Publicity:

Mother of two Regan Haight was married and living contentedly in mid-west USA until she returned home one day to find her children and her Japanese-born husband gone. They’d gone to Japan and they weren’t coming back. Regan Haight soon discovered that in Japan a combination of law and custom were heavily stacked against her. The system was on the side of her kidnapper husband. What could she do? Would she ever see her children again?

Living in Japan, Australian Chayne Inaba has been battling the system to try to get access to his daughter Ai and has tried to negotiate with his wife and her family but to no avail. In fact Chayne was beaten to a pulp in his own home and he has his strong suspicions about who was responsible and the message they were trying to send. He now stays a safe distance away from the house that’s now home to his daughter and former partner.

“There’d be major problems (if I went to the house). I would say the police would be involved, a lot of nasty things would happen.” CHAYNE INABA –           Left-Behind Parent

Japan has long resisted signing up to the Hague Convention that sets out the rules for these cases and while there’s been intense international pressure to sign and Japan has said it will, none of the so-called Left-Behind Parents are holding their breath. And the courts aren’t prepared to break the mould either.

“Who wants to be the first judge to order a crying child to be taken away from a crying Japanese mother and given back and sent overseas? Nobody.” PROFESSOR COLIN JONES - Law Expert

Foreign Correspondent’s Mark Willacy investigates the heartbreaking cases of the mums and dads trapped in a Kafkaesque hell, unable to see their children, stymied by a system on the side of the child snatcher.

There’s Craig Morrey, left to care for his profoundly disabled son after his pregnant wife left him. He first saw his daughter fleetingly in a courtroom when she was 6 months old. And there’s Alex Kahney who’s broke and is now packing his bags to return to Britain after 19 years, leaving behind everything he cares about – his two little daughters kidnapped by their Japanese mother.

‘I thought she can’t kidnap my kid, I’ll just go to the police. The first 2 or 3 months I was shattered, the first 6 months I was numb. I’ve been disowned. I might as well be a ghost.” ALEX KAHNEY – Left-Behind Parent

And what of American mum Regan Haight? Well she hired a former British SAS officer and took matters into her own hands.

Tokyo

Music

00:00

Families in park at cherry blossom time

00:08

Fade to black

MARK WILLACY: The cherry blossoms are out for all to see. It’s a spectacular sight that lifts the spirits of Japanese and travellers lucky enough to be here. It’s difficult to imagine a time when Japan was completely isolated from the outside world, but under Sakoku from the 17th to the 19th centuries, no foreigner could enter nor any Japanese leave the locked country on the penalty of death. Eventually Japan opened up and foreigners returned but many of the old insular ways continue to this day.

00:23

Fade up from black: Distraught parents

Just ask parents trapped in the anguish of failed marriage, locked out from the lives of their children and with nowhere to turn.

01:01

ALEX KAHNEY: “So I thought my wife can’t kidnap my kids. I’ll just go to the police.

01:15

Alex Kahney

The first two or three months I was shattered. The first six months I was numb.”

01:19

Regan Haight

REGAN HAIGHT: “And when I got home I kind of just fell apart and my true feelings of

01:27

Dissolve to: Family photo of Regan, husband and child

you know not being able to trust him or being really angry with him came out.”

01:34

Craig Morrey

CRAIG MORREY: “Basically it all came down to I don’t want to be with you, I don’t want to be with you,

01:40

Dissolve to: Photo of Craig and daughter

I’m leaving. I didn’t even know my daughter was born. No.”

01:43

Dissolve to: Left-Behind Parents hold up photos of their children

WILLACY: Tonight we reveal how Japan has long condoned one parent snatching children away from the other, not just from within its own jurisdiction but from around the world. This is the story of how Japan became a haven for parents abducting their own children and of the paralysing heartbreak and helplessness of those parents left behind. Under Japanese law there’s no such thing as dual custody. The courts almost universally award all

01:48

Japanese families

legal rights over a child to the one parent – meaning the other parent is frozen out of a child’s life. Often the only contact the forgotten parent is allowed is a few photographs every year.

