Progress and challenges: Same-sex dads with children, in Japan

Personally and professionally, Japan has mostly been my home since 1989, and has been an amazing place to live and raise my family with my same-sex spouse. While challenging at times, I have been encouraged to see the progress made for, and by, same-sex couples over the past two decades.

The Tiananmen crisis in Beijing prompted me to move here in 1989. I was working at a U.S. law firm in China and had to decide what to do next with my career. Having spent a year studying Japanese in Tokyo while in law school, I felt Japan — at the height of the “bubble” — seemed like a better choice than moving back to the U.S.

However, truth be told, that’s only part of the story. Japan was the only place where my future husband Paul — whom I met in his hometown of Tianjin in 1988 — could get a student visa to leave China.

It was a big commitment on our part, but Japan welcomed us, while my home country did not. At that time, I felt I couldn’t say anything about our relationship at work and had to figure out how to manage our lives — and legal status as a couple — independently. The emotional aspects of hiding one’s family aside, that was in stark contrast to heterosexual couples, who could more easily negotiate arrangements with their employers for their spouses and family members.

Even so, we both thrived in our adopted home, but occasionally encountered difficulties relating to the fact that same-sex couples are not legally recognised here (and were not in the U.S. either until 2013, even though we had been legally married in California in 2008).

The first challenge had always been immigration and renewal of visas. Without status as a married couple, we always had to find independent reasons for living here. Imagine the stress that arises when your family might be split apart in any given year because of a visa renewal problem. And to make matters worse, health insurance and a host of other legal rights derive from that marital and visa status. I will never forget the landlord who in the 1990s reneged on a lease agreement signed by my employer on discovering that my partner was male; we had no legal recourse.

Also, because Chinese passport holders had more difficulty travelling until recently, Paul could not easily visit my family and friends in the U.S. We thus spent four years apart when he emigrated to New Zealand to obtain citizenship and a more mobile passport. I enjoyed some nice vacations in Australia and New Zealand, as an unintended side benefit!

Then came the special difficulties encountered when we sought to expand our family. We have two lovely children: a son four years old and a daughter two, of whom we have joint legal custody of in the U.S. But in the eyes of Japanese law (for purposes of immigration status, national health insurance eligibility, tax benefits, decisions on education, medical care, and the like) are these wonderful human beings, whom I have been responsible for since birth, really deemed to be MY children as well as Paul’s? Unfortunately, the answer is unclear, at best.

Socially, despite significant progress on acceptance of LGBT people, raising kids presented another whole set of challenges. Not being Japanese citizens, how will we effectively deal with the inevitable issues arising at their school? Our children are currently in "hoikuen" (public day care), and we remain inclined toward the excellent Japanese public school system, to ensure they grow up speaking Japanese. But this demands extensive parental involvement, a task typically carried out by a mother in Japan. Although Paul and I both speak Japanese, how do we appropriately engage in extra-curricular activities and PTA meetings? We do not know many peers in the LGBT community here facing a similar situation and must, as always, create our own path.

But looking on the bright side, I never would have imagined when I met Paul that we would be legally married in the eyes of U.S. law — even if not yet Japanese law. Or, when we moved here, that I would one day be working for a Japanese employer with an explicit equal employment opportunity provision covering sexual orientation in its Code of Conduct. Or, most especially, that we would have two beautiful children.

Paul and I have lived together as a couple for 28 years, and enjoy Tokyo as perhaps the greatest city in the world. We are happy to call Japan home, yet know the road ahead won’t be easy. Looking back on how much has changed — and looking ahead to what might change next — I am confident that, for our family and hopefully many younger LGBT people, it will have been worth the effort.

© Japan Today