crisis of belief, or faith, or the breakdown of traditional bonds;  nor is it comprehensible as  exclusively a problem of inadequate law. To look upon the abductions as the actions of sociopaths is inadequate too, even though they often may be. The abductions haven’t multiplied solely on the basis of one group of parents’ increased privileges over and against those of another; the ownership and low regard of the needs of children has a much longer history. Neither is it the rise of a more brutal family, nor an increase in the reporting of domestic brutality alone that is fueling the rate of increase of parental abductions.  Just as surely as there are no innocent abusers of children or spouses, there is no need either to project the distinction of  ideal “undeserving” victims from “deserving” ones. The problems of family, marriage, relationship, and of legal guarantees that protect children and parents from violence and alienation of parent-child bonds will not be reduced to one cause, nor resolved by one solution; nor should larger economic and military realities in the foreground of  the relationships between countries  be ignored, or provide absolution.

Family crisis. Loss of faith. Loss of bonds. Inadequate law. Sociopathy. Identity politics. Civil Rights. Gender equality. Childism. Child abuse. Domestic violence. The deserving and undeserving. This post I’m writing today is only a scratch on the surface; but I believe that we can sort out an approach to greater insight into what this madness, Japanese parental abduction, is derived from. Every day that I’m able to sit up straight and think, I recognize that we,  parents of abducted kids, are now forced to become anthropologists, historians, psychologists, sociologists, activists, diplomats, lobbyists, lawyers, social workers, moral philosophers, and public relations agents.  The ability and willingness of third parties to minister to abductors or turn their heads and ignore parents and children are profound; indifference and corruption are bred into the institutions.

But fear is also a great enabler. Governments of countries, municipalities, foreign affairs bureaus, ministries of justice and police forces, whose actions determine the conditions of the development of the problem are dramatically inhibited by saber-rattling nationalists in Japan (and  its neighbors), think tank “security” policy analysts from Washington who dominate diplomatic agendas, and self-interested bureaucrats with career paths to protect. None can be excluded; all should be considered part of what has gone wrong.

The denial of dignity to children, the refusal to protect women and men from real, authentic domestic brutality, and the rigid roles and loss of family intimacy that are forced on working people all disrupt familial, community and human solidarity,  and provide the roots from which the inspiration to commit parental abductions spring. They are problems of modernity, of industrial society, of non-democratic economies,  of unequal distributions of power, and of manipulated feelings of men and women who have no other outlet for their pain than to afflict one another. These issues might seem less daunting to address in a materially prosperous Japan than they would have been in the conditions of, say, the impoverished outposts of empire. Yet today, Japan shares a rate of parental abduction that exceeds that of all the rest of developed world, and victimizes the totally innocent –  parents and children who love one another.

Today, liberal rhetorics are employed to achieve illiberal aims. Social and judicial concepts that were created to work to benefit and protect families from gendered violence are turned into weapons of the same. We must organize ourselves again, and renew our efforts to overthrow tyranny visited on children. Keep your eyes wide; the chance won’t come again.

We can take inspiration from many sources. Among them, Darwin saw life as an increasingly complex emergence from earlier forms, and the outcome of an environment that throbs with impulses of attraction to maximally differentiate individuals and species. I think he knew that the production of difference is relentless. Our job as living beings is not to denigrate nor merely tolerate this differentiation, but to learn to be amazed by the changes as they flower. The family form is changing under tremendous pressure. It is our job as adults to see that children’s need for the love and care of their families are met all the same.

- Bp

“… before  you can say Jack Robinson, there’s the idol, flat on his back!”
- Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew
                

“Takes more than guns to kill a man.”
                                                      “Joe Hill” (Alfred Hayes & Earl Robinson, 1925)

I had forgotten what day that was until I looked at the time stamp on the photograph.   New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2005. Starting that night, Machico and I slept every night in a hospital chair next to Rui for something close to a week while Rui underwent  and recovered from surgery. He was 6 weeks old, with pyloric stenosis.  He had to have a portion of stomach muscle removed from his tiny belly.

The birth of a child changes you internally in ways you can’t possibly anticipate until they’ve already become your past. The first weeks are shaky. It’s not so much that Rui seemed fragile or breakable as that he was like all infants, a wiggling wad of needful squirm. It’s a very physical thing, and a wonderful thing. Imagine a baby seal trying to squiggle from your grasp as you try to hold on, convinced full well that second by second, everything that you do is a life/ death matter. (It’s some time before you understand that it’s not.)

Rui was by all definitions a good baby, by which people mean one that sleeps a lot. You never know how many minutes there are in a day or an hour, not really, until you are waiting for your newborn to wake up or fall asleep when he’s not doing the one you wanted. It’s famously taxing at first, and gives you the famous “I’m so tired, my face is melting”  effect. Rui and his mother took a little while to get their breast feeding in order. It seemed like an eternity, particularly to her, burdened as she was by performance pressure  and a feeling of responsibility trending towards panic.

A few weeks in, he started to have trouble keeping his milky stomach fluids down, which led to precipitous slowing of weight gain. Although the urgency gained on us quickly, it seemed like an eternity.  He’d swallow his portion, and the way I recall it,  we tried to keep him upright to convince the milk to stay down– until we finally learned that the linkage between stomach and small intestine was narrowing so that the frothy, milky stuff had nowhere to go but up and out. It dribbles  over the chinat first, a chalky waterfall; but then it starts to gain eruptive power and travels farther, like a practiced shot-putter improving his trajectory.  It’s alarming. Good sleep became much harder for him to get, and so did nutrition.

There was a string of wintry car trips to an unfamiliar side street in deepest Queens to see our pediatrician, who sent us back home with gentler baby formula and a feeling of bewilderment. Night fell on the BQE and Grand Central Parkway with a sick baby and boxes of Enfamil Gentlease on the back seat. Christmas passed; Machico’s mother and sister returned to Japan.  Late December, and it wasn’t working.  During his sixth week since birth, I asked the pediatrician if my babyhood pyloric stenosis, aka “projectile vomiting,” at the same age was relevant? Our next stop was New York Hospital. On New Year’s Eve, Rui was admitted.

