Japan's rich buy organs from executed Chinese

Gil Hamilton · Post by **Gil Hamilton** » 2006-03-21 11:17pm

The Japanese dead don't typically have useable organs to donate. They cremate their dead and put the ashes in shrines that can be visited on important days, traditionally, and I'm pretty sure the body is supposed to be as whole as possible. This is a Buddhist thing. In practical terms, there is not alot of room in Japan for large graveyards.

Kazuaki Shimazaki · Post by **Kazuaki Shimazaki** » 2006-03-22 12:06am

You are supposed to grab those organs BEFORE you cremate them.

Gil Hamilton · Post by **Gil Hamilton** » 2006-03-22 12:23am

Kazuaki Shimazaki wrote:You are supposed to grab those organs BEFORE you cremate them.

Yeah, unless you go from the dead, to the mortuary to be put on dry ice to the wake to the temple to the urn.

kheegster · Post by **kheegster** » 2006-03-22 07:02am

AniThyng wrote:
I don't know about the Japanese, but for the Chinese it's superstition about needing the body to be whole in order to have a whole body in the afterlife or somesuch. Donation rates for Malaysian Chinese are also quite low IIRC.

I think I sent an application form to be a donor to the Kiwanis association back when I was 18. Never heard anything for them since.

Post by **Broomstick** » 2006-03-22 07:06am

Admiral Valdemar wrote:
kheegan wrote:FORTY donated organs since 1997??? I didn't realise that Japanese culture was so against organ donations.
I'd like to know what is causing this in their culture, because it is quite disgraceful. Where's the honour in keeping your organs to yourself as you go to the grave when others could use them?

I believe it is connected with their definition of death, but I'm not an expert on Japanese culture so I may wrong.

The way it was explained to me was that they don't use brain death as their definition, but rather breathing and heartbeat. So you're not dead until the heart and lungs have permanently stopped working. Unfortunatley, that makes for very poor donor organs. The alternative methods used in the West - maintaining the body on artificial respiration until the organs are removed, then shutting down the machines - could be prosecuted as murder in Japan.

IF I recall the explanation properly.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2006-03-22 09:20am

That's pretty dumb, since there are two definitions of "death" here, only the main one applies to the brain once it has gone 4 minutes or more without oxygen and been irreparably damaged. I guess they'd have let Schiavo live a long time too, since her higher brain functions were kaput, but the autonomics were intact.

Post by **Broomstick** » 2006-03-22 07:56pm

Remember, Admiral, that the breathing/heartbeat definition was the original definition of death in many countries, including those in the West. There were a couple of doctors in the US several decades ago who, when first using cadavar organs for transplant, were brought up on murder charges in US courts. In fact, it was those cases that lead to brain death being the US standard rather than heart/lungs. It's not that the Japanese have two definitions of death, it's more they never changed their definition of death.