A group of transsexuals will shortly file civil suits to have their new genders recorded on their family registrations, an activist supporting transsexuals told Kyodo News.

The report said that eight people have undergone sex-change operations in Japan so far, two men becoming women and six women becoming men.

Although it is believed that "back alley" reassignments have taken place, the first legal sex-change operation was conducted in Japan in October 1998 at Saitama Medical College, a private medical school in the town of Moroyama, Saitama Prefecture.

The female to male transsexual who was in his thirties at the time of the operation said he has been waiting six years for the medical procedure and has wished for it for more than a decade.

Sex-change operations had effectively been banned in Japan until 1996, when a eugenics law applied to a doctor who performed three sex changes in 1969 was abolished.

However in May 1997, The Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology decided to permit the operations and introduced new guidelines stipulating that patients receive psychiatric counseling and hormone therapy before undergoing the operation.