Soon they had him on an I-V for several days to make him strong enough for surgery. I crossed the street every night to retrieve Chinese take out across from our Queens hospital. We waited.

Among my more indelible memories of this phase is of lying with him in bed what may have been only one or at most two weeks earlier, trying to soothe him into a nap, his ball-sized head nested between my chest and arm, my hand wrapped around his bookbag body, as he drifted slowly, slowly to sleep. Just before he passed into unconsciousness, the last milk he’d swallowed squirted out of his soft, coin purse mouth and landed squarely in my ear. I couldn’t hear, but I could feel the warm sticky stuff  settling in.  I didn’t dare move until he fell all the way to sleep and stayed that way a long while. I think I fell asleep there with him for a time, pukey ear and all.  (All parents know that sensitivity about bodily fluids is among the first bits of squeamishness to go.)  He felt like one of Harry Harlow’s rhesus monkeys, cradled by  his terry cloth mother-doll, which was me. He breathed softly in sleep. The warmth and binding love eased through my chest, my arm, up my cheeks, into my face. It  invaded my neurocircuitry where it would stay, until now.

Friday, November 16, 2012

I sang this to you many times when you were very small, Rui.
From memory:

I touch your hands and my arms grow strong
Like a pair of birds that burst with song
My eyes look down on your lovely face
And I hold the world in my embrace

Younger than springtime, are you
Softer than starlight, are you
Warmer than winds of June
Are the gentle lips you gave me.

Gayer than laughter, are you
Sweeter than music, are you
Angel and love, heaven and earth,
Are you to me.

And when your youth
And joy invade my arms,
And fill my heart as now they do,
Then younger than springtime, am I,
Gayer than laughter, am I,
Angel and love, heaven and earth,
Am I with you

On October 23, a Diet Study Session called by Diet member Mr. Yokokume on the problems of parental abduction and custody determination in Japan’s family law and family courts was held.  The session ran a bit like a symposium combined with a press conference.  For the first time, Mr. Yasuyuki Watanabe spoke publicly about his case ,  naming the judge whose conduct, decisions and failure to follow the latest, best practices of the law as set out in revisions of the civil code exemplifies the problems of child abduction and elimination of parental rights for which Japan’s family courts have been bitterly criticized both within Japan and internationally. Mr. Watanabe and numerous other parents seek relief in the form of new law to guarantee the security of the parent-child relationship.

Law Professor Colin Jones also spoke, as well as several others.

Prior to this event, Mr. Watanabe had taken a case to the Supreme Court where he asked for custody of his daughter. The significance of the Diet Study Session is that a member of a government bureaucracy was making a very trenchant declaration; he is an official in the Ministry of Internal Affairs condemning the family law system and by extension the Ministry of Justice, and  is naming the judge in his case [Wakabayashi] publicly,  bringing  forward  that the actions of this judge as well as others are grounded in past practices which are no longer legally justifiable, and should not continue as they have been. The continuation of the practice of nearly automatic termination of parental rights by Japan’s family court judges is defiantly misguided. The judge in this case made disdainful comments in the course of the custody hearings which implied that by virtue of his position as a sovereign family court judge, he could and would ignore with impunity the statements of former Justice Minister Eda in Diet testimony in which he urged that an agreed revision of the family law be implemented and adopted immediately. Essentially a statement of the institutional and personal autonomy of his court room, the judge sidestepped agreed upon change in civil code article 766, which now requires a divorcing couple with a child to specify visitation arrangements between the child and the father and mother, in addition to custody. These are guidelines that the family court was and is supposed by the Diet and Supreme Court to have followed. But the judge in this case, as have judges throughout the system, simply resisted the guidelines. This reveals a disconnect between the Minister of Justice and the bureaucratic family law judges within the Ministry of Justice, and implies a certain willful disobedience of the intention of the law on their part. Even actions of the Supreme court and the admonishments of the Minister of Justice are ignored by family court judges who have self-interest and a “tradition” of their own making on which to rely.

Resistance to change in family law becomes complex very quickly. The State, seeking legitimacy through its public pronouncements, wants to be able to say it is protecting its families and its citizens;  yet it alternately collaborates with, seeks support from, or steps aside for practices in civil society which  undermine  family stability and seek to impose private interests over those of citizens, thus turning working life and the evolving material of citizenship  against family, community and neighborhood well-being. As a consequence of the State’s obsequy before interests which seek to see civil matters in maximally private terms (forcing the withdrawal from citizens of state protection against the power of those interests, such as those which may be financial and geo-political in origin ), it is then politically doubly-difficult for these  State institutions  to reform  so-called “private” matters of family law. In the end there is antagonism and conflict of loyalties within the direction pursued by the State.

There is a small but growing number of ciitzens such as Mr. Watanabe who are working to compel the Diet to create a real family law code, to pressure the Ministry of Justice to enforce the kinds of procedures needed to eliminate the abuse to which parents and children are subject under the current regime. This is occurring in the context of a rebound of activism amidst an increasingly polarized Japanese public for the first time since the 1970′s as a consequence of the triple disaster and nuclear accident of 2011, the corruption evident in Japan’s energy politics, and powerfully increased popular outrage over U.S. military bases in Okinawa. Noisy nationalists are also very much on the rise, much to the detriment of Japanese political affairs. In an era in which institutions of the nation-state whose real sovereignty over matters of economy and society are rapidly waning, and whose accountability to the public has precipitously declined, this brings along with it very serious problems of legitimacy for the State. Japan’s is not an exceptional case in this regard. But the abuse and misuse of judicial practices in Japan’s family courts is more than noteworthy. It is endemic.

Press coverage of this controversy, particularly as regards abductions and the abuse of family court, is increasing, in Asahi, Yomiuri, and AERA news magazine.

