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Legislation as a Social Process: Japanese Family Law and the Drafting of the Bill on the Hague Child Abduction Convention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2022

Takeshi Hamano
Takeshi Hamano*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Humanities, University of Kitakyushu, Kitakyushu
*
E-mail: hamano@kitakyu-u.ac.jp
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Abstract

When Japan signed the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, the government enacted a new act to deal with international parental child abduction according to the Convention in the same year. The Ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs were immediately in charge of making a draft Bill. Once the government and respective ministries had instantly set up the legal and administrative procedure for dealing with international family issue under the Convention, as some studies argue, simultaneous issues of the family in separation in Japan were underdeveloped. Employing a method of content analysis of the record of policy debates by authorities, observing both diplomatic and domestic frames referred in the debate in contrast, this paper highlights this law-making process delivered and elucidated continuous consecutive inquiries about radical questions of the current Japanese family law regarding the wellbeing of the changing families and their children in contemporary Japan.

Keywords

Japaninternational parental child abductionHague Child Abduction Conventionfamily lawcross-border marriage
Type
Research Article
Information
Asian Journal of Law and Society , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , June 2022 , pp. 316 - 335
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Asian Journal of Law and Society

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