The Audition Nobody Regulates

On Japanese social media there are, at any given time, hundreds of accounts offering sperm. Most read like a listing: height, weight, blood type, university, sometimes a note about eyelids. Some have been running for years. One donor, interviewed by a national newspaper, described having provided to more than a hundred people across roughly five hundred meetings over a decade.

This page examines that, and it was commissioned as a thesis to be tested rather than a phenomenon to be described: that women are becoming more open to single motherhood, that the search for a donor has turned into an audition for specifications, and that the results have included serious harm. Two of those turn out to be well supported. The third is supported and is not quite the story that circulates, and the difference matters enough that the page begins there.

What this page will not do is tell any woman whether to do this. That is a decision about a life, made under conditions nobody outside the household can see, and a page that issued a verdict on it would be doing the thing this library objects to everywhere else. What it can do is set out what the market actually is, why it has the shape it has, what the record says happened in the cases that reached a court, and who else is in the room.

The story most people have heard runs like this: a single woman, wanting a child, found a man online who presented himself as high-specification, conceived, and discovered afterwards that he was unemployed and had invented everything. It is close enough to be recognisable and wrong in almost every particular, and the corrected version is worse rather than better.

According to the claim filed at the Tokyo District Court in December 2021 — reported as the first lawsuit in Japan over private donation arranged through social media — the plaintiff was a woman in her thirties who was married. She and her husband wanted a second child; he had a condition he might pass on. He consented to her seeking a third party. She contacted the man in 2019, and conception was not by syringe but by repeated intercourse, on the order of ten occasions over about three months, with roughly ¥150,000 spent on hotels. She has said she chose that method because it was how her first child had been conceived.

What he had represented was that he was Japanese, unmarried, and a graduate of Kyoto University. What he was is Chinese, married, and a graduate of a different national university. Not unemployed. The claim was for approximately ¥332 million. And the fact that almost never travels with the story: the child was born in February 2020 and was placed in a child welfare facility, with the plaintiff’s representatives citing sleep disturbance and psychological distress that left her unable to raise the child.

The way that story loses its own ending as it travels is worth one sentence, because the loss is not accidental. In the circulating version there are two people: a man who lied and a woman who was wronged, and the moral is about vetting. In the record there are three, and the third one did not consent to any part of it and is the only person whose situation is permanent. Nearly every argument made about this subject, in either direction, is conducted as though the third person were a consequence rather than a party.

The market is not small and it is not hidden. Hundreds of accounts, advertising openly, listing the same fields: 身長, 体重, 血液型, 学歴, sometimes a photograph, frequently a note about whether the donor offers シリンジ法 — a syringe — or タイミング法, which is the euphemism for intercourse. Most donors take nothing beyond travel costs, which removes the one feature that would make the arrangement legible as commerce and replaces it with something harder to name.

The safety picture is the part that should be read slowly. A survey of one hundred and forty websites and social media accounts offering donation found that five of them disclosed adequate information about infectious disease testing, contactability, and family medical history. Five out of a hundred and forty. That is not a market with a compliance problem. It is a market with no compliance layer of any kind, in which the single most consequential health decision a person can make is transacted on the basis of a self-description.

And the accumulation problem, which is structural rather than a matter of any individual’s conduct. One donor, a hundred recipients, in a country where a large share of the population lives within one metropolitan area. The specialists quoted on this do not lead with morality; they lead with consanguinity, because the children of one prolific donor will be in the same schools and the same dating pool without any of them knowing. One woman interviewed said she had lost contact with her donor and did not know how many children had been born.

The specification lists are the part everybody finds easiest to be scornful about, and the scorn is the least useful available response. 高学歴, 高身長, イケメン — it reads like a dating profile with the person removed, and the obvious reading is that these women are shopping for superior children out of vanity or status anxiety. That reading is available, it is what most commentary reaches for, and this page thinks it is wrong.

