A poverty-hit Japanese lorry driver who discovered that he was switched at birth from an affluent family sued the hospital involved, which has been ordered to pay him compensation of 38 million yen (US$250,000).
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The 2013 case has resurfaced online amid the reporting of several recent cases of Chinese children who were abducted at a young age, grew up in poor families and were reunited with their rich parents.
In November 2013, a court ruled that the San-ikukai Hospital in Tokyo’s Sumida district should pay the 60-year-old 38 million yen because they made the mistake of switching him with another baby right after their birth in 1953.
The truth did not emerge for six decades until the rich family’s younger sons grew unsatisfied with their elder brother’s treatment of their father.
After their mother died, the elder brother reportedly held their father’s share of their mother’s heritage in return for looking after him, but instead sent him to a nursing home.
The younger sons then began to notice how their elder brother did not look like them, and recalled that their late mother told them his clothes changed after a nurse gave him a bath in hospital.
They collected a cigarette end their elder brother threw away and sent it for a DNA check in 2009. The results showed that he was not biologically related to them.
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