In 2001, a Japanese researcher was indicted in the United States on charges of industrial spying. Since he had already returned to Japan, the U.S. requested his extradition under a bilateral treaty. However, legal opinion here remains divided over whether he should be tried in a U.S court -- in other words, whether he committed a crime that requires extradition. The question is now before the Tokyo High Court, which held a hearing on Wednesday.

According to the U.S. indictment, Mr. Takashi Okamoto, former employee of the Japanese government-affiliated Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, or Riken, in 1999 stole DNA samples on Alzheimer's disease from a laboratory of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, where he was working at the time; and he gave some of the material to Riken when he moved there from the U.S. institute.

The hearing itself is a normal procedure based on the 1980 Japan-U.S. extradition treaty. So far, eight Japanese nationals have been extradited to the U.S. In principle, the government has an obligation to protect its own people from trial abroad -- that is, it can extradite a Japanese citizen only to a country with which it has an extradition treaty. Japan has such a pact with one other country: South Korea.