02:23

Craig nurses his son Spencer

Craig Morrey isn’t just a father. He’s a 24 hour a day carer for his profoundly disabled son Spencer. After terrible complications during birth, Spencer was left with catastrophic brain damage and severe cerebral palsy.

02:37

CRAIG MORREY: “He can’t swallow, he can’t move on his own. He obviously can’t sit up. He can’t close his eyes

03:02

Craig Morrey

and obviously kids can be very, very resilient but in Spencer’s case he was essentially born dead.”

03:09

Craig and Spencer

WILLACY: The Chicago native and reproductive biologist came to Japan 15 years ago to further his research, but he quickly

03:20

Photos of Craig and wife and baby Spencer

fell for and married a Brazilian-born Japanese woman. While they were both struggling to care for their first born son, Craig Morrey’s

03:31

Craig and Spencer

wife discovered she was pregnant with their second child and it proved too much for her.

03:39

CRAIG MORREY: “So she started to

03:47

Dissolve to: Craig Morrey

say she wanted a divorce, she wanted to leave. She talked about wanting to you know not necessarily commit suicide but to die.”

03:49

Craig and Spencer

WILLACY: Five months into her pregnancy, his wife disappeared leaving Craig Morrey to care for Spencer on his own and shut out of the birth of his second child.

03:58

Dissolve to: Photo of Craig’s daughter

CRAIG MORREY: “I didn’t even know my daughter was born. I found out that she was in the hospital and I went to try to see her with Spencer and she had called security and I was denied to see my daughter.”

04:17

WILLACY: How old was she when you finally got to see her?

04:28

Dissolve to: Craig Morrey

CRAIG MORREY: “Six and a half months. In a courtroom. For 15 minutes with her mother wailing in the background. Not the ideal circumstances to meet your daughter. So… ”

04:30

Craig working in bar

WILLACY: Craig Morrey has a night job. He’s unable to afford specialist care so he takes his son along to the bar he runs in the town of Okazaki.

04:45

Craig caring for Spencer

In between pulling beers, he has to clear Spencer’s airways to ensure he doesn’t suffocate.

05:04

Craig’s bar

Despite his wife abandoning their son, the court awarded her guardianship of their baby daughter Amelia and now, still fighting that ruling, Craig Morrey has been placed in an extraordinary dilemma by the court – if he takes his son to the United States where he can get better care for him, he’s been told he’ll lose the right to see his daughter.

05:10

Craig and Spencer

CRAIG MORREY: “I’m sort of put in the situation where I either have to abandon my daughter and leave her with someone who I don’t think is a particularly good role model at the moment or go back and get better care for Spencer

05:33

Craig Morrey

which is just, for lack of a better word, idiotic.”

05:51

Photos of Craig and family

WILLACY: But this isn’t just a system layered with rulings many parents regard as idiotic – it’s a system in which court rulings are often flouted or ignored by parents who abduct their children.

05:56

Dissolve to: Alex packing away photos of his daughters

Englishman Alex Kahney is leaving Japan after 19 years. He’s lost his job, he’s broke and so he can’t afford to stay and that means he’s leaving behind everything he cares about – his two daughters.

06:11

ALEX KAHNEY: “They just love their daddy. They were real daddy’s girls.

06:30

Alex Kahney

Every time we got in the car there’d be a fight who could sit next to daddy in the front.”

06:33

Photo of Alex and family

WILLACY: Two years ago with his marriage to his Japanese wife falling apart, Alex Kahney

06:36

Dissolve to: Photos of Alex’s daughters

returned home from work one day to an empty house and an empty bank account.

06:42

Alex Kahney

ALEX KAHNEY: “I thought uh-oh, something’s wrong here. I went to the police. I said to the police, ‘my wife’s taken my kids out of the house without my permission and we’re not divorced. There’s no agreement in place, there’s no court order. She’s refusing to let me speak to the children.’ The policemen laughed. They both had a good chuckle about it.”

