Through the Eyes of the former Consul General Yamada (June, 2017 - July, 2020)

Working on issues regarding unfair divorce –part I-

In June 2017, not long after I arrived in Seattle, Ms. Naoko Inoue, a legal advisor to the Consulate, visited our office. After we discussed legal matters related to the office, she started to talk about an unexpected topic. She informed me that there are a significant number of women here in Washington State who were in international marriages and suffered terrible domestic violence, leaving them no choice but to divorce under unfair conditions that drove them and their children to their mental and financial limits. Ms. Inoue has dealt with serious cases pro bono, but because there are many such cases, she decided to found a non-profit organization so that she could work on this issue more systematically.

Before long, this became the issue that I spend my time on the most in Seattle. Since there is too much to write in a single column entry, I will cover this issue in two parts. I would like to dedicate this one to explaining how this problem occurs.
 
The vast majority of international marriages involving a Japanese citizen are between an American husband and a Japanese wife. Therefore, I will be referring to such a framework throughout this entry. When the couple gets married and moves to the United States, they of course would not think about divorce. I know many international couples who happily maintain their marriage forever. However, around 50 percent of marriages in the United States are said to end in divorce, and likewise, there are many international couples who end up getting divorced. Some couples separate under amicable terms, the husband calmly thinking about their spouse and children’s future by taking on legal responsibilities. On the other hand, there are some men who try for a divorce under selfish conditions, ignoring their legal responsibilities under family law. This problem is not unique to the United States, but also occurs in other countries, Japan included.

In many cases, when a Japanese woman gets married to an American husband, the couple divides the labor: the husband earns money and the wife does the housework and raises the children. I heard that some husbands, including those who often earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, give very little money, only five hundred dollars a month, for example, to their wife and children. This amount is given as a “living cost for the family,” but how can his wife and children live with such little money? In Washington State, with few exceptions, income and assets earned during marriage become the couple’s shared property. Generally, property is split fifty-fifty when couples get divorced. (Washington State is thus referred to as a “Community Property State.”) Therefore, property, such as a house, and savings that are earned during marriage should be divided evenly. However, there are men who try to take all the property in preparation for a new life with another woman, instead of giving his wife and children their due and without providing them with living costs.

Domestic violence is an act of a person who abuses his or her  dominant power in the dynamics of a relationship against another family member. Besides physical violence, domestic violence can also include forceful sexual conduct without the partner’s consent, moral harassment using insults and offensive words, and/or economic violence that limits the freedom of the non-income earning partner by withholding money. In complicated divorce cases involving foreign nationals, the foreign-born woman typically does not have an individual source of income, living a life isolated from society and with limited English-comprehension skills. She also often does not know about the legal process or her own rights in the United States.
 
When the divorcing couple has children, the mother, a Japanese national, seldom wishes to separate from her kids, US citizens. Some husbands have taken advantage of this dilemma in order to gain the upper hand in divorce proceedings. In terrible cases, for example, a husband records a video of his emotional wife while discussing their separation and then threatens her, saying that the video is proof of  her acts of domestic violence, which could trigger forfeiture of her parental rights. Even though he set her up to get angry, the husband then calls the police and claims his wife exerted violence on him in order to have her thrown into jail. Then, in the pit of her desperation, he produces a divorce agreement which he had prepared ahead of time with his lawyer and tells her that she can live with her children if she signs it. The agreement requires her to relinquish all claims to property under her husband’s name. Economically pressed, the wife does not have the means to hire a lawyer or to understand cryptic legal documents written in a foreign language. In distress and fear, she ends up agreeing to extremely unfair terms without fully understanding them. Then, the next day, she has to start a new life with her children with no income and nowhere to live.
 
Many women would probably want to go back to Japan with their children to start a new life. However, with few exceptions, parents have joint custody in the United States. Therefore, if a married couple has lived in the United States and that is where their children go to school, the court will order that the children who have American citizenship continue to live in the country. Many women, therefore, stay in the United States to be near their children but without any family or friends to depend on and without a sustainable living situation. Not a small number of these divorced women have come to depend on food provided by churches or social services, or end up homeless and staying in public shelters.

Later, I learned that this state of distress is not only found in Japanese women, but also experienced by women from other countries. There are many who become depressed due to shame and suffering, and some of them even commit suicide. I heard they also become vulnerable to sex traffickers looking to take advantage of their helplessness. Their ex-spouse, on the contrary, starts a new life after the “successful” divorce as if nothing happened.

According to Ms. Inoue, the number of Japanese women who contact her with inquiries about divorce issues is nearly two hundred a year. I think this number is just the tip of the iceberg. Even though not all of the cases are dreadful ones involving domestic violence, it points to a surprisingly large number of women struggling to cope with divorce-related legal issues. When including women of other nationalities to this statistic, it seems that the number of women who suffer from an unfair divorce reaches an appalling number. 
 
Thus, I learned that in the peaceful and prosperous greater Seattle area, injustice and tragedy are taking place, hidden from the attention of public offices. The Consulate’s most important task is to protect the safety and rights of the Japanese people who live in its jurisdiction. We have to do something. But, even if we understand the structural mechanisms of this social problem, divorce is an individual’s private matter. Is there anything the Consulate or I could do? I would like to touch on this question in the next column.