Written by Wassila Belhacine
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For six years Vincent Fichot, a forty-year-old from Saint-Martin-de-Crau, has been searching for his son and daughter kidnapped by their Japanese mother and has been fighting tirelessly on an international scale against child abduction.
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In “A missing part“, directed by Guillaume Senez and in theaters since November 13, actor Romain Duris plays the role of Jay, a French father expatriated in Tokyo who, aboard his taxi, has been looking for his daughter for 9 years. Jay, has never been able to obtain shared custody of her child.n the case of separation, Japanese laws give exclusive authority to one parent.
Jay’s story is not only the fruit of Guillaume Senez’s imagination. Every year, 150,000 children, according to figures from local associations, are kidnapped by a parent in the Land of the Rising Sun. Vincent Fichot, resident in Saint-Martin-de-Crau, is one of them. In 2005, this former trader was expatriated to Japan, to Tokyo. He meets the woman who will become his wife in 2005 and with whom he will have two children: Tsubasa and Kaede.
After the birth of the two children, Vincent’s couple struggled. In 2018, when he came home from work one evening, his wife and children disappeared and the house was gutted from top to bottom. His daughter was 11 months old the last time he saw her and his son was turning three.
For six years, the Frenchman has never seen his son and daughter again. The fault of conservative legislation: Japan does not recognize shared custody in the event of separation of a couple and systematically gives sole custody to only one of the parents. The deposed parent can only try to obtain rare visitation rights that are little respected. Vincent Fichot’s first lawyer brutally reminds him of this reality: “Il told me that she had taken the children away and that I would never see them again, and that if I wanted to have children, I had to start my life again“.
A real obstacle course then follows for the father of the family. : legal proceedings in France and Japan, summons of the country before the UN and even a hunger strike lasting 21 days in 2021. Despite all these steps, Vincent Fichot will never see his children again and obtains a single , two years after the kidnapping, information from the Japanese authorities:
“They told me their height in centimeters and said my boy thought I was in Hawaii and missed me. My daughter thought I was dead.”
Vincent FichotFrance 3 Provence-Alpes
In his battle, Vincent Fichot met many parents concerned by this problem: “pTo legally kidnap your child, all you have to do is go to Japan. An American woman explained to me that her husband kidnapped her two children by moving there even though neither had a connection to the country. These are 95% of Japanese parents concerned by this problem and 5% of foreigners.“
In Japan, a child is considered a piece of furniture; it belongs to both parents when they live in the same household, but if one of the parents takes the child to another place, the child belongs to the new household.
Vincent FichotFrance 3 Provence-Alpes
In 2021, with two other parents concerned by the problem, Vincent Fichot decided to create the “Find my parent” application. It uses facial recognition and artificial intelligence to make connections between a parent and a wanted child. The application is launched in February 2022 just before the start of the war in Ukraine. At the start of the conflict, Vincent Fichot contacted the Ukrainian ambassador to Japan: “I told him that the application could be used to find children kidnapped in the war. We signed an agreement and the ‘Reunite Ukraine’ application has existed since April 2023. It is now the official application of the Ukrainian police“.
By continuing to work against child abductions, Vincent Fichot still hopes to find Tsubasa et Kaede : “I created social media accounts in their names so they could see them and maybe get in touch with me. I also have high hopes that the film Guillaume Senez arrives to reach them. Maybe they can relate to this story“.
Six years after his complaint was filed in France, the story of Vincent Fichot will be examined at the Paris Criminal Court in February 2025.
