First in a two-part series
In July, Tokyo's family court granted me, an American, physical custody (kangoken) of my 13-year-old daughter exactly 120 days after she was abducted by my Japanese wife, a lifelong public servant employed as a teacher at a state school in Tokyo. This just may be the first time that Japan's family court has awarded a foreign father custody of a Japanese child after a successful abduction by the child's Japanese mother.
The times they are a-changin'. Or are they?
One day in March, just minutes after my daughter and I returned home from celebrating her graduation from elementary school that morning, her mother, from whom I had filed for divorce in January after 17 years of marriage, lured my daughter out of the house, shoved her into a taxi and took off for the local ward welfare office (fukushi jimusho), where her mother claimed domestic violence. A social worker met the taxi outside the office and gave the driver directions to a shelter, which was located in Shinjuku Ward within the Yamanote Line.