Japan loath to discuss incestuous abuse
The Japan Times Online - Sept 16
....During the summer when "Chitose" (not her real name) was 11, she was at home with her father one day watching TV in the dining room, when he suddenly grabbed her breast for a few seconds. According to Chitose, now an adult, "It was as if an atomic bomb had been dropped during peacetime."
As a girl, she could not consciously deal with the reality that her father, whom she trusted, had suddenly transmuted into a sex offender. She repressed the memory for five years.
Recently, Chitose filed a civil lawsuit against her father. Judge Hiromi Morita of the Kyoto District Court states in her judgment: "It is observed that the plaintiff remembers this defendant's act as the betrayal of her deep trust and respect of the defendant. On this point, the defendant testified that he thoughtlessly touched the plaintiff's breast to measure how much the plaintiff had grown.
"According to the overall purport of the pleadings, it is recognized that (since birth) . . . the defendant took care of the plaintiff and was deeply interested in the plaintiff's growth; and that the defendant touched the plaintiff's breast for only a few seconds in his dining room where he happened to face the plaintiff.
"Given the context in which the act was committed, the defendant's intention, the kind of relationship established between the defendant and the plaintiff, the act should not be judged illegal or beyond the limit of what is commonly accepted by society."
The daughter appealed to the Osaka High Court, but Presiding Judge Seijiro Shimada dismissed the appeal on similar grounds last May.
The dismissals implicitly endorse the classical principle of the coalescence (reciprocal growth) between rights and duties stipulated in Hegel's "Philosophy of Right": "a man has rights insofar as he has duties, and duties insofar as he has rights." In other words, insofar as the father fulfilled the parental duty of taking care of his female child, he had the right to touch her breast.
Conversely, precisely because the father fulfilled the parental duty of taking extensive care of his child since the child's birth, the child deeply trusted and respected the father....more...