06:49

Yumi makes phone call

WILLACY: Alex Kahney says his marriage broke down after his wife reneged on an agreement to raise their children in England for a while. We tried to get his estranged wife’s side of the story.

07:08

Subtitle

YUMI: “We’ve heard your husband’s side of the story. Now we’d like to hear both sides of the story.”

07:22

WILLACY: But like other Japanese spouses we contacted, she refused to be part of this programme. Despite a court order giving Alex Kahney monthly access, his wife hasn’t allowed him to see

07:34

Dissolve to: Alex outside school trying to talk to his daughters

his children since she snatched them two years ago. So his frustration has turned to desperation. It’s a harrowing scene as the father tries every now and then to connect with his daughters as they leave school.

07:45

His daughters don’t want to listen. They run from their father without saying a word.

08:16

ALEX KAHNEY: “And they just ignore me. They just ignore me. A child ignoring her own father, you know, so I’ve been disowned. I’m nothing. I might as well be a ghost.”

08:23

COLIN JONES: “When we talk about

08:38

Dissolve to: Colin Jones
Super: Colin Jones
Law Professor

family law in Japan today, it’s a slight exaggeration but there really isn’t any. There is no body of law called family law.”

08:40

Protestors marching on street

WILLACY: At this protest in one of Tokyo’s busiest districts, so-called Left-Behind Parents – both Japanese and foreign – have joined forces. They’re a very vocal part of an effort to stop Japan remaining a black hole for international and domestic child abduction. The country’s been under pressure from foreign governments and parents to sign the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. The Convention sets out the rules for the prompt return of kids abducted across international borders by one of their parents.

08:49

Sequence continues

Every top industrialised country in the world – except Japan – has signed it. Japan says it plans to but nobody here is holding their breath and the courts have been very reluctant to break the mould. According to local media reports, there’s not been one recorded case of a Japanese judge ordering the repatriation of an abducted child.

09:35

COLIN JONES: “Who wants to be the first judge to order a crying child to be taken away from a crying Japanese mother and given back and sent overseas?

10:06

Colin Jones

Nobody. There’s nobody in the system I think who benefits from being the guy who ordered the crying child to be taken away.”

10:20

Distressed woman at microphone in meeting

WILLACY: It’s not the sort of meeting they’re used to inside Japan’s parliament complex.

10:30

Subtitle

WOMAN: “I just want to spend a normal time with my children every day. And I don’t understand why this has happened.”

10:41

WILLACY: These parents of abducted children and a handful of Japanese MPs have come today to learn more about the Hague Convention. The man they’ve come to listen to is Colin Jones, a professor of law and Hague specialist from Kyoto’s Doshisha University – but his message isn’t encouraging.

11:05

Subtitle
Colin Jones speaks to meeting

COLIN JONES: “Alienations will not end just with this. I don’t think there will be much improvement in international abductions.”

11:27

WILLACY: Professor Jones believes Japan could treat the Hague Convention very much like it does the international treaty on whaling – in other words, by using loopholes to largely ignore it and by putting national interest ahead of global cooperation.

11:41

COLIN JONES: “You see this attitude up through the leadership levels in some situations, so

11:57

Colin Jones

it wouldn’t surprise me if the same thing happened with the Hague Convention.”

12:03

Salt Lake City
Super: Salt Lake City, Utah. USA

Music

12:08

Dissolve to: Regan Haight on phone

REGAN HAIGHT: “We’ve just made a mess and we just have to clean it up.”

12:25

WILLACY: American mum, Regan Haight, didn’t take long to realise she could never rely on the Japanese legal system to get her children

12:30

Dissolve to: Regan and children looking at photos

back.

12:37

REGAN’S DAUGHTER: How old was I?

