169 patients, 418 medical acts and a licence 'lost in a move': the Osaka cancer clinic that hired a 66-year-old on a claimed Kyoto University career

Japan is usually thought of as a country where nobody practises medicine without the right papers. A doctor needs a national licence under the Medical Practitioners Act, and treating patients without one is a criminal offence. Yet the case Osaka Prefectural Police brought in the autumn of 2025 turned, according to the reports, on a confident interview, a false résumé and an employer that did not follow up on a missing document.

According to the Yomiuri Shimbun, Osaka Prefectural Police arrested a 66-year-old company executive from Taisho ward, Osaka, on 30 October 2025 on suspicion of practising medicine without a licence. Police alleged that between September 2024 and April 2025 he carried out 418 medical acts on 169 patients aged from their twenties to their nineties at a clinic in Kita ward specialising in cancer prevention and treatment, including consultations and directing nurses to inject cancer-treatment vaccines. The paper reported that he was appointed the clinic's managing doctor after submitting a résumé falsely claiming he had worked at Kyoto University Hospital, and that at interview he said his licence had been lost during a move. Nikkei Medical said he worked for about half a year without ever submitting one.

The Yomiuri reported that he resigned in April 2025 after the clinic asked to see his licence, and that no harm to patients had been confirmed. The case surfaced sideways: police investigating a ring forging residence cards for Chinese nationals found image data of a forged medical licence in his name. He denies the charge and has told police, in substance, that he graduated from medical school and holds a licence. Nikkei Medical reported that he was re-arrested on 20 November on suspicion of fraud, accused of persuading a man in his seventies in Kagawa Prefecture to transfer 30 million yen in 2023 for a fictitious investment in cancer-vaccine research and sales.

What failed was not a forged certificate shown to the clinic but the absence of any certificate at all. According to the reports, the clinic accepted a written career history and the explanation that the licence had been lost, then let roughly half a year pass while an unverified man saw patients who had come to a cancer clinic because they were worried about their health. The prestige of Kyoto University did the work a document should have done. Japan has seen this before: the Tokyo case of a 'doctor' practising on a found identity is recorded elsewhere on this site.

For a student or family weighing medicine abroad, the lesson applies to agents and colleges as much as to clinics. A licence, a degree or an admission letter is a document a regulator or institution can confirm, not a story told in an interview or written on a CV. When someone says a document was lost or will follow later, that is the moment to stop paying and start checking. Verify every claimed qualification with the body that issues it, pay the institution rather than the intermediary, and keep your own originals.