Flash-forward to the end of September when, in a gutsy and desperate attempt to retrieve his children, Christopher flew to Fukuoka, rented a car and tried a reverse-kidnap on them, making it as far as the U.S. Consulate General in Fukuoka City before being arrested at the gate. He's currently being held in Japan and may face up to ten years behind bars there for his gambit. Damn.
Critics of Christopher's actions argue that two wrongs (the original kidnap and subsequent counter-kidnap) don't make a right, but that misses entirely the simple truth that shit should never--NEVER--have been allowed to get this far and, in fact, the entire affair preceding his Japan escapade had been a travesty of justice. Fact: ex-wife Noriko was under court order to stay in Tennessee where both parents could enjoy easy visitation with their children. Fact: by taking the children Noriko is a kidnapper. Fact: Noriko is an international fugitive now and if she ever leaves Japan for a nation having an extradition treaty with America she will be arrested.
Why did this horrible woman kidnap her kids and flee to Japan in the first place? Was Christopher an abusive father or ex-husband? Was she in physical danger from something or somebody? Neither. It turns out she just thought the kids were losing touch with their Japanese identity. What. The. Fuck? I'm so tired of this nationalistic bullshit! I want to throttle this woman and shake her violently while laying out the crystal clear fact that the kids are ethnically half-Japanese and half-American. Not one more than the other. Equal. Still, it's that half-Japanese part that gave this woman the idea that she had the right to abscond with them away from their father and home.
The saddest chapter in this is yet to come, I think. Christopher is facing some serious jail time, and since Japan has a ridiculous 98% conviction rate when a criminal case reaches the trial stage--which it likely will--he could be spending the next decade behind, uh, probably bars, but maybe some shōji screens too. Even if he does get off there's nothing short of an act of divine miracle that could get the Japanese courts to send his children back to the U.S., away from their amoral mother, nor even allow him visitation privileges. This is by no means an unprecedented event. Indeed, this is the 125th time a psycho-bitch Japanese mother has kidnapped her kid(s) from American soil and stolen them away from their biological fathers! Nor is it only a problem with American fathers, the French, Canadian and British governments have also experienced this problem in the past (and probably still currently do). It's safe to say that Christopher did what he did because a massive body of evidence shows how wrangling with Japanese courts only leads in circles and then to bankruptcy.
These problems stem from several factors--the mothers being off their rockers among them, but unfortunately one that can't be easily mitigated--but primarily grow from two major issues. First is that culturally the Japanese view the mother as the more important parent in a child's life since it's she that typically stays at home to rear the children and tend the home while father works the day away and spends the nights drinking himself to a stupor. This concept is flawed in that is supposes that all family configurations are uniform and perpetual. Why can't the mother be the breadwinner and father be the homemaker, or both parents be workers and raising a latchkey kid? Both, and more configurations, happen in Japan, trust me.
The next factor, and potentially the greater of the two, is the fact that Japan has not signed the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspect of International Child Abduction, an international treaty designed to protect children and parents from this kind of bonkers thing in the first place. Japan's refusal to sign the treaty is as baffling as it is insulting, their diplomats stating that subjecting themselves to its statutes would prevent them from protecting Japanese women fleeing abusive foreign husbands. That reasoning makes little sense since abusive fathers could not easily be granted custody of children in any nation's jurisdiction and thus would have no right to pull the kids back if mom up and left with them. Most of all it's just deeply, deeply offensive to me to think that here is the Japanese government blatantly admitting that they believe all foreign men to be devilish, violent husbands and fathers and only the pure and good Japanese can be relied on to raise a kid or treat a woman right. It's like that cover from that March 1976 issue of The New Yorker, only instead of the world as seen from 9th Ave. it's the world as seen from Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo: Kabuki-cho and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building in the foreground, followed by Kyoto and Osaka, Fukuoka in the distance and across the Sea of Japan just an indistinct landscape of inhuman barbarian hordes.
Jesus. FML, I lived for three years there.
--Matt
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