The following appeared in AERA. An English translation appears below the article:

dot. 10月25日(木)7時9分配信

Lois Lurie Prager. You are Louis Prager. I named you in memory of her.

That’s Mom and me, Rui.

With your Uncles Neal and David. I think we’d moved to this new suburb in Dallas not long before. New duds, too.

Your Aunt Karen.

Your Grandpa Morton Prager, starting out with his family; my big sister and brother,  Karen, and David. They all long to have you home.

Uncle Neal.  Here, with his famous adding machine.

In Cleveland, Ohio, with my Grandmother Esther Lurie, your grandmother Lois, your Aunt Karen, your Uncles David and Neal, and me, Daddy, in my bow tie.

Your Grandpa and me,  small and new at six months old.

* * * *

The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day.
I have spent my days in stringing and unstringing my instrument.
The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set;
only there is the agony of wishing in my heart.
The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by.
I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice; only I have heard his gentle footsteps from the road before my house.
The livelong day has passed in spreading his seat on the floor;
but the lamp has not  been lit and I cannot ask him into my house.
I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.

- Rabindranath Tagore

FROM THE SHADOWS – Documentary Film

Directed by Matt Antell, David Hearn 2012
At the Philadelphia Film Festival 2012
http://filmadelphia.festivalgenius.com/2012/films/fromtheshadows0_mattantell_filmadelphia2012

Run time: 90 min. | Japan, USA | Language: English

This documentary follows the heart-wrenching stories of five different parents whose children have been abducted by their other parent to Japan, a country whose government has been widely criticized for treating  abduction and brutality towards children as  ”family matters” rather than as crimes. The film demonstrates ways in which the government of Japan is in league with a network of child abductors.

Parental abduction to and within Japan is one of the most talked about social issues in the country today, and one of the top five bilateral issues between the US and Japanese governments. Japanese immigrants from around the world kidnap their children to Japan because of their inadequate family court system and lack of punishment for such acts, giving the parents left behind  no chance of regaining custody.

From the Shadows follows five parents going to the greatest lengths to reunite with their children. It includes interviews with actual children who have been abducted, and perspectives from psychologists, lawyers, lawmakers, and other experts on the subject.
Don’t miss the documentary that’s been talked about on CNN, ABC News, and the Today Show, as well as screened on Capitol Hill. It’s a compelling film that will also educate you on this alarming social issue.

2012 Philadelphia Film Festival
Screenings
5:00 PM Tue, Oct 23
Prince Music Theater
7:35 PM Sat, Oct 27
Ritz East – Theater B

From the Shadows

If you or anyone you know is in the Philadelphia area, or will be at that time, PLEASE urge them to attend the screening and bring as many friends and family members as possible! Support this film if you can!

This post is about the abduction of Proserpina,  Persephone to the Greeks, the grief of her parent, Ceres (aka Hera), goddess of earth and agriculture, and the attempts by Jupiter (aka Zeus), the god of sky and thunder, most powerful among the gods of Olympus, to save her.

To bring fertility and a wife to Jupiter’s barren brother, Hades (later Pluto), dark and violent god of the dead, Venus sent her son, Cupid/ Amor, to strike Hades/ Pluto with one of his arrows. Soon after, Prosperina, beautiful, childlike and young, caught the eye of the king of the dead, and he was enchanted. Now increasingly driven by his desire, Hades swore to bring Proserpina to the underworld and make her his wife. Full of lust and menace, Hades burst onto the surface of the world steering four black horses, saw Proserpina collecting flowers among nymphs at the fountain of Arethus near the volcanic Mount Etna in Sicily, and abducted her.

All ego and devoid of pity, he took possession of Proserpina, his prey –  to rape, marry and live with her in Hades where he ruled.

Proserpina/Persephone’s mother, Ceres (later Hera), goddess of cereal food crops and Earth, vainly went looking for her daughter in every corner of the world, but could find no remains but her daughter’s small belt floating on a saltwater lake made of the tears of Arethus’  nymphs.

In despair, Ceres/Hera poured out her angst, rage, and sorrow. She raised her arms and swore maledictions on Sicily, demanding her daughter’s return. Overpowering nature, she willed that the heat and light of the sun be blocked and the growth of fruits and vegetables be stopped.  She refused to return to Olympus without her daughter, and began walking the entire Earth’s surface, making cold, savage deserts with every step.

Despairing of the cold, death and destructiion Hera’s grieving brought on the world, Jupiter/Zeus sent Mercury to demand that Proserpina be returned. But Pluto/Hades wouldn’t be easily persuaded, and resisted.

Unable to impose his will absolutely , the god of the underworld would have his compromise:  Proserpina would have to live six months of each year with Hades/Pluto in his kingdom, and six above ground with her mother. Ceres was forced to yield unwillingly to this demand.

When Proserpina rose from Hades to her parent’s arms, the Earth bloomed and spring and summer returned. But each year when her daughter returned to her husband’s kingdom, Ceres/ Hera was lost in despair, and wandered the Earth searching for her. She willed that the sun grow cold again;  the flowers died and the trees turned bare; food became scarce, bringing back desolation, death, and winter, every six months.

The myth of Proserpina is mainly described by the Roman Claudianus Mamertus.

** ** ** **
Painters and sculptors have long been inspired by the story of Proserpina, the cruelty of her abduction, and the raging grief of her loving parent.

Here are two versions of a new song of Ceres/ Hera mourning her child, as imagined and written by Kate McGarrigle just months before she died in 2009.
Martha Wainwright, her daughter – and a new parent herself  – performs it.
Those who are embarrassed by the love a parent feels for his child, or who are fool enough to believe that both father and child and mother and child are not equally significantly attached, need not go further.

1
2010 concert honoring her mother shortly after her death.
 Proserpina, by Kate McGarrigle, sung by Martha Wainwright.

2
2012 Studio film: Martha Wainwright Proserpina

Martha Wainwright’s website is here.

