En World / Asia, AdvertisementThe Japanese government has finally relented.

It took decades of pain, separation and despair, but on Friday it passed laws that will give parents the right to have joint custody of their children for the first time.Dozens of Australian parents and children have been caught in this outdated, cruel system.

There are 89 Australian children who have been taken by their Japanese father or mother and disappeared since 2004.Scott McIntyre with his children in Japan.

They have been protected by a legal system that rewarded Japanese parents for being the first to snatch a child and then gave them total control over their child’s life.Just ask Catherine Henderson, a Melbourne mother who struggles to catch a train without thinking about the two children that were ripped away from her while she was at work in 2019.Or Queensland father Scott Ellis, who spends each birthday alone in silence, staring at the empty chairs that were once filled by his children Mera and Telina.Or Anthony Soma, who only discovered when he was 23 that he had been abducted by his mother and that most of what he had been told about his father was a lie.Australian mother Catherine Henderson was living in Tokyo when she says she came home from work to find that her husband had abducted their daughter and son.These laws changed because these parents and dozens more spoke out.

They launched class actions, they protested, they shook the foundations of a custody system that has not changed in seven decades, based on customs that stretch back to Samurai-era Japan.The Japanese government has been dragged into incrementally changing these laws through international shame.

They still have not gone far enough.