When Kenichiro Hokamura's kidneys failed, he spent four years on dialysis before going online to check out rumors of organs for sale.
With less than 10 kidney transplants performed in Japan a year, the 62-year-old businessman was desperate. "There are 100 people waiting in my prefecture alone. I would have died before getting a donor."
Still, he was astonished by 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 says. The "donor" was an executed man, the price 6.8 million yen. "It was cheap (in comparison to the cost of my life)," says a recovering Hokamura, now back in Kyushu in southern Japan where he runs a construction-related business. "I can always earn more money."