TOKYO — In his sixth month in office, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is trying to rescue a moribund economy, mend tense relations with China and South Korea, and stamp out persistent corruption.
But he's a player in a far more personal drama as well.
Koizumi's 18-year-old son, Yoshinaga Miyamoto, longs to see his politician father, a man he has never met. The closest he has come was at a rally a few months ago, when he managed to get within about a dozen yards. Nobody noticed the striking resemblance. Miyamoto didn't have the courage to shout out his identity.
Yet he yearns for some acknowledgment from the man whose face appears on posters all over the nation--including on Miyamoto's bedroom walls.
"He's my father," the teenager said in a recent interview. "There are no words that can express my feelings. In my everyday life, he is my mental support. He fuels my desire to improve myself and to face up to myself."
Miyamoto's mother, Kayoko, has an equally compelling dream. She wants to visit with the two elder sons she hasn't seen since they were 1 and 4. She was six months pregnant with Miyamoto when she and Koizumi divorced, apparently because of a wide gap in age and interests, and she moved out of the extended Koizumi household. Although the older boys grew up with Koizumi's family less than a 15-minute drive away, she has been barred from any personal contact with them.
"I've been hoping to see them for 19 years," she says. "All I can do is wait."
Since his election in April, the 59-year-old Koizumi, who has not remarried, has enjoyed unusual popularity as Japanese have focused on the hip hairstyle and manner that seem to embody his promises of reform. But the prime minister also represents a darker aspect of this society: the wrenching separation of many parents and children after divorce.
In Japan, splitting up often means saying goodbye to children forever. There is no such thing as joint custody, and in the few cases where courts grant visitation, there is no enforcement. Most divorces occur with both parties simply signing a one-page "consent" form that requires only the most basic information. No need for a lawyer. Stamp it with your hanko name seal and it's done.
"It's the Japanese general understanding that if they divorce, the noncustodial parent won't be able to see the kid again," says Tokyo divorce lawyer Hiroshi Shibuya, who handles some of the rare cases that are contested. "It's as if the child loses a parent in an accident, as if that parent just dies."
Custom--and usually the custodial parent--dictates the arrangements after a husband and wife with children part ways.
Family counselor Hiromi Ikeuchi, 39, who runs a "divorce school" in Tokyo to advise couples thinking of separating, has both professional and personal experience. She divorced seven years ago; her daughter, now 13, hasn't seen her father since.
Ikeuchi takes colorful magnets the shape of large buttons and moves them around a board in her office to illustrate the male-dominated lineage system--known as ie--that underlies family matters here.
One of the magnets represents the mother's family, another the father's. If a child is close to the mother--viewed as an outsider by the father's family--the child goes with the mother and, from the paternal family's perspective, they're both out of the picture. Often children's names are removed from the father's registry, changed to the mother's maiden name and entered into her family registry. Such documents, kept in city halls, track family ties in Japan.
Although official adherence to the ie system ended after World War II, it's still very much a part of the Japanese psyche, Ikeuchi says. A woman can keep her maiden name after marriage only if her husband agrees to take it as well.
"Japanese people have the idea that marriage is between family and family, so it's difficult to think of divorce as a matter of individuals," Ikeuchi says. "The grandmother thinks: 'Oh, my poor son. He has to remarry a nicer woman who doesn't hurt my child.'
"In Christianity, everyone is a child of God. Everybody's the same," she adds. "But in Japan, there's no Christianity, so it's a strong country of ie. Children are to take over the family."
In Koizumi's case, his mother, sisters and brother raised the elder boys. The family even tried, unsuccessfully, to take Miyamoto from his mother soon after he was born, Kayoko Miyamoto says.
Although divorce is on the rise in Japan--in 2000 there were about 264,000 divorces in this country of 127 million people--it is still generally considered taboo. Instead, alienation within marriages is common, and estranged couples often lead separate lives.
"If people know you're divorced, everybody looks at you with curious eyes," Ikeuchi says.
This prejudice extends to children of divorce. When Koizumi's elder sister divorced, her daughter was adopted by Koizumi's father, allowing her to avoid any stigma.