In the Song of Songs, it says,

My beloved is like a gazelle or a young hart / Behold, he stands behind our wall / He looks in through the windows / Peering through the lattices

In traditional communities, the blessing that is recited is thought to be a continuation of an ancient ritual performed by the Kohanim, the priests of the disappeared, ancient Temple. The hands of the Kohanim were spread out in the direction of the congregation, with fingers  separated, palms facing downward, and thumbs  touching so as to make five spaces between them, arranged to form an overlapping lattice of ‘windows’ in emulation of  Solomon’s poem of love.  This is Nesiat Kapayim, the lifting of the hands. According to Jewish tradition, the Divine Presence would shine through the fingers of the priests onto the people, and no one was allowed to look at this out of respect and fear of the brilliance of enlightenment and God.

At home, the blessing can be recited at bedtime. The Mishnah advises that a person who is troubled by his dreams should concentrate on this blessing. This also derives from the Song of Songs [3:7-8], where it tells that 60 armed guards surrounded Solomon’s bedchamber to protect him from  night terrors.

May 60 guards and memories of your daddy’s undying love for you keep you safe, and calm your heart, and mine, my Rui boy.

May the LORD bless you and keep you -

יְבָרֶכְךָ יהוה, וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ
(“Yebhārēkh-khā Adhōnāy weyishmerēkhā …)

May the Lord shine His light upon you and be gracious unto you -

יָאֵר יהוה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וִיחֻנֶּךָּ\
(“Yāʾēr Adhōnāy pānāw ēlekhā wiḥunnékkā …)

May the LORD lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace 

יִשָּׂא יהוה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלוֹם
(“Yissā Adhōnāy pānāw ēlekhā wiyāsēm lekhā shālōm.“)

Amen

Rui and I at the desk at home.

 「引き取りたかった」別居中の実子連れ去り逮捕
北九州市八幡東区で、離婚に向けて別居中の自分の子どもを連れ去ったとして、35歳の男が逮捕されました。

In Yahatahigashi Kitakyushu District, a 35-year-old man, estranged from his wife and moving towards divorce, was arrested for abducting his child.

Minoru Tamura, the father, was arrested (and declared a suspect).

According to the police, the 1-year-old Tamura boy was taken around 9:30 pm July 19, on the Yahataekimae JR. While talking to his estranged wife, this not-yet-divorced father took the boy away from his wife, and fled  by car with the infant inside.

The wife asked for help at a nearby police station. Police found the “suspect,” Tamura, alone, about an hour and a half after the incident. Where was the boy? He said that “the child had been ‘entrusted’ to his home.” Wnen the investigators visited Tamura’s home, they found the boy was safely protected, with no injury to the child, despite his having been rushed into a car and sped away.

The police investigating the incident explained that Tamura admitted the charges and said, “I just wanted to get the custody of my child”.

No child left behind - 

And that is how it has to be done in Japan. Any not-yet-divorced Japanese person who doesn’t attempt to abduct his or her child is at exceedingly high risk – almost a certainty –  of having his/ her parental rights permanently terminated should the divorcees find themselves in a Japanese family court. The only consistently observed criterion for the award of custody is physical possession of the child, which can be  and is often established by child abduction – preventing kids from seeing their parent.  So one or the other parent MUST escalate and abduct if there is any risk of post-divorce acrimony. If that parent does not abduct, and the child is in the physical possession of the other (Japanese) parent, it is only a matter of time, speed, and possession of the willingness to act ruthlessly and viciously against one’s own child and spouse to terminate their relationship. That, for Japanese, is what family court is for.

Smart system!  Is that what constitutes  looking out for children’s interests?

I’m tempted to make an outrageous declaration; to decide that it’s best to wish the man in this story who abducted his 1-year old success. Entertain the idea for the sake of argument: Today, EVERY child in Japan should be abducted. That’s what the system is built to induce;  and given the so-far insurmountable resistance to changing or modifying it, it must be right.

What’s good for the goose …

I’m repeating this news story here today as a small taste of what goes on every day in Japan, and what Japanese law requires Japanese parents to do in order to secure their parental right within Japan. For Japanese, divorce and custody are a blood sport. They must risk the permanent termination of their parental right in order to separate from a vindictive spouse, leaving open the probability of losing the right to protect and raise their flesh and blood. It goes without saying that this systemic encouragement and practice of child abduction – with the machinery of state in place to see that abductions take place – is plainly responsible for the epidemic of international abductions to Japan. Given that  parents would find themselves bound by law  (heaven forbid!)  to agree to a joint custody agreement, to treat their children with love and respect, to protect and promote the children’s well-being through securing for him or her the stability of the child’s relationship with and attachment to both parents, and to engage in interpersonal cooperation and co-parenting with his or her spouse or ex-spouse (or face repercussions) in any country where there is an actual family law, one in which parental rights are understood  by the state, there is no equivalent risk for divorce and termination of parental rights outside of  Japan. Only in Japan has a system been so carefully engineered to maximize emotional and psychological distress for parents and children, assuring that children will be permanently traumatized by battle and loss, undermined and induced to fear, and beleaguered with enduring damage to their egos.

No Action for Children:
Japan Shows the World its Back; Abandons the Hague for the Remainder of 2012

To finish the week, the Japanese Diet declared itself unable to bring itself to a discussion of, much less a vote on or a decision about, the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of the International Abduction of Children for the rest of this year. Abductors, kidnappers, child abusers, police, judges and so on, must have raised their cups in unanimous cheer at the victorious “good” news; another long reprieve for child abductors to earn another year’s pay and solidify control over another round of small victims and hunt for new prey. The Japanese had previously readied a set of reservations to prevent themselves from having to implement the Hague Treaty (while signing it) and deal prudently and conscientiously with children’s interests . The Diet had instead prepared a set of regulations to be voted on that undermine the treaty’s purpose (which is the quick return of abducted children to their home countries and that of their parent). But the proposed regime raised the ire of parent and children’s rights groups to such a degree that even officials of the perennially-complacent-towards-children’s-human-rights U.S. Department of State had mustered themselves to voice objections and warnings this year that the Japanese provisions were unacceptable. Given the innumerable crises to which Japan is currently subject, the treaty was given a level of priority that suited the political parties, in the classically inept and leery fashion of Japanese governance: the Diet simply put the treaty aside to let it die in the “constitutional process.”
“Intrepid as a Japanese legislator” is not one of the more common idiomatic phrases that comes tripping off the tongue.

