Other countries press Japan on parental abductions issue.

From the AFP, Eight countries press Japan on parental abductions:

Envoys of eight countries met the Japanese foreign minister Saturday to press the government to sign a treaty to prevent international parental child abductions. Activists say that thousands of foreign parents have lost access to children in Japan, where the courts virtually never award child custody to a divorced foreign parent. Japan is the only nation among the Group of Seven industrialised nations that has not signed the 1980 Hague Convention that requires countries to return a child wrongfully kept there to their country of habitual residence. ... Activist groups estimate that over the years up to 10,000 dual-citizenship children in Japan have been prevented from seeing a foreign parent.

The state of Japan basically shields Japanese parents from legal obligations they have elsewhere. The media is sometimes complicit in this in that accusations against foreign spouses are taken at face value.

For a primer on Japanese family law or lack thereof, here is a great article (found via debito.org):

• Judges fill the gaps in Japan's family law