US lawmakers are threatening to punish Japan unless it works to reunite hundreds of children with their foreign parents, accusing Tokyo of violating human rights through its custody laws.
As Japan celebrated its annual Children’s Day on Wednesday, lawmakers gathered near Capitol Hill with a handful of tearful fathers who held up pictures of their half-Japanese children to whom they have no access.
Japanese courts almost never award child custody to foreign parents. Activists say thousands of Japanese have spirited children home, denying access to their foreign parents.
“For 50 years we have seen all talk and no real action on the part of the Japanese government,” said Republican Representative Christopher Smith, who is helping spearhead the legislation. “American patience has run out. This is a human rights issue.”
The legislation, which needs approval by Congress, would create a US ambassador-at-large for child abductions and spell out actions that the president could impose if Japan or other countries do not cooperate.
The punishments range from a private demarche to barring US agencies from procuring or exporting goods to governments in violation. It lists exceptions in defense — Japan and the US have a military alliance.
The custody issue was thrown into focus last year when Christopher Savoie of Tennessee was detained in Japan for snatching his two children on their way to school and taking them to a US consulate.
Savoie, overcome with emotion, appeared at the Washington press conference and voiced hope his children would see him on TV.
“Please always remember — Daddy loves you,” he said.
He accused Japan of hypocrisy, saying that Tokyo has campaigned for years to force North Korea to return Japanese civilians kidnapped in the 1970s and 1980s to train the communist regime’s spies.
“They have sought and received — rightfully — the support of our government, but in 58 years, Japanese parents have stolen hundreds of children from the United States and the Japanese government has refused to cooperate in the return of even one” child, Savoie said.
Japan is the only major industrial nation that has not signed the 1980 Hague Convention that requires the return of wrongfully kept children to their country of habitual residence.
Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, whose coalition swept out the long-ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) last year, said in February he was willing to sign the convention, pointing to global pressure, but Hatoyama said that his government needed time as parliament was unlikely to ratify the treaty in its current session.
Scott Sawyer, who said his ex-wife took their now three-year-old son to Japan from Los Angeles in December 2008, appealed to Hatoyama to take action.
“This can be done without a treaty, without any paperwork,” Sawyer said. “This can be done tomorrow as a show of goodwill and Japan’s chance to rectify the bad policies of the LDP of the last 60 years ... and put Japan on a new footing of genuine friendship with the rest of the world,” he said.
Smith, the congressman, said that even if Japan approved the treaty, it would be unlikely to affect US parents whose cases are currently in dispute.
Smith flew to Brazil last Christmas and helped another US father, David Goldman, bring his son back to the US after a bitter five-year custody battle.
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