* *

Now Prime Minister Noda faces an electoral vote which will make his legacy that of having inherited the destruction and cost of the great disaster – the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown of 2011 –  and having overseen a lot of legislative bickering and fussing, resulting in the heroic action of his commandeering a modest rise in sales tax. Not precisely lionhearted, nor even plucky, given Japan’s existential crisis. His dismal disappearance from the stage of world history is safely assured.

Our children continue to drown – while indifferent Japanese and their State Department/OCI lapdogs hold the life lines in their laps.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/25/opinion/men-who-needs-them.html?_r=1

By now, I think everyone should hate male-bashing just about as much as sexism.  I’m all for a materialist, scientific understanding of life, of the biological underpinnings of it all,… but it’s characteristic of a superficially technic-and-commerce obsessed society that it be fashionable to denigrate the human – (which men, women and children are). The intimacy of newer technologies today conspire to create increasingly isolated, inexperienced people. Who needs to expose themselves to the potentially traumatic encounter of meeting someone, having sex, and struggling with the vagaries and ambiguities of relationship? We really are on the cusp of an historic world discovery here in our age; because we kinow that we are bio-social beings; that as we better understand every aspect of how things grow on a biological, material basis,  it is dawning much more slowly that people (and in varying ways, each of our fellow animals) can’t and don’t develop without the full-on interaction of their protectors, the ones with whom they are intimate and who love them, who socialize them and from whom they learn language, behaviors to emulate, concepts and emotional intelligence, and so on. To discover that life generation can be materially reduced to cellular reproduction, passage of nutrients and immunities and all the rest of it, does not lead an informed person to conclude that males are inessential to children. Developmental psychology came late to the discovery of fathers; but it has come there, and has discovered numerous ways in which we need our fathers AND our mothers. Let’s not let ourselves get carried away in pithy denials (see the Times think piece above) of hard-won lessons, the ignorance of which causes far more heartache and soul damage than this NYT guest author means to concern himself with.

And by the way, someone should tell this man that not only do kids need their daddies, but their daddies also need them, despite the differences our respective developmental stages dictate.

… And another thing!!
This writer’s uncritical posture, like a half-dead Victorian or medieval school master, is actually that the only purpose of sex is reproduction and propogating the species – an archaic notion that we have never lived by. So if you can reproduce the species without dealing with people … what is really being said is that the intimate encounter with a desired, potentially  loved person has become too traumatic, too risky, and in the long run, too much of an interference with the absorbing, narcissistic self. I daily watch my fellow New Yorkers, ears corked  with earbuds, peering into iPods so intently, staring into a plastic rectangle with such great attachment, un-ready to  deal with the presence of other humans, that I wonder … what will become of affinity if it’s not practiced?

Rant, rant. Rant … rant.

This post is motivated by the knowledge that Rui is stuck in a household in which males, particularly his loving Daddy, are little valued by his mother, aunts and grandmother. I  believe that they are so naive and unthinking as to think that my loving boy’s self-worth is not affected. Every single day, I long to share thoughts and life with him. Without each other, we are lost.

The video clip below is something I saw on Youtube that reminded me again, again, again, (like I need to be reminded?) that Machiko’s drive to divorce and abduction is a miserably narcissistic and cruel thing to do to Rui. I didn’t want to divorce her; in the end, I wanted to live with my son and preserve his home. Like a fool, I refused to acknowledge Machiko’s death-drive pathology and incessant hostility was 切り離せない; inherent and inextricable.  But then, she said it herself: “What should I do? Be miserable the rest of my life?” For a person who is damaged in her particular way, it’s impossible to imagine a life in which there were alternatives to “misery the rest of my life” that didn’t involve  acts of  hostility, destructiveness, delusion, and spouse and child abuse. Felonies don’t usually bring happiness outside of TV, and in Machiko’s childhood, the way to absorb the conflict between her parents was demonstrated at an early age.  Her mother dumped her off with a grandmother whose still-at-home youngest daughter was considered too self -absorbed to learn to accept Machiko’s presence;  next, she was placed with a crazy nanny who abused her and her sister; and finally she was given up for adoption to a rich aunt, separating Machiko from her mother and sister, and requiring a law suit to get Machiko back home once her mother was forced to recognize the mistake she had made. It is the stuff of horror films, but now the next generation has been subjected to more of the same. “If she could take it, so can he.” Such is the mantra of this dysfunctional Japanese family, with the family courts to approve and support it.

It’s imposssible for Machiko to comprehend the insult and indifference to Rui’s inner life she is concealing.  She displayed this indifference constantly to him at home … 20 hours a day on the internet and telephone where her business clients which were always the indisputable top priority, dwelt, regardless of Rui’s needs or the effect it had on him; the obvious conflict and hurt she continually put on Rui’s heart by cold-shouldering the love of his father,  keeping Rui on a short string to force him to choose her, cling to and please her; and of course, an elaborately devised scheme to promote pointless and pernicious lies about me to him, to herself and her friends and family, to her lawyer, and to several counselors she sought out to use as puppets in the play.

As every psychologist and counselor knows, Machiko’s own broken family and extremely damaged childhood were highly predictive of her pathological rejection of compromise, trust, negotiation, relationship, and ultimately, predictive of the abduction of Rui. I am so ashamed that I didn’t realize this and act decisively on it. I can’t possibly make this grief comprehensible in words.

