Archives for April, 2009
A child custody story to watch?
My company gets lots of unsolicited messages from people around the world looking to get something published. Today as I was cleaning out our catch-all address, erasing several hundred spam notes and forwarding or responding to the two or three messages that actually needed attention, I saw this press release from someone at Turkey’s Dogan News Agency. (The text is sic.)
JAPANESE MOTHER STRUGGLES TO HAVE DAUGHTER BACK
Mrs Michiko Deniz, a Japanese mother, struggled for days to get parental rights on her daughter from her Turkish partner in Turkey, but she has had to leave the country alone.
Mrs Deniz claims that Mr Deniz, who is still formally her husband, does not let her daughter, Kader, see her, and she has been seeking for help to take Kader to Japan with her. She has left the daughter behind for now, but she promises her daughter “to come and get her sooner or later”. Mrs Deniz is planning to try every legal ways including the European Court of Human Rights to have parental rights on Kader and take her to Japan.
A search for “Michiko Deniz” turns up numerous hits, but they all seem to be in Turkish so far.* This might be an interesting story to watch: if it gets picked up at all in Japan, expect to see any sympathetic coverage of Ms. Deniz get slammed as hypocritical in the light of foreign parents’ treatment when the tables are turned and the kid is with a Japanese parent. (See for instance this group and any number of stories like this one.) Do you suppose a trip home to Japan with mom would end with a happy return to dad’s house in Turkey soon afterward?
* EDIT: The second Google hit for her name is now this post. Fear the Google!
Link of the day
Here’s the Language Log archive of its “There’s no word for X in language Y” posts. Handy ammunition for when someone talks about how some concept in Japanese can’t possibly be translated faithfully into English, or vice versa.
Yomiuri archives free this month
A common lament among Japan observers is the horrible state of online news archives. Once upon a time the Saga Shimbun had a great archive going back to the dawn of its Web existence. It was shut down, probably at the insistence of Kyodo et al., whose wire articles were also available going back to the mid-1990s.
Good news, for a limited time: Yomiuri has made its ヨミダス歴史館 available to all for the month of April. Search the main Japanese paper or the Daily Yomiuri, narrow your search to noteworthy people or to a certain era. If this was permanently open to the Web-browsing public it would be a formidable database for Japan researchers.
The info you need:
ID: ustemp
Password: m7k77s
(Via the H-Japan list.)