Left Behind by Japan: The other victims of parental abduction and Japanese child custody laws

Photographs by Clive France
Main Bar: Saturday, May 12 to June 1, 2012

Under Japan's sole custody system, only one parent maintains "shinken" (parental rights) following divorce, while the other is stripped of any and all rights with respect to his or her children. This has created a post-breakup environment in which one parent, typically the father, is often denied all access to his or her children. Arguably, few married couples in Japan are aware of the child custody issues they face should their marriages fail. Most of the subjects photographed for this project expressed disbelief, frustration and powerlessness with a system that makes little effort to investigate and judge cases on an individual basis. I have been photo-documenting so-called Left-Behind Parents for a project to highlight individual cases and bring a human face to this tragedy.

Japan is the only G8 member not to have signed the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, a multilateral treaty "that provides an expeditious method to return a child internationally abducted from one member nation to another."

The Exhibition Committee