Four-year lawsuit comes to an end as court dismisses privacy concerns.

Tokyo resident Satoshi Egura turned 67 this month, and while it’s natural to spend some time on your birthday thinking back on your life so far, Egura most likely looked back even farther than most people do, to the very first few days after he was born.

Egura was born at Sumida Maternity Hospital in Tokyo’s Sumida Ward in 1948. As he grew up though, it became noticeable that there was no visible family resemblance between him and his parents. He didn’t get along with his father, either, with their relationship so strained that he left home and started working, and living, in a dry cleaner’s shop at the age of 14.

Eventually Egura and his father patched things up to the extent that he began communicating with his parents again as an adult. At some point the topic of blood types came up, and Egura, who’s type A, learned that his mother was type B and his father type O. If you remember your genetics lessons from high school science class, that combination shouldn’t sit right with you.

A child’s blood type is determined by the genes they get from their parents, one from the father and one from the mother. Since each parent has two genes of their own, there’s an element of randomization in the process, but some possibilities can be ruled out. A person can only have blood type O if they have a pair of matching O genes, and will always pass an O gene to their child. Meanwhile, a person with blood type B, has either two matching B genes or both a B or an O gene, meaning that they’ll pass either a B or an O gene to their child.

From that, we can determine that Egura definitely should have gotten an O gene from his father, and either a B or an O from this mother. Two matching O genes would have given him blood type O, and a combination of B and O would have given him blood type B (since the B gene is dominant and the O gene recessive). But there’s no possible combination of genes that Egura could have gotten from his parents that would result in his blood type being A.

The only possible explanation is that Egura’s genes come from someone other than the couple who raised him, which he confirmed by having a DNA test in 2004, with the doctor telling him “There is not a single drop of shared blood between you and your parents.”

It turns out that Egura was switched at birth before leaving the hospital. Since learning that startling fact, he’s been trying to find his birth parents, but to no avail. Investigating the matter on his own failed to yield any results, with the difficulty compounded by the fact that Sumida Maternity Hospital closed down in 1988. However, since it was a municipal hospital, Egura believes the Tokyo metropolitan government is obligated to make amends, and he filed a lawsuit in 2021, suing the city for cooperation in determining who his birth parents are.

During the trial Egura contested that the city-run hospital had committed “a grievous error that threw [his] life into disarray,” but the city countered that it had no obligation to carry out an investigation. Since ostensibly no one went home from the hospital without having given birth to a baby, searching for Egura’s birth parents would, by necessity, involve looking for another set of parents and child without any blood relation, which the city said would constitute a violation of their privacy.

On Monday, though, the Tokyo District Court rejected the city’s position and rendered a verdict in favor of Egura, saying that the municipal government must carry out an investigation and report the results to him. The city is ordered to search family registries and birth records to determine possible couples who could be Egura’s biological parents, then seek DNA testing for confirmation.

However, neither the court nor the metropolitan government can force the individuals who are approached to comply with testing. While leaving citizens the right to reject the requests was a key factor in dismissing the government’s privacy concerns, it also means that there’s a possible scenario in which Egura’s birth parents are located but their relationship is never confirmed. Still, Egura sounded hopeful after the verdict, saying “I am deeply grateful to the court for granting my request” and “I hope the city will not appeal the decision and begin the investigation as soon as possible.”

Egura’s sense of urgency is understandable. The father who raised him passed away 10 years ago, and with his birth parents being ostensibly of similarly advanced age, there may not be that large a window of time in which to find and connect with them. Egura also wants to know if he has siblings, but his desire to find his birth parents goes beyond just his own personal circumstances. “I have nothing but gratitude to the mother who raised me,” he says, and hopes that in tracking down his birth parents, he’ll also be able to let her meet her birth child for the first time.

Source: NHK News Web, Yomiuri Shimbun
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Pakutaso (1, 2)
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