12:38

REGAN HAIGHT: Well you were four and you were one.

12:39

WILLACY: Her Japanese husband abducted their son and daughter from their home in Utah and took them to Japan where the police made it very clear to Regan Haight that they regarded

12:42

Dissolve to: Footage ‘From the Shadows’

this as a family matter.

12:52

Subtitle

POLICE: “I’m sorry, we don’t consider your case an abduction or even a crime.”

12:55

WILLACY: With no help from the

13:07

Footage ‘From the Shadows’

US Government or Japanese authorities, Regan Haight decided to take matters into her own hands. It was a radical and very risky course of action.

13:08

REGAN HAIGHT: “And then I was told that I could do a

13:18

Regan Haight

snatch and grab kind of thing that was… could be traumatic and most likely unsuccessful and get myself into trouble.”

13:21

Steve Johnson in park with dog

WILLACY: Regan Haight turned to this man. Former British military special forces operative Steve Johnson is known in the business as a child recovery specialist.

13:32

STEVE JOHNSON: “Japan has a reputation around the world as being difficult, some say impossible to recover children from. I am robust,

13:45

Steve Johnson
Super: Steve Johnson
Child recovery specialist

I’m head on, I’m in the face of anyone I’m going up against and I don’t leave until I get the job done.”

13:55

Regan Haight

REGAN HAIGHT: “It gave me confidence and you know what I needed was support from somebody whose main goal was to help me.”

14:02

Footage ‘From the Shadows’

WILLACY: Steve Johnson soon joined Regan Haight in Japan where the case took another dramatic twist. Regan Haight’s husband

14:11

Dissolve to: Photo of Regan and family

Shuta revealed the children had been abducted a second time – this time

14:20

Dissolve to: Photo of Japanese grandmother

by their Japanese grandmother who was effectively holding them for ransom.

14:25

REGAN HAIGHT: “At one point she told me that I had to

14:32

Dissolve to: Regan’s family photos

sign over… sign my name off the house and that I could see the kids. You know so we did that. Then she wouldn’t let me see the kids after that. You know so we

14:34

Dissolve to: Regan Haight

had to pay her fifty thousand dollars, then we could see the kids and you know I didn’t… I didn’t have that money.”

14:45

Dissolve to: Footage ‘From the Shadows’

WILLACY: After a period of subtle negotiation, Steve Johnson decided to apply the blowtorch at a street side rendezvous filmed by other abandoned parents documenting the traumatic consequences of child abduction.

14:52

STEVE JOHNSON: [to Shuta at a road side meeting] “Your mother must understand that things are about to get bad. TV cameras are going to be here, the police are going to be called. Then Interpol will take over. The easiest thing for her to do Shuta is to hand over the children this afternoon, and it all goes away. Everything disappears. If your mum wants to swipe the kids up and run away – then good luck to her.”

15:13

Regan’s family photo


Fade to black

WILLACY: With that the ultimatum was delivered and the deadline set. But the odds were well and truly stacked against Regan Haight. How would her ordeal end?

15:34

Fade up from black: Willacy and Chayne Inaba watch home video on computer

Australian Chayne Inaba believes he knows the perils of pushing too hard to right the wrong of child abduction. As this video indicates family life

15:49

Chayne Inaba’s home video of wife and child

seemed pretty happy and contented for the medical trauma specialist. Four days later his wife abducted their daughter Ai…

16:08

Dissolve to: Inaba family home

and brought her here.

16:20

Willacy and Chayne outside Inaba home

“This is the family home?”

16:23

CHAYNE INABA: “Yep that’s the family home, the home of the Inova family.”

16:26

WILLACY: “And if you went to the house there’d be big problems?”

16:29

CHAYNE INABA: “There’d be major problems which I would say the police would be involved and a lot of nasty things would happen, yeah.”

16:34

Photos of blood-covered Chayne


Fade to black

WILLACY: Chayne Inaba has already had a run-in he thinks was all about scaring him off. Not long after being warned by his wife’s family to stay away from his daughter, he was attacked inside his own home.

