I would have loved to have been able to donate an umbilical cord for stem cell research. Unfortunately, there only seems to be one hospital in London that 'harvests' donated cords and it isn't the hospital I'll be using.

Now I'm faced with continuing a custom knowing nothing about how to go about it.

In Japan, the umbilical cord is kept and the baby ends up with it.

What advice is given to Japanese mothers who give birth outside Japan in order to accomplish this?

I've seen these boxes - is this the sort of thing I should be asking ojiisan to bring from Tokyo?

MrLapLap says he has his stored somewhere, but I'm not going to be able to see it until it's way past the point of no return with this new cord so I've no idea what dried Japanese cords typically look like (do they have ribbons? are they dried into a standard shape?). As you can imagine, it's not something I want to be giving much thought to at the crucial moment - now is a much better time.