Home
Politics
The opposition-controlled upper house approved the revised bill by 138 votes to 82, just weeks after the lower house gave the green light.
Supporters of the new law hailed it as long overdue but said much work remained to foster greater understanding of the issue.
"I see the door to organ transplants opening for many children whose lives we could not save because they could not receive organs under the domestic law," Keiichiro Nakazawa, whose one-year-old son Sotaro died last year in the United States while waiting for a heart donation, told AFP.
Japan is the world's second largest economy and a global leader in medical research and technology, but the country has been hesitant about organ transplants, in part because of cultural perceptions of death.
Transplants have been rare even for adults because tough rules have required donors to give prior written consent to having their organs harvested when they are brain dead, while their families have also had to agree.
Supporters of the new law said Japan's hospitals would need more resources to cope with an increase in the number of transplants.
"The real challenge starts tomorrow because all the hospitals need to be upgraded," said Taro Kono, a ruling party lawmaker who supported the amendment.
"We need more coordinators. A lot of hospitals need to be prepared for those organ transfers," said Kono, who gave part of his liver to his father in 2002.
The legislation scraps the age limit and the need for prior consent for donations, unless the person explicitly objected in advance to having their organs used. It still requires family members to agree to a transplant.
The law also recognises that patients who are medically brain dead are legally dead -- long a controversial topic in Japan where many religious groups say a person is only deceased once their heart and lungs have stopped working.
Japan adopted an Organ Transplant Law in 1997, but since then only 81 transplants have been carried out, compared to several thousand each year in the United States and several hundred annually in Europe.
The long-debated reform plans were fast-tracked this year after the World Health Organization (WHO) signalled it would ask signatory nations in early 2010 to limit organ transplants to within their national boundaries.
For a kidney or liver transplant, many Japanese travel to China or the Philippines, where organ trafficking flourishes.
In the move against so-called transplant tourism, Australia, Britain and Germany have already announced they would refuse Japanese patients seeking organ transplants.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Supporters of the new law hailed it as long overdue but said much work remained to foster greater understanding of the issue.
"I see the door to organ transplants opening for many children whose lives we could not save because they could not receive organs under the domestic law," Keiichiro Nakazawa, whose one-year-old son Sotaro died last year in the United States while waiting for a heart donation, told AFP.
Japan is the world's second largest economy and a global leader in medical research and technology, but the country has been hesitant about organ transplants, in part because of cultural perceptions of death.
Transplants have been rare even for adults because tough rules have required donors to give prior written consent to having their organs harvested when they are brain dead, while their families have also had to agree.
Supporters of the new law said Japan's hospitals would need more resources to cope with an increase in the number of transplants.
"The real challenge starts tomorrow because all the hospitals need to be upgraded," said Taro Kono, a ruling party lawmaker who supported the amendment.
"We need more coordinators. A lot of hospitals need to be prepared for those organ transfers," said Kono, who gave part of his liver to his father in 2002.
The legislation scraps the age limit and the need for prior consent for donations, unless the person explicitly objected in advance to having their organs used. It still requires family members to agree to a transplant.
The law also recognises that patients who are medically brain dead are legally dead -- long a controversial topic in Japan where many religious groups say a person is only deceased once their heart and lungs have stopped working.
Japan adopted an Organ Transplant Law in 1997, but since then only 81 transplants have been carried out, compared to several thousand each year in the United States and several hundred annually in Europe.
The long-debated reform plans were fast-tracked this year after the World Health Organization (WHO) signalled it would ask signatory nations in early 2010 to limit organ transplants to within their national boundaries.
For a kidney or liver transplant, many Japanese travel to China or the Philippines, where organ trafficking flourishes.
In the move against so-called transplant tourism, Australia, Britain and Germany have already announced they would refuse Japanese patients seeking organ transplants.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
