Kyodo News

Helicopters raced through the night sky trailing police motorcades rushing from hospital to hospital. Television networks interrupted soap operas with news bulletins. It was, by all accounts, one of the more frantic newsgathering spectacles ever in a country where media mobs are the norm. The object of all this attention: a heart transplant operation.

Wait a minute. This is 1999. Surgeons around the world have been transplanting hearts for more than three decades now, and while the operation is not quite routine, it is no longer whiz-bang science. Yet up until last week, no doctor in Japan could perform the surgery. This is a country where technology moves with a flash, but attitudes change at a glacial pace. Indeed it was only last week that a government panel indicated it will finally approve the birth-control pill later this year.

The transplant policy dates back to 1968, when Dr. Juro Wada performed one of the earliest heart transplants--only to be investigated for murder. Critics alleged that the person who donated the heart was not yet dead because the brain was still functioning. It didn't help Wada's case that the recipient died after 83 days. Ultimately the accusation against Dr. Wada was dropped, but his reputation--as well as that of the procedure itself--were tarnished. "We had medical doctors accusing other doctors," says Dr. Wada, now 77. "It completely demolished the spirit of medical pioneers."

Not to mention the hopes of thousands of patients, who over the past three decades could not get the transplants they needed to live. "Everyone was afraid," says Dr. Shinichi Nunoda, a cardiologist at Tokyo Women's Medical University. "Surgeons feared they would be accused of murder. And if a surgeon was accused, his department and hospital would have been left with a bad reputation." In 1991 Nunoda risked his career by helping cardiac patients travel overseas for transplants. In the past 15 years, 44 Japanese have received new hearts in other countries. "I thought about it over and over again," he says. "If these patients could not get a transplant because I would not help them, then they would die. I would regret that forever."

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