tony-and-liliana-delvecchio.com

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

            Having lost all attempts at “amicable negations” with his ex-wife and after having been denied his parental rights by the Japanese “legal system,” Tommy joined what was to become known as the Left-Behind Parent Movement. In the early years following the final divorce decree by the Japanese courts, Tommy had lost himself in wandering throughout other parts of Asia, staying away from Japan for as long as his school holidays and financial resources would allow. During this period of time, he had developed an unhealthy hatred for the country that had taken from him the most precious thing in the world — his only child. Escaping to the Temples of Angkor, the tranquil beaches of Koh Samui on the Gulf of Siam, and the wilds of the Himalayas in the Khumbu Region in Nepal afforded him some measure of relief from the agony of his loss, albeit a relief that evaporated upon his return to the island he had once loved, but which now he viewed as heartless and devoid of all human compassion. To him at these times, all Japanese people were complicit in the injustice he was experiencing through their indifference and sham pretense of fancying themselves as a “harmonious country” driven by a general disposition toward courtesy and “omotenashi,” or “hospitality” for outsiders. Were it not for a determination to be available for his daughter by staying close, Tommy might well have boarded a plane back to the States never to return. He considered himself a broken man, held together somehow only by a grim resolve to bring about some vague sense of “closure” to the whole unfortunate affair. He was one part bitterness, one part anger, and one part despair, and he honestly didn’t know how he was going to get through this traumatic amputation of his erstwhile parent-child relationship.

            After several years of trying to readjust to a life as an un-parent, Tommy learned of a case of another left-behind parent, one Christian Sorensen, who had found himself in the custody of the local constabulary after attempting to “re-kidnap” his children from his ex-wife who had violated a court-sanctioned divorce agreement in Georgia that had awarded main custody of the kids to Christian with generous visitation rights and alimony to his former spouse. Sorensen became something of a cause célèbre, with left-behind parents around Japan rallying to the cry of “Free Christian Sorensen!” Tommy started thinking that maybe he should get involved in the burgeoning movement after first avoiding it some years earlier in its nascent stage as he had just needed some time to deal with his PTSD. He had, in fact, been brushed off by U.S. government officials in the past who insisted that they “could not get involved in domestic matters in Japan,” and to “consult with a Japanese attorney.” Thus, Tommy had met with one roadblock after another in trying to get somebody — anybody — to take an interest in his cause. And so, despite the promise of reliving the pain the loss of Livy had engendered, Tommy dove headlong into the abyss.

            Tommy got involved in any number of aspects of the movement, including meetings with other “LBPs,” protest marches through the streets of Shibuya, letters to his Congressman, President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, and other government officials, and most importantly, he thought, meetings at the U.S. Embassy to get them to put pressure on Japan to do something about the injustices endemic in their system of “justice” when it came to parental and children’s rights. Calls for kyōdō shinken (parental rights) were coupled with those of coercing Japan to accede to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.

            There were actually two groups of left-behind parents in the movement — parents whose Japanese spouses literally abducted the couples’ children from foreign countries back to Japan and resident parents like himself who were victims of the institutional “abductions” brought about through Japan’s single custody system upon divorce. The idea was that by bringing these two different groups together changes in Japanese law might be brought about through “gai-atsu,” or outside pressure.

           The U.S. Embassy officials at this point were actually extremely supportive of the efforts of parents such as himself, perhaps due to increased awareness of the issue and concerted action by parents, and in fact persuaded embassies from other countries to join together to issue a series of joint demarches, which were coordinated efforts among the various nations asserting a shared position of concern and request for action. Tommy attended a dozen meetings at the embassy to share his story and to continue to pressure his government and that of Japan to bring about justice for left-behind parents.

           Ultimately, the embassy was successful in persuading Japan to sign on to the Hague Convention, and after some 40 years since it was first adopted, Japan finally signed on to the international treaty. Emboldened by this success, Tommy felt some measure of hope that the victory on that front would translate into changes in the Japanese legal system itself for resident parents following divorce, not only for foreign parents, but also for Japanese parents who had been similarly separated from their kids. The reality, though, was that that was not to happen, and Tommy’s efforts to help non-resident parents to be reunited with their children did not make any difference at all in the Japanese family courts. Twenty years later, Japanese politicians were still giving lip service to the issue, insisting that they were “looking into and discussing the matter,” which when translated into explicit English from the implicit Japanese meant they were weren’t going to do anything at all.

           Moreover, there were deep divisions in the Left-behind Parent Movement due to different views on how to bring about resolutions to their situations, with some being more conciliatory and others more radical in their approaches. This was, after all, not an association born simply of shared interests, but instead one which attempted to unite deeply scarred and emotionally distraught people. Internecine warfare often broke out among the parents, and at times their anger at Japan was directed at one another. Tommy was not exempt from this misdirected anger and took sides as well, unleashing his own fury at parents he felt were trying to co-opt the movement for their own personal advantage, sometimes even for monetary gain. The hoped-for unity Tommy believed would bring about change was thus illusory, and the movement disintegrated over time.

           Even Japan’s acquiescence to the Hague Convention, Tommy eventually was to learn, was a sham, with Japanese courts refusing to return children abducted from foreign countries by their Japanese mothers and fathers with claims of potential “domestic violence” on the part of gaijin spouses and assertions that it “would be wrong to return abducted children” back to the lands of their birth as it would be “traumatic for them after having become accustomed to life in Japan.” Or some other such nonsense.

           To say that Tommy had become disillusioned anew was an understatement, and the ensuing realization that he had once again ran headlong into a dead end was almost too much for him to bear. He had spent several years “fighting the good fight” to no avail, and he now understood that the energy he had invested into the cause was nothing more than a distraction from and avoidance of his true feelings of sorrow over the loss. He no longer believed that concerted action and sheer determination had any chance against an intransigent Japan, and slowly he drifted away from the Left-behind Parent Movement. By this time, he and Livy had been separated from each other for some eight years, and the little girl he once walked to her kindergarten bus stop was now in high school. He shook his head the way a man in a drunken stupor tries to overcome his inebriated state. Reality wasn’t just knocking at his door — it was crashing through it like a battering ram. And there was no getting out of its way.