Abstract
In July, 2009, the Organ Transplant Law was amended in Japan. However, the debate in the Diet on the amendment bill was confused and far from complete, with the result that the revised law-especially Article 6-remains problematic. This paper elucidates the issues in the amendment bill and Diet deliberations concerning it, in addition to setting out the framework for an alternative plan. In the first section, an examination is made of the problems in the second clause of Article 6 of the amendment bill. No persuasive argument was made in the Diet for the concept the bill introduces of brain death being equal to actual death, and consequently this means that key issues remain unsolved and that the bill lacks clarity. In the second section, the conditions for harvesting organs prescribed in the first clause of Article 6 are outlined, and the issues surrounding changes in the regulations for organ donation decision makers are discussed, as well as shifts in people's thinking regarding organ transplants. In the final section, a system for organ transplantation that permits opting-out and mutual insurance based on reciprocity is proposed as a potential alternative to the current system in which transplant donations rely on benevolence (voluntary and altruistic), and which has hitherto been uncritically propounded.
