Dateline: Tokyo
By: Toshi
From: The Honor Network

Priority News Exchange Program News Item (PNEP)

What follows is a dissecting of an appeal to the western media to come to the aid of foreign women in Japan who lose access to their children after divorce (though it is masked as an appeal for all spouses that have lost access to their kids due to being foreigners in a foreign country).

In this case it is Japan, but it could easily be any nation throughout the world that treats its citizens better than foreigners, which they all seem to do, for those people vote and have kin and more rights under their law to cause the government much more headaches.

This dissecting of a typically subtle feminist approach to article writing is also note worthy because it is also a case study in all transnational custody cases. All such transnational organizations should naturally join into a loose confederation at minimal (as should men’s rights groups in all nations throughout the world too), so as to get the power of numbers working on their behalf. Yet instead what is happening is feminists are sabotaging this by only centering on women losing out in isolated countries and not connecting it to other nations, and especially not connecting this to their home nations and their home nation’s men and their plight. In this way they are using men suffering in the same situation to push for international laws that favor only the women in these transnational cases.

The fact that a boarder is of little consequence when in countries like the US, Australia and Canada, for example, a mother can routinely move as far away as say from Russian to England with the full blessing of the court. How a father is to pay for traveling is never accounted in to his expenses for the courts really doesn’t care if the father actually gets visitation, or it would make him pay less in support to allow for such real access. Instead they often give fathers a dressing down for not making the effort to visit or pay in these situations, which is often unjust in the extreme. For if the legal system did care they’d punish mothers who decide to live on the other coast, a continent away from a father’s access. Yet transnational child custody organizations like to make it out that they suffer from distance alone as an injustice. All they suffer from in fact is differing governments for in countries like Canada and Switzerland they have people who speak one language going up against a regional court where they must be translated too.

So let’s begin with the article pushing this dysfunction. Please note at the end of the article when the veil is so subtly dropped showing the real agenda of such attention getting operations:

WOMEN: Foreign Spouses In Japan Seek Easier Child Custody Laws
By Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Mar 22 (IPS) – Divorce has constantly been on the mind of Imelda (not her real name), a 36-year-old Filipino woman who married a Japanese man seven years ago.
But the soft spoken woman says that despite the nagging loneliness and physical abuse she sometimes has to endure from her husband, she will never leave the man she despises for fear of losing her two children.
”I asked my husband for a divorce after my first child was born. He said okay, and told me to leave that night taking only my clothes. I couldn’t bear to part from my son who was then only 10 months old,” she explained. So, she stayed on.

Or in other words the family stayed together, which in fact all studies say is in the best interest of any child.

One marriage Imelda is but one of what social workers and lawyers say are a growing number of women and men, both foreign and Japanese, who are locked in miserable marriages because Japanese laws ignore the individual rights of parents to see their children after a divorce.

”Japanese divorce laws ignore the rights of children to have access to both parents,” explained Mizuho Fukushima, who works with women and foreign labourers here.

This is why in many cases women who want to leave their Japanese husbands do not do so, and their predicament is complicated by the fact that they often face economic difficulties coping with child rearing.

Fukushima says the situation is particularly difficult for foreign women because they have the added problem of getting legal visas to stay on in the country after a divorce. Asian women are especially vulnerable as a result of lingering discrimination, activists here say. The problems experienced by foreign men and women with Japanese spouses with gaining access to children after separation or divorce, was highlighted at a recent press conference by the Japanese chapter of the Children’s Rights Council, a Washington- based organisation. Saying the inability to maintain ties with their children was akin to child abduction, several foreign nationals spoke out against a system that they said denied their children the right to see them and the opportunity to develop closer ties with their biological parents.

Yes it is, but you need not look to Japan for that, for it is going on inside the US and every western nation, but directed more at western men!

Dale Martin, an Englishman, says he has not seen his six-year-old daughter for the last two years because his Japanese wife refuses to allow it. This, he adds, is despite his telephone calls and letters and a hard-won visitation agreement signed in family courts in December 1994.

Welcome to the club Martin so let’s join hands in defending all such people in all western nations (but wait I didn’t get a answer back form their organization)? Why? Are they not interested in helping all people in all nations? Or is it because the Japanese government is putting its citizens first (loyalty) over foreigners (mostly women) that has got you giving this so much attention and not comparing it to every western nation that is doing the same to foreigners and especially western men!

”I have no news about her even while living a few hours away from her home. I call this a violation of my daughter’s rights to have access to her father,” he told the press. Margaret Leyman, an American journalist living in Tokyo, says her Japanese former husband prohibits her son from meeting with her.
And in other countries, is it not the same? Use your journalist skills and make the argument worldwide & a United Nation’s issue! Unless of course by keeping things only at the Japan level you can save having to deal with how millions of men are feeling the same as you or worse!

”My son, who is 12 now, lives with my mother-in-law after the family court decided I was, as a working woman and foreigner, not a responsible mother,” she explained. ”They have prohibited him from seeing me.” In both cases the foreign spouses had signed divorce papers that had, without their knowledge, included the awarding of custody of their children to their estranged husbands or wives.
We men sign nothing in our native language and still loose access, so you should not make your situation out to be worse.

