For Rui Boy

This video, for me as the grieving parent of a kidnapped child, was riveting.

What follows here is a link to the first of five roughly 10-minute clips comprising an interview with Colin Jones, a U.S. lawyer and a professor in Kyoto. If you’re able to watch all 5 in sequence (you absolutely should!), you’ll get a fast education in the issues and a solid insight into the Japanese. Once you get past the introductions and background in part one, the subsequent interviews present the gaping holes in Japanese law,  the workings and motivations of Japan’s courts and judges, and the method, or lack of method, behind their flaccid, self-interested treatment of families and children. By the time it’s over, you’ll  know why the courts  not only fail to protect parents’ and children’s rights, but don’t have a clue as to how to even define them. The default positions they defer to leave families and children without hope of an effective defense. Japanese fathers are forced to give up their own kids. Abusive burdens are placed on small children who are given tasks of decision they are utterly, cognitively, emotionally, developmentally unprepared for and abandoned in the insanity described.  It is tragic.

The mortifying amount of repression at work in this story strikes me dumb. It is stunning.

If  you can’t see the entire interview, try to view the meat of it – #2 –

#3

and #4 –

And for a complete picture, here is the conclusion, #5 –

P.S.

In case you miss the reference, the celebrity former Prime Minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, who famously raised the issue of the abduction of Japanese children by the North Koreans a decade past, took full advantage of Japanese family law to prevent his ex-wife from ever seeing their two children, over twenty years ago. Further, he left her when she was pregnant with their third child, who he has steadfastly refused to meet, ever, as if he did not exist. Here is a short re-telling of that story.