Consider what a woman buys from a regulated sperm bank, and notice that a university is not on the list. She buys screening for infectious disease. She buys a family medical history taken by somebody whose job it is to take one. She buys a cap on how many families one donor may serve. She buys a record that will still exist in twenty years, held by an institution rather than by a man with a phone. The credentials, where they are given at all, are incidental. What is actually being purchased is verified data and enforced limits.

Now remove all of that, which is what the Japanese situation does, and ask what is left for a person to evaluate. Nothing is verified. Nothing is recorded. Nothing is capped. The only signals remaining are the ones the seller supplies about himself, and a rational buyer in a market with no verification will reach for the signals that are hardest to fake and easiest to check — which, in the absence of any checking mechanism, collapses into the signals that are conventionally associated with reliability. A university. A profession. A height. She is not shopping for superior genes. She is shopping for a proxy for the screening that does not exist.

Which makes the deception cases predictable rather than shocking. Credentials are the cheapest thing in the world to fabricate and the hardest thing for a private individual to verify, so a market that runs on credentials will select for people willing to state them falsely. The famous case is not a story about one unusually dishonest man. It is the output of a market designed — by omission — to reward exactly that.

The obvious question is why any of this happens outside a clinic, and the answer is that for most of the people doing it, the clinic is not available. Donor insemination has existed in Japan since the late 1940s, but access is governed by professional self-regulation rather than by statute, and that self-regulation restricts it to couples who are legally married. A single woman, a woman in a common-law partnership, and a woman in a same-sex couple are not people with a harder path. They are outside the eligible category.

A law was finally attempted. In February 2025 a cross-party group of legislators submitted the 特定生殖補助医療法案, which would have been the first statute in this country to establish anything resembling a right for a donor-conceived person to know their origins — records held for a hundred years, accessible from the age of eighteen, yielding height, age and blood type without the donor’s consent and a name only with it. It also restricted eligibility to legally married couples, and attached penalties to use outside legal marriage.

It lapsed. It was never taken up for deliberation, and opposition came from more than one direction — including from within the people it would have governed, and from an opposition party that objected on human rights grounds. So the position as this is written is that there is still no statute, and that the only serious legislative attempt in more than two decades would have left the women in this market where they already are, while adding a penalty for being there.

That is the single most important fact on this page and it should be held carefully, because it inverts the intuitive picture. This is not a market that exists because Japan is permissive. It is a market that exists because the regulated route is closed, the unregulated route is not illegal, and the one attempt to write rules would have closed the first harder rather than opening it. The women in it did not choose an alternative to the clinic. They are in the only room that was left.

The commission asked what pressures produce this, and the honest answer begins by declining the frame the question usually arrives in. This is not a submission to anything, and it is not a symptom. A woman who wants a child and does not want or does not have a husband is not exhibiting a condition. She is in a country that has fused those two things more completely than almost anywhere on earth.

The number that carries this is the proportion of births outside marriage, which in Japan sits at around two per cent against forty to sixty per cent across much of Europe. This library has a separate essay on what that fusion does. The consequence for the subject here is simple and severe: elsewhere, a woman who wants a child without a marriage is taking one of several ordinary routes. Here she is stepping outside the system, and every institution she meets afterwards — medical, administrative, financial, social — is built for the other case.

Add the arithmetic, which nobody escapes and which the marriage market makes worse here than it needs to be. A woman who wants a child has a window; a woman who wants a husband first has a search whose length is not under her control. Where those two run into each other, the options are to accept a partner she would not otherwise have accepted, to give up the child, or to separate the two decisions. The third option is the one under discussion on this page, and it is worth noticing that it is the only one of the three that does not require somebody to settle for something.

And a last pressure that is rarely named because it sounds ungenerous. A woman in this position has usually spent several years being told, by people who mean well, that it will happen, that she should not settle, and that there is plenty of time. None of those statements is checkable and all of them are comforting, which is a bad combination. The move to a donor is frequently the point at which somebody stops accepting comfort in place of information — which is, whatever else it is, not a submission to anything.