Japanese laws recognise divorce, granted on mutual consent, on a form signed by both parties. Both Leyhman and Martin assumed, in accordance with laws in many western countries, that custody is a separate issue from divorce and would be treated as such under the Japanese legal system.
”I was shocked to realise that I had signed away my right to see my child and also denied my son’s right to have a mother as well as enjoy a different culture,” recalled Leyman. In desperation, she tried to get at least visitation rights to her child.

Welcome to the club, you now know how is feels for men in your own countries, so are you ready to join forces? My email continues to be empty despite many email send outs?

Fukushima says problems arise because the concept of visitation rights or shared custody is not deeply ingrained in the Japanese system. ”There are no specific laws on visitation like most other countries and consultations between judges and children are not common, so it’s difficult for the parent who does not have custody to gain access,” she explained. ”This is because Japanese tradition views children not as individuals with their own rights but as belonging to the family,” she added.

Not exactly true. Japanese men have the traditional option of not supporting fully the life style of the former wife, for did she not want separation? They then can get the access they want for more support. Shame, quite unfashionable in western countries, forces both to give access and support after the break up, or both suffer for selfishness. The best interests of the kid is always deem to be in the women’s care (very old fashion again in this new equal world) and thus if the husband is to care he must continue to fund the child through the women, who he might have despised in her spend habits to begin the divorce.

This isn’t full divorce. It is divorce of child from the man (usually), divorce of the women doing anything for the family best interest, and undivorce of the man giving money to the wife to spend as she sees fit (including clothes to make her look better for a new money provider to come. The wife should fend for herself like a man is expected to do, and if she can’t do so she should give the child to the father who probably has the job and can place a child in daycare, just as easily as a woman can these days.

This was the way until lately, but now feminist laws are now pushing for the same one-sided ways in other non-western countries often using articles like this one to force governments to become western. Men’s rights organizations should at least challenge these panderers for feminist pushes. This cynical approach is a good policy if such organizations fail to return offers of cooperation, and try to push western ideas of feminist perversities into law in non-western nations.

Chieko Nishioka, who runs a shelter for foreign women, says many of them flee failed marriages with their children because they do not want to lose them. ”After they come here I help them to find jobs and new homes, which are important considerations for gaining custody of their children.

Gaining custody? Why should they get custody? You have slipped up here and showed your true colors. Get a job so they may get shared custody should be the line in this section. You should be more careful with your political subtlety honey! And also way not male shelters? Are there no cases of men and their children being beaten by nasty wives? In the last two month in Japan two women have been convicted of murdering their own children, so the old standby of mothers don’t hurt their own kids or husbands is total BS.

The whole experience is very painful for these distraught women,” she explained.

How about the men, you callous uncaring bitch!

Fukushima says in many cases, Asian women estranged from their Japanese husbands are at the losing end of custody battles. This is because the often children do not speak the mother’s language, and it is easy for judges to decide that the children are better off living with the Japanese father who has the means to support them, who can remarry or have support from his parents.

Sounds correct to me. Money+ Family+ plus not removing the child from the area he is brought up around sounds like the best interest of the child. Why must a child say good-bye to friends because a spouse wishes to put some distance from the other having access? How is that in the best interest of the child? It would seem what a woman claims allows her to cut off all the child’s base of emotional support in friendships. Again mothers can do no wrong!

But activists and those who feel aggrieved by the current Japanese law point out that there must be some changes in the law as marriages with foreign nationals and divorce rates rise.

Plus laws in western countires that treat foreigner unjustly too must also be dealt with you self centered egotist. The natural unification of all such transnational marriages should be dealt with in one accord, but first citizens in each country need to have equal rights to access and support for both sexes equally. But I think this would mean some feminists having to support men having access to kids in their own countries first. Unfortunately these groups are unable to even return countless emails to them on this issue and thus have led me to bringing this to all the readers.

These organizations just want others back home feeling sad for women in these other counties and call on old fashion chivalry to come to these mothers rescue (very old fashion once again), and this is why women are used in most examples (instead of men). We should be very careful in joining up with any transnational marriage rights groups and demand that they get their houses in order on these outstanding issues, and do much more than pledges in working in their own countries for fathers rights. If not we should give them the shaft and only work with men suffering in their situations in foreign countries if they work for men in these countries suffer as them at a international level. In fact these organizations could help such men for they will speak the language and have ways to support such men. So it is in the best interest of such transnational organizations to be knocking down doors with men’s groups and not trying to ignore us so as to think they will get squeezed into the system by tying their fate to feminists centered groups. It is amazing how media time and government attention goes to women in these situations and these people become blind deaf and dumb to their own nations. This borders on racism in that if a foreigner does something to you it is somehow worse than if it is done by a women in your native country. Kind of how women lie about a black man raping them to get more racist empathy directed toward their attention-whoring ways. Yet this won’t surprise western MRAs or MROs they are all too aware of the hypocritical dysfunctional weaseling games going on.