Last in a two-part series
Parents, lawyers and activists alike understandably frame the problems of parental child abduction and parental alienation in Japan in terms of children's rights. While it would be easy to conclude from what I wrote in last week's column that Japanese courts simply do not care about them, this would probably be a mistake.
On the contrary, family courts and their specially trained investigative personnel are held out as the "experts" on children, their welfare and rights. In my view, the problem is that children's rights probably have the same character as many other personal rights in Japan: Rather than being rights that bind and can be asserted against the government, they are benefices bestowed on the people by well-meaning judges and other bureaucrats. Rights that on paper seem similar to those enjoyed by people in other countries may undergo a subtle process whereby they are converted from rules government agencies are supposed to follow, into the medium by which bureaucrats tell the people what to do — civil rights often becoming civic duties.