Dawn of cardiac surgery in Japan.

Because of World War II, the development of closed heart surgery in Japan was delayed for several years. As far as open heart surgery was concerned, the tireless Japanese investigators in the early 1950s worked extremely hard to quickly catch up with the North Americans and Europeans. Looking back at the dawn of Japan's open heart surgery, we are impressed at how the investigators precisely reported their experiences as cited in this editorial, how many times they repeated their experiments prior to clinical application, and most importantly how cooperatively they worked as a group even in the very competitive environment.