Rui, no matter what she does, cannot know that every single day of my life since they left has been a struggle with the extreme, beyond-all-sense  selfishness of her having stolen him. Rui is still, as he was when he was here, the center of my life.  But how to live with his absence, and the substitution of gnawing pain at the center of my life and his, with the constant deblilitating knowledge that he is there, being mislead, manipulated, and emotionally bankrupted, is an unsolvable mystery to me, as it is to every victim of Japanese Child Abduction.

The Japanese State condones the international abduction of children upon marital breakdown or failure. By encouraging the practice of abduction, then masking parental kidnapping as  “custody determination”, Japan helps to induce Japanese families to bring about the permanent separation of children from the parents who have raised them, and upon whom they depend to share love and experience trust.  Therefore, child trafficking into Japan has become an industry of lawyers, embassy and consular employees, family court judges, families and friends. Disappointed Japanese spouses and grandparents are able to gain Japanese state protection and ignore previously ajudicated custody in the child’s country of origin easily, regardless of the child’s originary nationality or age. Rewarding  the whim of any Japanese national who can manage to bring a child across the international border – regardless of his or her state of mind or fitness to make unilateral decisions of unparalleled importance concerning the parent and child victims – Japan provides a haven and fierce police intervention. Every separation or divorce in which there are children becomes a circumstance for defiance of the sovereignty of any country over its children; every separation between parents with bruised egos is escalated into an opportunity to commit a felony-kidnapping. The Japanese are determined to provide that opportunity, and so far, will stop at nothing to achieve it.

The United States and other countries with similarly weak national and state governments and relatively open borders for those of a certain class are easy targets -  sitting ducks for Japanese lawyers and Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials who can extend the umbrella of their sovereign powers over children at will to embrace and “bring home” any child whose parent they are able to reach, or who in turn inquire of them. Globalized commerce and communications have come to  greatly facilitate the ease with which “specialists” in abduction can and do solicit clients, tempt and provide inducements to them in the form of advice and services to parents in troubled marriages  that make avoidance of tiring and challenging marital negotiations, therapies to address emotional difficulties, and potentially costly legal processes (that nonetheless protect children from predatory lawyers and maliciously disgruntled parents of small children) a tremendously tempting option. With the global extension of the “feelers” of every parent in possession of any internet-ready device, the nerves and nerve-endings of the unstable or instant-solace-seeking can be more easily stimulated to incite her or him to take measures to cut and run that Japanese not bothered by conscience or the precision of law have uniquely at their disposal. Parents in search of a quick escape abduct and conceal the child, then run out the clock.  The price in mental well-being, psychological reliability and certainty, and emotionally safe growth will be paid by the child, as well as the abandoned parent. And in the schemes of a grandiose or depleted narcissistic abducting parent, that outcome can be readily deferred to the nebulous world of the uncertain, unknown, unthought-of future.

Within Japan, parental vulnerability and the risk of the loss of a child is as great, or greater. Parents are routinely stripped of custody of their children without cause or reason, and without concern for the impact on the child or the child’s bereft family. Japanese’ socially-generalized disregard for the developmental ill-effects of abduction-masked-as-custody makes it easier for the abducting parent to pass the illness along to their woe-begotten children,  who will forever miss not a crumb of information that will explain the wounds that their abductors avow to have sustained, and will seek to assuage their abductors as long as they live, internalizing to themselves the worry, anxiety and uncertainty of their condition, and the loss of their abandoned parent’s care and love.

A conservatively-estimated 4000 American children have permanently lost their non-Japanese parent since 1992, and the rate of loss increases annually. There are roughly 2 1/2 million children in Japan who are firmly not allowed to know their own parent who has loved, nurtured and raised them from babyhood.
This could not happen without institutional support from within both countries. And it will take a real, authentic exercise of democratic restoration for that institutional support to be overcome and defeated.

An Update Concerning Japan’s Continuing Failure to Sign the Hague Abduction Convention

by Jeremy Morley

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Over the past couple of years the Japanese Government has made a succession of statements concerning its purported intention to sign the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. These statements were quite effective in that they served to limit the international pressure on Japan to sign the treaty.

Of course, more important than what the Japanese Government says is what the Japanese Government does. Although legislation to authorize acceptance of the treaty was introduced at the last session of the Japanese Diet the proposed law was not debated and was allowed to “die on the vine.”

In May the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Government of Japan announced a so-called “pilot project” to assist in child abduction cases. Indeed, it renamed a division as the “Hague Child Abduction Convention Division”. On August 1, 2012 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that the program has been extended until March 29, 2013. See http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/human/pilot_120501_en_2.html

Unfortunately, the pilot project has absolutely no substance. It merely allows a left-behind parent to make one telephone call for up to one hour to a Japanese lawyer to receive information. The Ministry cautions that, “The lawyer will not give you professional consultation on your specific case. This pilot project is designed to allow you, who reside outside Japan, to gain a deeper understanding as to what scheme currently available in Japan might be of help to you.”

Very few left-behind parents will use the “pilot program,” since it offers them no actual benefit. One might wonder if its real purpose is to show that those who pressure Japan to adopt the Convention are exaggerating the problem.

In my personal opinion, if the Government of Japan were making full disclosure to left-behind parents it would – and should – also state that, “The Japanese Government regrets to inform you that it will do nothing to help you except express words of sympathy for your situation and regrets that the legal system in Japan will provide no meaningful assistance to you.”

Posted by Jeremy Morley  at http://www.internationalfamilylawfirm.com/

But no preventive measures were undertaken.

It is not rocket science to see that she ran away with her kidnapped child because she knew that she would be protected by Japanese authorities once she arrived in the country. There would be no recourse for the father if she could just get that baby to Japan.

This is child abduction sponsored by the Japanese state.

What will it take for this systematic abuse of the world’s children and families to come to full awareness?
I was moved to post this not only because of the tragedy of it, but also for two other aspects of the story:

1. The news story also refers to the abduction from Seattle of Mochi Morehouse, the son of  Jeffery Morehouse in 2010, the same year and season in which my Rui was kidnapped from New York.  Jeffery’s heart must ache tonight to hear of this.

