the hidden maze of an international divorce

When people hear “divorce,” they think of two people splitting up. Maybe lawyers, maybe a fight over the house. What they don’t picture is a five-phase operation spanning two legal systems, two tax codes, two languages, and an ocean.

My wife is Japanese. We married in Seattle over twenty years ago. She holds a green card. We have two kids, both born here. And now, amicably, we are unwinding all of it.

She had no idea what she was getting us into.

The sequencing problem

The single hardest thing about an international divorce is that the order in which you do things matters enormously — and getting it wrong can be catastrophic.

You might think: file for divorce, split assets, move on. But when one spouse holds a green card and plans to return to their home country permanently, every step has to be choreographed. A green card isn’t just an immigration document — it’s a tax status. Holding one makes you a US tax resident regardless of where you live. Surrender it too early, before the divorce settles the division of community property, and you trigger an IRS “exit tax” — a tax on gains you never actually realized, calculated against assets you may not even keep. The tax code treats you as if you sold everything the day you left. There’s a net worth threshold that determines whether the government considers you a “covered expatriate” subject to this tax, and the IRS tracks it carefully.

The sequencing cuts both ways across the ocean. If she registers as a Japanese resident before the asset transfers, Japan taxes those transfers as income. So the transfers must happen before she files for residency — but she can’t surrender the green card until after the transfers settle. The window is narrow, and both countries are watching.

So instead of one event, it becomes a phased plan: prepare, file, wait for the decree, transfer assets, surrender the green card, depart permanently, then register residency. Each phase depends on the one before it. Skip a step or scramble the order and you’re exposed. Washington’s mandatory 90-day waiting period after filing means the earliest phases alone stretch into months.

We filed a re-entry permit before any of this began — a document that preserves green card status during extended absence. It bought us time. But time is finite.

Two countries, two tax codes, one marriage

Washington is a community property state. That means virtually everything earned during the marriage belongs to both spouses equally — regardless of whose name is on the account. This is already complex in a domestic divorce. Add a second country’s tax system and it becomes a puzzle.

The US taxes its residents on worldwide income. Japan does the same for its residents. There are treaties to prevent double taxation, but navigating them requires specialists who understand both systems — and they are rare and expensive.

Even the asset transfer itself has to be done carefully. Selling investments to split them in cash can trigger enormous tax events. An in-kind transfer — moving shares directly without selling — avoids that, but requires specific legal authority under the divorce decree and careful documentation of cost basis that will follow those assets across borders for years.

Custody across an ocean

Then there’s the parenting plan. Our daughter is sixteen. She’ll stay with me in Seattle, and her mother will be in Japan. There is no “every other weekend” when the other parent lives across the Pacific.

Instead, you’re writing terms for international travel, passport custody, airfare responsibilities, and communication across time zones. You’re trying to preserve a child’s relationship with both parents when one of them is about to be seventeen hours ahead and an eleven-hour flight away.

We’re writing these terms together, not fighting over them. But even in the best case, the logistics of international co-parenting are daunting.

The emotional math

What none of the legal documents capture is the strange emotional arithmetic of dissolving a twenty-year marriage while cooperating on a plan this intricate. The divorce is uncontested. We agree on everything. And yet the paperwork, the tax modeling, the phased plan, the attorneys, the financial specialists — it is staggering in its complexity. Even when both people are pulling in the same direction, the system is a maze.

This isn’t over. We’re still in the early phases — preparing documents, engaging specialists, counting down to a filing date. But the realization of the complexity has also elongated the timeline, which we are both eager to get through.