The people who deprived me of access to my daughter are still easy to spot on Google streetview when you retrieve past street views.
Here’s the view in full resolution, just in case they make a call to Google and ask them to blur the image.
My former mother-in-law, Shigeri Hirasawa (平澤しげり), is easily recognizable from her bald spot. My ex-wife Shijima Hirasawa (平澤しじま) is easy to recognize from her oddly shaped calf muscles and her uncomfortably stiff bearing.
This is great news!
Please understand: I don’t hate the Japanese. Despite what happened to me and to my daughter, I cannot hate the Japanese. This child kidnapping BS is a Japanese problem and most of the victims (parent or child) being Japanese. If anything, this makes ME feel Japanese.
So the Japanese side of me is very happy at seeing Japan get the Olympics in 2020. I will surely go, and I will make every effort to visit my daughter. And if the cops arrest me for trying, well it’ll make the news won’t it?
GO JAPAN!!!
If nothing else, the Bible offers stories as instructive and formative as the myths and legends of ancient Greece. For almost two years now, one story in particular has stayed in my mind: the story of the Judgement of Solomon. （日本語はこのリンクの第3章3:16から読んでください。）
Two women living together came to King Solomon to ask him for justice; both women were unwed mothers. The first woman accused the second woman of having taken her newborn infant while she slept and instead placed in her arms the second woman’s dead son. The second woman denied this, saying her child was the live boy and that it was the first woman’s son who had died in his sleep.
A Japanese family court official holds the sword while the false mother looks on.
Solomon ponders the question and gives his judgment. He asks for a sword to split the child in two, giving each woman one part. The first woman cried out and stopped the King, “Give her the boy alive, do not kill him!” while the second woman said “He will be neither yours nor mine. Cut!”. Solomon then said “Give the child to the first woman. She is the mother”.
Emilie will one day wonder why I abandoned her. The answer is simple: her mother took her away and there was no King Solomon to pass a wise judgement.
A real mother does not rip a child away from the father like Emilie’s mother did. A real father puts the child’s interests before his own. My daughter needed both parents and I never would have dreamed of taking Emilie away from her mother. And once her disturbed mother took our daughter, in a system rigged to reward the first parent to snatch the child, there was no way to arrive at a reasonable settlement.
So instead of fighting a battle I could not win, I decided to wait and save my strength for later. Perhaps one day, Emilie will understand what her mother did. I hope she does. Perhaps her mother will understand what she did and ask for Emilie’s forgiveness, but I doubt she will.
In any case, Emilie should know that her father passed a test which her mother failed.
Friday, November 19th, 2010
This is the 8th post I’ve written on this site. This is the sorrowful page I’ve most dreaded adding, identifying my wife’s family, the Terauchis.
[I’ve added a section below, elaborating on the narrative of relevant family history. 2023/08]
Why do these family members cluelessly join in setting a little boy on a path of emotional disturbance? Look beyond appearances. Do decent people allow such a terrible thing to happen in their own homes?
Any and all families have a skeleton or two in the closet. But the number of incidents of children having been permanently removed from one or more…
View original post 2,325 more words
This article by Jeremy Morley, an international family law attorney, makes it clear. Japan will change its domestic law to give the appearance of harmony with the Hague convention but in reality it will give judges enough power to keep abducted children in Japan.
What to do?
Part of the long term solution is to support divorced Japanese men who want to see their children. I’ve said it before: it’s mostly a Japanese problem. More women work and expect their husbands to share family chores while at the same time Japanese divorce rates are rising, just like in the rest of the world. What will happen to Japanese men (mostly, but some women too) left behind by the other Japanese parent? Japanese daycare workers are routinely told by separated mothers to keep their children away from the fathers.
I have young Japanese male friends to whom this has happened. The older generation (with the women mostly staying at home but always caring for the children) are making the laws and sitting in court and they are telling the men of the younger generation to “gaman” (buck up) at the same time as the women of the younger generation are telling them to do more. When things don’t work out, the men are still expected to “act like men” and take it. It’s the samurai walking off alone into the sunset thing. But as being a man comes to mean something different, the laws can change.
It won’t help us, but it will help future generations. And when Emilie is an adult, the consensus in society among the people with whom she will live and work should be that her mother did something very very wrong.
Why am I keeping this blog? Why am I putting my story on the internet? Why don’t I just let go and move on? The answer is that I am doing the only right thing I can do. It’s that simple.
What my ex-wife Shijima Hirasawa (平澤しじま) and her family, including the Tajiri family (田尻家) did to my daughter Emilie and to me is wrong. They have cut us off from each other.
Shijima’s argument is that what she is doing is perfectly legal. Certainly it is legal but it is not right.
Should I go quietly away? Should I let Shijima cut us off without reminding her of the consequences of her actions? Should she go on believing she “got away with it”? Should she feel rewarded for kidnapping my daughter from her father?
I cannot accept that and if the law won’t protect my daughter and me, then I have to let as many people as possible know what happened and how my wife and her family behaved.
Her first husband, an American, agrees with me and he wants nothing more to do with her. Shijima cost him nearly a decade of his life in aggravation and suffering and today he is disgusted by her behaviour.
I will never get over losing my daughter. No parent can get over something like that. But I got through it and I am in fact moving on. I do have a life beyond this blog and I am living it. I will have something to offer my daughter Emilie if she finds me one day. But I am also spending a little time and effort in reminding Emilie’s mother of the consequences of her actions.
And here we are. What would you do if you were in my place? Give up?
Ma chère fille
Je te souhaite un bel anniversaire! Déjà deux ans!
J’en profite pour te demander pardon de ne pas être là. Peut-être te demandes-tu pourquoi? Eh bien, c’est parce que ta mère nous sépare. Elle t’enlève ton père comme elle m’enlève ma fille. Quoi qu’elle dise, elle n’a aucune raison de te priver de ton père.
J’ai bien hâte de te revoir un jour.
Ton papa qui t’aime!
It’s nice know the right people are following my blog. I’m also impressed with Google’s commitment to protect people’s privacy. It’s not Google’s fight after all, so when my ex-wife called them to complain she could be recognized in their Streetview, they blurred the people in the picture. They even blurred the poor dog, but if you know what to look for, you can still see it’s them.
This is the sort of paranoid family my daughter is living in. Rather than maintain a relationship between her and her father, they exclude me. When I show the world what kind of people they are, they get angry. Well, it’s their own fault.
I’m planning a trip to Indonesia next. There are some secrets there involving other members of Shijima’s family that I need to confirm before publishing.
This is where my ex-wife lives with my daughter. I retrieved the screenshot below from this Google Maps link. You can see Shijima on the right and her mother on the left. The dog is Tomu-chan. (That dog is one reason I believed my wife when she told me her father used to beat her and her mother: the way Mr. Hirasawa yells at his dog is shameful.)
My ex-wife and my former in-laws have completely cut me off of course. Who can reason with such people? Why waste time even trying? Therefore I must continue to shame them.
On a more pleasant note, this is where (I think) Emilie goes to daycare. It’s in Tokyo’s Setagaya ward in Kyodo. It’s difficult to get into public daycare (ho-iku-en) but Shijima disingenuously (but legally!) pleaded she is a single mother. And because the Setagaya Ward Wakakusa Daycare is across the street from where my daughter lives, and it’ s likely that this is where she is.
Japan Family Law Reform 