2. California is set to pass and ratify Keisuke’s Law, a new law to add to the preventive measures available to state agencies to stop parental child abductors from getting away.  More about this legislation here and here. Keisuke’s Law was named for Randy Collins’ son, who was abducted from California. Testimony in the California legislature on behalf of Keisuke’s Law was given by both Randy and Jeffery, and can be seen here:

Having seen their children disappear into the Black Hole of Japan, both Jeffrey Morehouse and Randy Collins are activists in the fight against child abduction today. They both work under the banner of the anti-abduction group, BACHome.
Keisuke’s Law is precisely the type of legislation which Washington State, New York State, and 47 more states all ought to have, using Keisuke’s Law as a model on which to build resistance to Japanese and all other countries’ parental abductors. We in the United States must demand reciprocity of ourselves and the countries with which we share the world. Parental abduction is a crime with sad and grave consequences for all the victims involved.

State-sponsored Chld Abduiction to Japan must be stopped!

[Additional background to the case: the story follows a familiar pattern. In this instance, Ryoko Fukuda,  the Japanese mother,  made a charge of domestic violence and swore out an order of protection to keep the father, Arnold-Carlo Delizo away from his child. Upon investigation, the court found this charge of violence to be false and ordered a shared residential schedule and parenting plan for the child to divide time between both parents. Although Fukuda claimed that the father "chose not to see his child," the court found that "Fukuda withheld the child from Delizo for a protracted time without just cause.” Fukuda contended that the final residential schedule was "outside the bounds of reasonable choices.  In particular, she objected to….joint decision making.”  A father actually having a part in decisions regarding his child is outside the bounds of reasonable choice according to this mother.  One find this to be a typical part of the abductors' mentality in nearly every case. ]

Here is the news story:

Charge: Unhappy with parenting plan, Seattle mom took daughter to Japan

Mom latest of several such parents to face such charges in King County

BY LEVI PULKKINEN, SEATTLEPI.COM STAFF

Published 11:10 p.m., Tuesday, August 14, 2012

A Seattle mom accused of fleeing the country with her young daughter during a custody dispute is now facing felony charges in King County.

Prosecutors there claim Ryoko Fukuda absconded with her daughter the day she was supposed to hand over the girl’s Japanese passport.

According to charging documents, the girl’s father rushed to Sea-Tac Airport in an attempt to retrieve her. But prosecutors say Fukuda and the child were already flying to Japan.

Writing the court, Senior Deputy Prosecutor David Martin noted Fukuda had been ordered not to take the girl out of the country hours before she did exactly that.

Fukuda and the girl’s father dated but had broken up by the time Fukuda gave birth to the girl, Seattle Detective Jason Stolt told the court. The girl’s father and Fukuda each took out domestic violence protection orders against the other; the man told police he didn’t learn his daughter existed until 2009.

A parenting plan was first ordered in 2010. The plan gave the girl’s father visitation rights and required that either parent let the other know if their daughter was going to travel out of Washington.

On May 16, Fukuda, 34, and the girl’s father met with a King County court commissioner to discuss Fukuda’s plan to take the child to Japan. The girl’s father objected to the move.

The commissioner ordered both parents to surrender their daughter’s passports to Fukuda’s attorney for safekeeping until a final decision could be made. Stolt noted Fukuda had the girl’s Japanese passport.

At 2 p.m. the following day, the girl’s father called 911 to report that his daughter failed to arrive at her Broadview neighborhood elementary school that morning. Nor was the girl or Fukuda at their apartment.

Meeting with police an hour later, the man said Fukuda had failed to turn over their daughter’s Japanese passport. He said he was concerned Fukuda was preparing to flee the country, and he worried he’d never see his daughter again.

Leaving the meeting with police, the man drove to Sea-Tac Airport hoping to learn whether his daughter had been flown out of the country. With the help of Port of Seattle police and State Department officials, the man determined Fukuda and his daughter left the country at 2 a.m. that morning.

The detective told the court he has since confirmed that Fukuda and the girl are in Japan.

Fukuda has now been charged with first-degree custodial interference.

If similar cases filed in recent years are any measure, prosecutors will have a difficult time getting Fukuda before a King County judge.

Similar charges filed separately against two other Japanese women alleged to have fled the Seattle area for Japan have gone nowhere so far.

In 2009, Mayumi Ogawa fled the country weeks after a Superior Court judge approved an parenting plan stating that her son would split his time between his parents. The boy’s father has since been awarded sole control of the child, Ogawa remains at large and charged with first-degree custodial interference.

Michiyo Imoto Morehouse, 44, was charged with the same crime in 2010 after fleeing the country with her son. Her ex-husband had been awarded sole custody of the child; she remains at large.

In recent years, U.S. authorities have seen an increase in the number of international custodial child abductions. Watchdogs on the issue say there are currently more than 1,000 such open cases involving U.S. parents whose children have been taken overseas.

Speaking with seattlepi.com in 2009, Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said custodial child abduction is on the rise.

Unlike the United States and 80 other countries, the Japanese government has not ratified the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction. The 29-year-old United Nations accord requires that member countries honor custody agreements made outside their borders unless doing so threatens the child involved.

Allen said that even when the country in question has signed on to the Hague Convention, a child’s return is not assured.

“The cases where we don’t get children returned aren’t just from places like Iran,” Allen said in March 2009. “There are a host of horror stories out there.”

Another recent case has had something of a happy ending.

After months of work, the Redmond mother of a boy whose father had taken him to Morocco was able to retrieve her son and return him to Washington. Still, the boy’s father, Mouad Aimane Elbou, has not faced the charge against him.