Ask what to call this and the vocabulary fails in a way this library has catalogued elsewhere. 精子提供 is clinical and describes a substance changing hands. 妊活 belongs to couples and has a husband built into it. 選択的シングルマザー is a translation — accurate, used in writing, and almost never said aloud about oneself. What is left for ordinary speech is the tabloid frame, in which the whole subject appears only when something has gone wrong.

The consequence follows the library’s standing finding exactly. A thing with no comfortable name is done privately, is not discussed among the people doing it, generates no shared knowledge about which practices are safer, and reaches the public only as a disaster. Which produces a vicious and entirely mechanical loop: the only visible stories are the worst ones, the subject therefore looks like a subject made of disasters, and the naming stays impossible because who would claim a name attached to that.

It also has a specific and measurable cost, which is the argument for caring about vocabulary at all. If the women doing this could talk to each other in ordinary language, the thing they would exchange first is the practical safety knowledge that the five-out-of-a-hundred-and-forty finding says is absent: which questions to ask, what testing looks like, what a written agreement can and cannot do, and what to insist on before anything happens. Silence is not neutral here. It is the reason the same avoidable things keep happening to different people.

Every account of this subject is written from the position of an adult deciding something, and there is a third party to every one of these arrangements who is not consulted, cannot be, and will live with the result for a lifetime. Saying so is not a rebuke to anybody. It is simply that a page which left it out would be incomplete in the way most writing about this is incomplete.

What donor-conceived adults consistently report wanting, in the countries where they have organised and been surveyed, is not a relationship with a donor and frequently not contact at all. It is information: medical history, and the ability to answer a question about where they came from with something other than a blank. That is a modest thing to want and the Japanese arrangement currently guarantees none of it. In a private arrangement the record is one man’s memory, and the woman quoted earlier who had lost contact with her donor had also lost, permanently, the only copy.

The sibling question is the one that has forced legislation elsewhere. In the Netherlands a donor established to have fathered at least five hundred and fifty children was ordered by a court to stop, and the reasoning was not about the parents: it was that the children’s ability to form relationships was compromised by a real and unquantifiable risk of unknowingly meeting a sibling. A Japanese donor with a hundred recipients in one metropolitan area is a smaller version of the same arithmetic, arrived at by the same route, with nobody counting.

And the thing that has quietly settled this question everywhere without any legislature voting on it: consumer DNA testing. Anonymity is now a promise that cannot be kept, in any country, by any institution, regardless of what was agreed at the time. A donor who told a woman in 2019 that this would never come back to him was saying something that was already untrue. Whatever anybody thinks the right rule is, the factual premise that both Japanese practice and the lapsed bill rested on — that identity can be withheld — has expired.

The commission asked whether this is happening elsewhere, and the comparison is more useful than expected, because it separates the demand from the arrangements. The demand looks similar everywhere. What differs is only what a country has built to meet it.

Denmark supplies the figure that reframes the whole subject. Cryos, the Danish bank that is the largest in the world and ships to more than a hundred countries, reported that single women and lesbian couples were about eighty-five per cent of its clients as of September 2025. In an open market, donor conception is not primarily a treatment for the infertility of married heterosexual couples. It is overwhelmingly a route to parenthood for people without a male partner. Which means the demand Japan is currently routing through Twitter is not a Japanese pathology, not a new fashion, and not a response to Japanese conditions. It is the ordinary structure of the thing, showing up where it is allowed to.

Britain went the other way on the question Japan deferred. Donor anonymity was removed there in 2005, so a person conceived from a donation after that date can obtain identifying information at eighteen, with non-identifying information earlier, and the regulator has been consulting on going further. The instructive part is what did not happen: donation did not collapse, and the supply that did contract was replaced by donors recruited on the explicit understanding that they would one day be identifiable. Removing anonymity changes who donates rather than whether anybody does.