16:44

Fade up from black: Chayne Inaba

Fade to black

CHAYNE INABA: “I walked inside, closed the door, walking down towards the living room and I was attacked by a brick from the bathroom.

16:58

Fade up from black: Photo of blood-covered Chayne

I had two black eyes, fractures – I had a lot.”

17:09

WILLACY: He has his suspicions about who was responsible

17:12

Dissolve to: Photo of brick used in attack on Chayne

but the police weren’t interested.

17:16

Fade to black

CHAYNE INABA: “The brick had skin and hair and blood on it

17:19

Fade up from black: Chayne Inaba

and they said, to my knowledge, that they told the Australian Consulate that the brick wasn’t the weapon.”

17:23

Chayne’s home video






Fade to black

COLIN JONES: “Parental abduction is an effort to eliminate the other parent from the child’s life and the sad cases we see here repeatedly are the child can’t talk to their father or sometimes their mother anymore. They’re taken away at a young age, they don’t get exposed to their foreign parent’s native language, they only speak Japanese. The foreign parent doesn’t speak Japanese. It’s a

17:33

Fade up from black: Colin Jones
Super: Colin Jones
Law professor

destruction of one half of the child’s identity to do that.”

18:01

Masae Ido and secretary in office

WILLACY: Government MP Masae Ido is a leading sceptic of the Hague Convention and a chief defender of Japan’s approach to family law.

18:07

Subtitle

MASAE IDO: “While Westerners call it abduction

18:19

Masae Ido

it’s common among the Japanese that a mother and child return to the mother’s parents’ home after a divorce.”

18:21

Computer screen showing websites referring to Masae Ido

WILLACY: She has a better understanding of this issue than most because as her political opponents gleefully advertise on the internet, she snatched her three children away from her first husband.

18:31

Subtitle
Masae Ido

MASAE IDO: “Like other parents, I left a note so the other parent knew where the children were and understood that they were at a safe place. Not many people think of this as kidnapping or a crime. If anything, they think it’s not a bad thing. It’s really a custom.”

18:44

Families and Left-Behind Parents outside Osaka Aquarium

WILLACY: It’s a day out for happy families at the Osaka Aquarium, but the group handing out these balloons is also dishing out a blunt message. Craig Morrey and other Left-Behind Parents have launched a public education campaign about an issue few Japanese are even aware of.

19:16

Subtitle
Craig Morrey speaks to man

CRAIG MORREY: “Do you know that they only have a sole custody system in Japan.”

19:41

Subtitle

FATHER: “I’m sorry, I don’t really know.”

19:46

Families and Left-Behind Parents

WILLACY: This custom of sole custody has torn apart parents and children from all corners of the world. But while local awareness of the issue is limited,

19:49

Dissolve to: Ryoma Takahashi teaching art student

Japanese do figure prominently among the victims. Every year 150,000 divorced Japanese parents join the ranks of the dispossessed.

20:00

Subtitle

RYOMA TAKAHASHI: “My love for my children and my desire to see them has not changed.”

20:13

WILLACY: Ryoma Takahashi is one such parent and because of his profile, the recent abduction of his children has sparked media interest.

20:19

Dissolve to: Home video of Takahashi’s children

His wife took their sons for a short break but never returned and the renowned local artist has now been frozen out of their lives.

20:28

Subtitle

RYOMA TAKAHASHI: “My mind went blank – what I thought and what to do –

20:41

Ryoma Takahashi

it was really blank. It was as if I lost sight of tomorrow… I lost sight of the future. I didn’t know what to do.

20:44

Takahashi’s home video

The point is that my children were abducted by her and they were stolen from me. It’s become a country where whoever abducts children wins. In my case the judge told me on the first day, ‘You haven’t seen your children for seven months now.

21:02

Ryoma Takahashi

Did your children contact you? No, right? Your sons don’t want to see you anymore’.”

