In 2021, Japan’s Ambassador to Australia Shingo Yamagami defended the system, arguing that Australian parents’ anguish over not being able to see their children was simply a misunderstanding of Japanese customs.

Never mind that Japanese police had repeatedly ignored Interpol missing person notices or that the number of Australian children registered as abducted by the Australian embassy grew from 69 to 89 within two years. Hundreds more have been taken away from American, British and French parents. Thousands more each year have disappeared from their Japanese father or mother.

The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and 60 Minutes have published more than a dozen stories on this issue since 2020. In 2023, Masahiko Shibayama, the deputy secretary-general of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, labelled it an international embarrassment. Weeks later the reporting was raised in US Congress before a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. The Australian government then marshalled nine foreign governments to heap pressure on Tokyo to change its ways.

The Australian government deserves credit here. After years of being wary of offending Japanese customs by speaking publicly about a deeply personal and domestic issue in Japan, they used the cover of Japan’s review of the laws to push for reform. Then they made sure they had support from other governments including the European Union, France, Germany and New Zealand to back in its message.

This was smart diplomacy, even if it lacked the megaphone that many parents would have liked.

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Until Friday, Japan was one of the last countries in the world to have a sole custody system. Cruelly it may be too late for the parents that did the most to make the country change its ways. Their legacy will be preventing dozens more parents from becoming a statistic in a system that has destroyed so many lives.

“What I want to do is to make sure that this doesn’t happen to any other Australian kids,” Scott McIntyre, who has not seen his children Hinata and Harugo since 2019, said last year.

The laws will be retrospective, but it will take two years for them to be fully implemented. They will in principle, ensure parents have an equal say over a child’s home and education, except in cases of domestic violence. But they lack teeth, in particular, explicit details that would make child abduction illegal. Instead, they will rely on both parents coming to an agreement and a family court that is underfunded and reluctant to enforce custody rulings.

Still, it is a start.

The real test now is whether Japan will meet these laws with equal investment in domestic violence prevention, police training, child care and counselling support for parents in a country that has for too long regarded all of these as private matters, best dealt with outside of law enforcement or the courts.

The sole-custody laws were originally designed to help women fleeing violent relationships pack up and leave. Over a century, they morphed into enabling Japanese mothers, fathers and abusers to disappear with their kids without a trace.

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Japanese mother Saori, who asked only to be identified by her first name to protect her safety, said her husband abused her and her son so much the neighbours could hear the screams. Then one day her husband took her son and left.

Saori went to the police to tell them her son had been kidnapped. “They said it’s a family issue,” she said.

Japan’s laws have changed. Now its society must too.

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