The Family Court of Australia has granted sole custody of a little boy to his Japanese mother, after his Australian father abducted the child during the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The court said that the boy was not at an “unacceptable risk” from radiation exposure if brought back o Japan.

The father first met the Japanese woman, a farmer’s daughter, when he was still married to his first wife who was pregnant at that time. After the 2011 disasters took place, when the man and the Japanese woman were already married and had their son, he convinced her to go back to Australia to fix their “trouble marriage”. He soon left her to go back to Japan, and when it looked like he wasn’t coming back, she was forced to hand legal guardianship of the boy to her in-laws while she went back to Japan to sort things out with him. She caught him cheating with a woman who would later become his next fiancee and future third wife (we’re sensing a pattern here). When she called her now ex mother-in-law to get her son back, she was told the boy was being shipped off to New Zealand. A bitter legal battle then ensued, with the mother eventually getting the boy back.

Justice Stuart Fowler decided to award sole parental responsibility to the mother and both were allowed to return to Japan. On the side, the judge hoped that Japan would eventually sign the Hague Abduction Convention. During Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent trip to the United States, he promised President Barack Obama that Japan would finally sign the treaty. Japan is the only Group 8 country that is not a signatory to the convention, which aims to protect and to return abducted children to their usual place of residence in case of failed international marriage.