China and Korea show what happens when the door is shut harder. Unmarried women in China are largely barred from sperm banks and IVF, which has produced a documented traffic of single Chinese women travelling abroad for treatment, and a domestic argument that has recently begun to move — Sichuan lifted restrictions on unmarried women registering births in early 2025, and advisers have proposed opening egg freezing and IVF. In Korea, the Bioethics and Safety Act requires a spouse’s consent, which makes donor conception effectively unavailable to a single woman; Seoul has meanwhile subsidised egg freezing for unmarried residents since 2023. And the most visible Korean case involves a Japanese woman: the broadcaster Sayuri Fujita, who conceived by donation abroad and said publicly that becoming a single mother had not been an easy decision and was not a shameful one.

Lay those side by side and a pattern appears that is not about culture. Where access is open and regulated, the demand shows up in clinics, with screening and records and caps. Where access is closed, the same demand shows up as travel if a woman can afford it and as a private arrangement if she cannot. Closing the door does not reduce the number of women who want this. It sorts them by money, and it moves the ones with less of it into the market this page has been describing.

A page that has argued the women in this market are behaving rationally owes them the list, because rational behaviour under bad information is still exposed to whatever the information was hiding. Nothing here is advice and nothing here is a reason not to. It is what a person is entitled to have in front of her before she decides.

Infection, first, because it is the one with a timetable. Where conception is by intercourse the exposure is the ordinary one and the donor’s self-reported status is the only screen; where it is by syringe the risk is lower and not zero. The five-of-a-hundred-and-forty finding is the relevant number, and this library has a separate page on why the absence of symptoms in a donor establishes nothing whatsoever.

Then the things that arrive later and cannot be undone. There is no record, so a child’s medical history is whatever one man remembers and remains willing to answer about. There is no cap, so the sibling arithmetic is unknown and unknowable. And the legal position of a private written agreement between the parties is unsettled here rather than settled against her — a distinction worth holding, because unsettled means a court would decide, and a court deciding is the situation the agreement was drawn up to avoid.

And the one the famous case is actually about, which is not the credentials. A donor is a person who knows where the child is. Whatever was agreed at the time, he retains the physical capacity to appear later, to change his account of what was agreed, or simply to be somebody other than who he said he was — and the discovery of that, years in, was what the plaintiff in the Tokyo case described as the injury. Not the false university. The fact that the person at the centre of the most consequential decision of her life turned out to be entirely unknown to her.

Nothing, and the disclosure is unusually easy to make. We sell nothing on this page, we have no service adjacent to it, we are not a route to conception and would decline to be, and there is no version of an hour here that bears on any decision described above. We wrote it because a page in this library asked what is on offer to women in this country, and this turned out to be a large, growing, entirely unregulated part of the answer that nobody had set out in one place.

The routes that are worth anything here are all elsewhere. A fertility clinic will say what it can and cannot do for a person in her circumstances, including when the answer is nothing, and getting that answer from a clinician rather than inferring it from a rule is worth the appointment. A lawyer, for anything involving an agreement or a parentage question, because this is an area where the law is unsettled and unsettled law is the one kind you do not navigate from a search engine. And the donor-conceived adults who have organised and written publicly in other countries are, for anybody weighing the third person’s side of this, better reading than any commentary including ours.

So the thesis, tested. Women becoming more open to single motherhood: supported, and better described as a demand that was always there becoming visible where a route exists. The audition by specification: real, and not vanity — a spec list is what a buyer reaches for when nothing is verified, which is why the specifications are precisely the thing that gets falsified. The harms: real, documented, and worse in the record than in the retelling, because the retelling drops the child.

And the finding underneath all three, which is the one worth carrying. None of this is evidence of a culture becoming careless about children or about men. It is what a demand does when the regulated door is shut and the unregulated one is merely unlit. Every harm on this page — the unverified credentials, the uncounted siblings, the vanished record, the child placed in a facility — is a harm that screening, caps and records exist elsewhere to prevent, and that the only Japanese bill in twenty years would have withheld from these women by name while adding a penalty for their being there at all.