What a surprise, the US courts failed somebody? I'm utterly shocked.
The courts baffle me in regards to a lot of this stuff, and as far as I'm concerned family law in this country is uniformly broken across almost the entire system. I'm not intimately familiar with Japanese policies on the matter, but I do have at least some knowledge of international child custody issues (remember, this is what I do for a living). The specific differences between Japanese and American law are what they are, and there's really not a whole lot that can be done until there's some sort of official resolution, and hopefully this case spurs that on and some headway is made. It would be about damn time. I was unaware of how deep the divide usually is with Japanese divorces, but that isn't really that different from the spirit of US divorce a lot of the time when you get down to brass tacks. While there's usually some sort of joint custody arrangement in the US, half the time that ends up being sort of meaningless, and there's usually a great deal of naked bias. Parental rights are a tricky issue, and lines get blurred here all the time, and there is more than a little misuse. The system is very biased despite how much it loves to tout impartiality.
Anyway, hopefully the guy gets some justice, but I wouldn't count on it. The crocodile tears of a "victimized" woman hold more sway than logic in most courts of the world.
