This from the Trentonian, a newspaper in the state capital.
There were congressional hearings again earlier this week about American children who are abducted overseas when one parent (of a bicultural marriage) decides they want to totally split from their estranged spouse.
I had caught this news elsewhere on the net, and the points that the other article went to were calling Japan out on the game they play of trying to write so many exceptions into an international agreement that it ends up like Swiss cheese. The congressman warned Japan not to do that. The focus in the Trentonian’s coverage is on America’s insistence that the already abducted children be returned. (There are maybe 150 123 173 in this category.) Even if Japan agreed to the Hague Convention on international custody, the children who were taken before Japan agrees don’t get coverage under the treaty. So there has to be another deal between the U.S. and Japan.
Japan always does this. They want to put it out there that they have agreed to abide by a treaty or some other accord to give equal protection or mutual recognition of rights to people from other countries. But then they turn around and try to gut the deal. It’s almost as if, if they don’t do that Step Two backing away, they lose face with hardliners inside Japanese society that MacArthur never bothered to root out like we (mostly) did in Germany.
Hoofin 