This “important message” was sent by the U.S. Department of State to all parents of children kidnapped to Japan (that is to say, those child abductions still on record despite the State Department’s best efforts to expunge them from their active case files) on August 10, 2012. In a display of diplomatic dissimulation, the State Department celebrated the extension for an additional time period of what the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) has come to call a “pilot program“ which MOFA initiated at the behest of the United States and other countries whose children are routinely abducted by Japanese, to assist parents of kidnapped children in a process of getting to know the routines of the Japanese judiciary. What the State Department will not tell you is that this assistance of MOFA that DOS is introducting us to will facilitate drawing the parent-victims into a perilous compromise of jurisdiction, providing the Japanese state with the concession of jurisdiction over our children where it has not been legally obtained.  Remember that these courts have yet to order the return of an abducted child in the 57 years since that have elapsed since the end of the 2nd World War, and  you have the U.S. government helping the Japanese government to relieve parents of the stolen rights to their own children.
The text appears below at the bottom of this post, along with a sample of MOFA’s rhetorical “pilot program.”

In response, this is what one of our fellow parents of kidnapped children observed:

 1.  Days since Japan announced their intention to sign the Hague Convention on 19 May 2011 =  449 days

2.  Days remaining until March 2013 (continuation of “pilot project”) = 233

3.  Total days from Japan’s announcement to sign the Hague until March 2013 = 672 days

 4.  Children statistically abducted since 19 May 2011 (assuming 39 per year – average of 2007-2009) = 48 children

5.  Children that will statistically be abducted between now and March 2013 = 25 children

6.  Total cumulative number of children from # 4 and #5 above = 73 children

 7.   Children that have been returned by the Japanese Government or Courts since Japan announced its intention to sign the Hague 449 days ago = 0

8.   Children that the Japanese Government or courts will return during the next 233 days during their ongoing “Pilot Project” = 0

As stated in the email [below], the “pilot project” is a direct result of the U.S. Department of State’s request for Japanese government assistance with existing cases of international parental child abduction.  Glad to see the State Department continues to make so much progress on this issue and share this good news story with us!!

You could cut the justifiable sarcasm here with a knife. But this is not comedic, nor cause for laughter. It is a tragedy with parent and child victims, benefitting ONLY child abductors.
—

Following is the “pilot program” message, followed by the message that the Japanese intended for us to see, as facilitated by the loyal United States Department of State, under the proud leadership of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. For anyone foolish enough to entrust a child’s fate to a state and judiciary that specializes in child abduction, and that eschews the rule of  law, be my guest.

Update:

MOFA Announces Extension of Hague Convention Pilot Program

Dear Parents,

We are writing to provide you with an update.  Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) announced that they will extend their pilot project, (about which we notified you on May 1), through March 2013.  The length of the extension may be revised based on the number of participants and/or availability of funds.

The pilot project provides a free phone service for parents of children abducted to Japan to call in to learn more about Japan’s civil justice system, particularly their family court.

For more information, please see our May 1 e-mail below or review MOFA’s
website: http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/human/pilot_120501_en.html
<http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/huma/pilot_120501_en.html> .

Text of May 1 e-mail:

MOFA informed the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs that the pilot project is an extension of its ongoing preparations to function as Japan’s Central Authority after Japan ratifies the Hague Abduction Convention.  Open to parents around the world, according to MOFA, the pilot project is a direct result of the U.S. Department of State’s request for Japanese government assistance with existing cases of international parental child abduction.  While the U.S. Department of State cannot recommend or endorse any specific program, we encourage parents to consider participating in this unique, cost-free opportunity to learn more about Japan’s legal system.

MOFA reported to the U.S. Department of State that in preparation for joining the Hague Abduction Convention, the name of its Division for Issues Related to Child Custody has been changed to the Hague Child Abduction Convention Division.  This office will administer the pilot program and has provided the information below, which will also be posted on MOFA’s website
(www.mofa.go.jp <http://www.mofa.go.jp> ).

In the Office of Children’s Issues, parents should contact their case officers.

And this from MOFA:

http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/human/pilot_120501_en_2.html

Foreign Policy > Human Rights > Notice: A Pilot Project towards concluding the Hague Convention of 25 October 1980 on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction > For parties to a case of international parental child removal and retention who reside outside Japan

For parties to a case of international parental child removal and retention who reside outside Japan

August 1, 2012
(Japanese)

This pilot project will provide an information service by a Japanese lawyer on the Japanese legal system for parents whose child has been removed to Japan and who reside outside Japan, and are seeking a solution to the issue but unfamiliar with the Japanese legal framework. This service will be available in English or Japanese via Skype or telephone, free of charge.

1. Who is eligible to use this service?

Parents residing outside Japan whose child has been removed to Japan.
(Only a parent of the removed child can apply.
A grandfather, grandmother or other close relative of the child, as well as friends and acquaintances of the parent, are not eligible.)

1. When is this service available?

Now available until March 29, 2013!

9:00 a.m. – 9:00 p.m. (Japan Standard Time), from Monday through Friday (a day of the week).

Please note that this service might be terminated earlier than the date specified above, depending on the number of applicants. Any changes will be posted at this page.

1. How many times and how long may I use this service?

One session only per applicant; up to one hour

1. Do you speak English?

The lawyer speaks English and Japanese.

1. What information can I get from this service?

Information on Japanese family law, family court proceedings and other aspects of the Japanese legal framework (Please note that in this service the lawyer in charge will not offer professional consultation to solve an individual case.)

1. I’d like to use this service. What should I do?Step 1: To arrange an information session with a Japanese lawyer in charge, send an email to the address below that includes the following information. The lawyer will report back to you regarding the time and date of the session via email.Note: The email address below is not hyperlinked. Please type this email address.
   • - Time and date (based on Japan Standard Time) you prefer: Provide three or more options in order of preference in the period described in Section 2 above. Please consider the time difference between your location and Japan.
   • The lawyer in charge might be unavailable at your requested time, so please give a number of preferred day and time slots.
     Example:
     i) 1st June, from 9 am (JST)
     ii) 5th June, from 11 am (JST)
     iii) 10th June, from 3 pm (JST)…
   • - The specific information you want to know
   • - Your contact phone number (including country code) or Skype name
   • - Your country/region (if your country has multiple time zones, please also provide your city name.)

Step 2: The lawyer will call you on the date specified.