With the gift-giving season upon us, it is as good a time as any to think about the gift that keeps on giving -- your organs. Another reason to think about organ donation is that on Tuesday the Matsuyama District Court will sentence a 59-year-old man who was convicted of buying a kidney from a woman. Under the Organ Transplant Law, paying for an organ is a crime, and the case has drawn attention to the medical options of thousands of people suffering from kidney disease.

Suzuo Yamashita admitted to paying the donor 300,000 yen after his operation in September 2005. He also gave the woman a car worth about 1.5 million yen. According to various media reports, the woman thought she should receive more and complained to the police, even though selling an organ is also a crime. (She ended up paying a 1 million yen fine)

In Japan, the transplant of an organ from a living donor can only be carried out when the donor is related to the patient. Since 2003, however, the family-only rule can be waived if the surgery is approved by a transplant ethics committee. In the Matsuyama case, the donor pretended to be Yamashita's sister-in-law. The imposture was necessary since the surgeon, Makoto Mannami, and his brother, Rensuke, also a surgeon, don't belong to any medical association and have had trouble with ethics committees in the past.