Photo/Illutration Police display documents seized from a Yokohama nonprofit organization that handled organ transplants abroad. (Tsubasa Setoguchi)

The criminal case over an overseas organ transplant underscores the chronic shortage of available organs in Japan and the lengths and risks Japanese patients will take to avoid the waiting list here.

Hiromichi Kikuchi, 62, who headed a nonprofit organization, was arrested by Metropolitan Police Department for his role in persuading a Tokyo man to travel to Belarus for a liver transplant.

Kikuchi’s organization, which arranges such operations abroad, had not obtained the required approval from the health minister to mediate the organ transplant, a violation of the Organ Transplant Law.

In fact, the Japan Organ Transplant Network is the only organization in Japan that has obtained approval for such mediation.

In 2022, organs were removed from only 108 individuals diagnosed as either brain-dead or in a state of cardiac arrest in Japan. The organs were used in 455 transplants.

However, about 16,000 people in Japan were waiting for available organs in 2022, according to the Japan Organ Transplant Network.

Police became interested in Kikuchi’s organization after The Yomiuri Shimbun reported in August 2022 that the NPO had mediated a transplant abroad using an organ that had been trafficked.

Among the documents seized by police in the case is a roster of about 150 patients who sought help from Kikuchi’s organization.

The Tokyo man’s family paid Kikuchi’s organization about 33 million yen ($250,000) for the liver transplant and travel expenses to Belarus.

Such transplants in Belarus normally cost about 16 million yen, according to sources.

Police went ahead and arrested Kikuchi without sending investigators to Belarus or asking for cooperation from authorities there to look into the actual operation.

Japanese police learned that Kikuchi’s NPO urged the man’s family to seek a transplant overseas. Investigators said they also went through the organization’s bank account and other documents to nail down the payment from the man’s family.

That fueled suspicions that the organization had mediated the transplant in Japan.

The Metropolitan Police Department also uncovered other possible cases of organ transplants abroad mediated by the NPO.

Sources said that after 2020, the organization arranged for two Japanese to go to Bulgaria, three to Belarus and one to the Kyrgyz Republic for organ transplants.

The Tokyo man died after returning to Japan after the liver transplant.

Police know of other patients who died after transplant operations, sources said.

The NPO’s alleged actions go against the spirit of the 2008 Istanbul Declaration, which called on governments to work to prevent organ trafficking and transplant tourism.

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