Writer Anabel Mariko Stenzel

I love Japan. As a child, I loved its scenery, food and the cute toys. As an English teacher there after college, I loved its clean streets, work ethic and its generous people. My Japanese mother and grandmother taught me to speak the language and to incorporate being Japanese into my identity.

But one thing I struggled to understand was the resistance to one of modern medicine’s greatest miracles: organ transplantation. As an industrialized nation, Japan has the lowest rate of organ donation in the world.