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Brother, Can You Lend a Liver?
Japanese loan sharks get into the organ transplant business
By PETER McKILLOP
November 3, 1999
Web posted at 9:30 a.m. Hong Kong time, 9:30 p.m. EDT
For many Japanese people, the issue of organ transplants is an unspoken, almost shameful topic. For religious, cultural and regulatory reasons, it is almost impossible to get one in Japan. Instead Japanese in need of a new kidney, liver or eyeball furtively use middlemen to search Asia for the needed organ.
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In recent weeks, the dark side of Japan's organ-transplant deficit has surfaced in the press. The former employee of a consumer finance company was arrested Sunday for allegedly threatening a customer to sell his kidneys and eyeballs in order to pay back a loan. And in the Philippines, Newsweek reported, Japanese middlemen are purchasing kidneys from desperately poor men who sell their body parts to make ends meet.
The organ scandal highlights two gross inefficiencies in Japan's statist marketplace. One involves the spectacular expansion of "shoko," or consumer finance companies, also known in the West as loan shark operations. Japan's prolonged recession has made it profitable for loan companies to offer rates of up to 40%--despite interest rates being at historic lows in Japan--because traditional banks are refusing to risk lending unsecured loans. That leaves individuals with little choice but to go to the high-flying loan companies and pay the usurious rates.
The truly insidious connection with Japan's other consumer need--organs for transplant--is, one must hope, a one-time-only excess of an out-of-control loan shark. What it underscores, however, is the extraordinary lengths Japanese will go to in order buy a desperately needed organ. It is, however, a vile Faustian bargain that preys on the fears and anxieties of Asia's most vulnerable citizens.
None of this would be necessary if Japan had a more efficient market in both consumer finance and body parts. There is no reason that Japanese consumers should be forced to pay 40% interest on a loan when the Finance Ministry is shoveling money into traditional banks for almost nothing. Nor should they be forced to use sleazy middlemen to search Asia's most desperate barrios for a man hungry enough to sell a kidney.
The Japanese government allows these kinds of practices because it does not understand how a system of supply and demand works. In both arenas there is obviously a need that is not being met by legitimate businesses and organizations. Instead, the market has created conditions that capitalize on the desperation of people.
What the Japanese government must accept is that consumers--not bureaucrats--dictate markets. No government decree can stop the need for a kidney or lung, if that is what it takes to survive.
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