I just had a lovely morning here in Dai Nippon...

[akujunkan]

...which I will write more about later. Perhaps it's precisely because of this that I'm so irked at having come home to find this article in the NYT.

The gist of it? Seventeen Japanese citizens--elderly citizens, no less--are currently under investigation by the Chinese government on suspicion of having travelled to China for illegal organ transplants. That's odious enough on its own.

But what makes it even worse, and what the NYT article inexplicably fails to mention is why Japanese people go to China for illegal organ transplants. Namely, because Japanese people refuse to be organ donors. Seriously, this is such a well known fact that it's been used as the main plot device in modern American fiction.

And it will never cease to gall and disgust me. If you find the prospect of being an organ donor so repellent, then suck it up and leave the donated to organs to people in societies that don't hold such views.

That will be all.

Comments

[enelte.livejournal.com]

That NYT ommited the fact that Japaneses refuse to donate organs (that I learnt from you)

and

- Chinese organs are cheaper (why and how)
- Chinese organs transplanting is cheaper (why and how)
- The transaction is safer because it's certainely under high officials' care. The proof is that rarely discovered operations as such (but when Japan is involved how can chinese goverment resist)

And, the waiting for "donation" isnt long.

Those also are the facts that a know-nothing about Japan like me can read between the lines. Those irk me more than a selfish society like Japan doing organs shopping outside its water (and not only japaneses), certainly nothing to be disgusted about because hypocrisy is a popular contemporary sickness in all over the world, mostly hidden in subtency that we hardly recognize. However I'm amazed that those jp doctors in the hospitals you mentioned admitted that they Refuse to donate but Accept donating, so openly. I appreciate open hypocrisy. not because I'm cynique, but because that way I can see things more clearly.

[akujunkan.livejournal.com]

- The transaction is safer because it's certainely under high officials' care. The proof is that rarely discovered operations as such (but when Japan is involved how can chinese goverment resist)
As well as the ease with which they find compatable "donors"--namely by executing a prisoner (criminal or political) who's a match. It's truly despicable.

But that's the thing: it wasn't open hypocrisy. They literally could not make the logical connection between being willing to receive a donatd organ and becoming donors themselves. This is one of the most striking aspects of Japan to me (and many other non-Japanese with whom I've spoken): that its citizens can so often completely mentally dissociate facts which are so obviously associated to citizens of many other places around the world.