China: Organs for sale - good price

asiatimes: When Hokamura Kenichiro's kidneys failed, he waited more than four years for a transplant before going online to check out rumors of organs for sale.

As a native of Japan, where less than 10 kidney transplants are performed a year, the 62-year-old businessman was desperate. "There are 100 people waiting in this prefecture alone and there were just three operations performed here last year. I would have died before getting a donor."

He was astonished by just how easy it was. Ten days after contacting a Japanese broker in China in February, he was lying on an operating table in a Shanghai hospital receiving a new kidney. A doctor had only examined him that morning. "It was so fast I was scared," he said.

The "donor" was an executed man, the price 6.8 million yen (about US$80,000). "It was cheap [in comparison to the cost of my life]," said a recovering Hokamura, now back in Kyushu in southern Japan where he runs a construction-related business. "I can always earn more money." Read more