21:45

Takahashi’s home video

WILLACY: He’s trying desperately to win back his children but his wife has countered with a claim of domestic violence. The abuse? That Takahashi suggested his wife should give up work because of the stress it was causing her.

21:57

Subtitle

RYOMA TAKAHASHI: “She’s accusing me of verbal violence – but just what is verbal violence?

22:14

Ryoma Takahashi

It seems like my suggestion that she quit her job was verbal violence. I think it’s a major problem that the police accept that as domestic violence.”

22:21

Colin Jones
Super: Colin Jones
Law professor

COLIN JONES: “Basically anything can be abuse. Verbal abuse is covered. Financial abuse. I’ve seen literature which includes ignoring somebody as a form of abuse.”

22:38

Regan with son and daughter in Salt Lake City

WILLACY: For Regan Haight there was a happy ending. After months trying to get her son and daughter back from the clutches of her Japanese husband’s family, the efforts of her private child recovery specialist paid off. The children were surrendered.

22:53

REGAN HAIGHT: “It was… it was amazing. It was a surprise.

23:23

Regan Haight

I didn’t expect them to walk through this door. I was expecting, you know, that this was going to go on for a long period of time and then the sliding glass door opened and they came through and it was just… it was a relief. It was just… it was amazing.”

23:25

Steve Johnson walking dog

WILLACY: For the man who helped get her children back, it’s proof that kids can be saved from Japan’s black hole of abduction.

23:42

STEVE JOHNSON: “There is only one way to recover children that have been abducted and

23:51

Steve Johnson
Super: Steve Johnson
Child recovery specialist

that’s to get on a plane, to land in country and get on with it. And confront people and upset people. Ruffle feathers.”

23:54

Craig Morrey and Spencer

Music

24:02

WILLACY: But the happy endings are rare indeed, overwhelmed by the thousands of stories of heartbreak, American Craig Morrey will continue to care for his son Spencer and continue to fight to be with his daughter Amelia and he’ll continue in his struggle to change the system in Japan.

24:07

CRAIG MORREY: “Every three minutes a child loses contact with a parent in Japan through divorce.

24:27

Craig Morrey

Every three minutes. And you know the government doesn’t want to acknowledge that because they don’t know how to deal with it and they’re not willing to deal with it.”

24:32

Chayne Inaba and Willacy watch home video on computer

CHAYNE INABA: “Sometimes it’s hard to watch.”

24:45

WILLACY: Chayne Inaba continues to fight for his daughter in the courts but he knows he may not get to see her for

24:47

Chayne’s home video

many years.

24:54

CHAYNE INABA: “And she’ll know that her father…

24:57

Chayne Inaba

her father did everything humanly possible to keep the family together and protect her. She’ll know that.”

25:03

Alex Kahney’s home video

WILLACY: They

25:15

Alex watches home video on computer

once loved to play music together but for Englishman Alex Kahney, it’s sayonara to

20:16

Alex’s home video

Japan and the daughters he can’t see and who will no longer speak to him.

25:27

Dissolve to: Note from Alex’s daughter

While recently packing up his Tokyo home he discovered a note left for him by one of his daughters before she was snatched away.

25:32

Dissolve to: Alex playing guitar and singing song in Japanese

He turned it into a song for them called ‘Someday We Can Meet.’

25:41

ALEX KAHNEY: “I didn’t want you to be out of my life, or for me to be out of

25:53

Dissolve to: Alex Kahney

yours. It wasn’t me that did this to you. I’ve done my best to get you back. I think about you all the time. If you want anything I’m here and I’m looking forward to that day.”

25:55

Alex sings song in Japanese

26:07

Dissolve to: Photo of Alex and daughters

Fade to black

26:17

Credits

Reporter: Mark Willacy
Camera: Jun Matsuzono
Editor: Stuart Miller, David Martin
Producer: Yumiko Asada