The alarms would sound at night, disturbing her sleep, but for anesthesiologist and intensive care specialist Dr. Uliana Kashchii, there was never any question of disabling the app on her phone alerting her to the Russian bombs falling on Ukraine.
That way, even in Tokyo roughly 8,000 kilometers away, she could still stay connected to home.
“Throughout the three months my colleagues and I have been here, the alarms on our phones have continued to go off, warning us of danger, which is the sound that all Ukrainians are listening to,” she said at Tokyo’s Juntendo University.
“They can’t turn their alarms off, so I shouldn’t turn mine off here either.”
Kashchii — who prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 was completing her residency training while working at the COVID-19 ward of a hospital in Kyiv — returned to Ukraine on Aug. 28. There she will join a volunteer medical battalion heading for the front line in the country’s east.
But from early June, she was a participant in the Clinical Observership Program at Juntendo University Hospital in central Tokyo as part of a fellowship for Ukrainian students, medical residents and researchers provided by the university.
Her day-to-day life on the program entailed training sessions and observations with Japanese doctors as they made their daily rounds and interacted with patients.
As an anesthesiologist — a role that in Ukraine also includes intensive care, pain medicine and emergency medicine — she was able to spend her time in various departments observing a diverse array of different medical procedures.
“We were told all the time by Japanese people, ‘Please enjoy,’ and we could tell that they really wanted us to enjoy our experience in Japan,” she said. “Which I did, especially in the hospital, where I saw rare cases and surgeries I had only heard about and couldn’t imagine seeing with my own eyes.”
She described visiting pain clinics — dedicated centers for the investigation and treatment of different forms of pain — which are relatively new to Ukraine but well established in Japan. She was impressed by the bedside manner of the Japanese medical professionals she observed working in the facilities.
“Especially with children in the operating room, for example, because they come in very anxious and nervous, but here they take as much time as is needed to calm the patient down, to talk to them and make sure that everything is okay,” she said.
Having attended a cardiology center at Juntendo University Hospital, an intensive care facility at a hospital in the capital’s Nerima Ward and a Disaster Medical Assistance Team facility in Fukushima Prefecture, Kashchii noted the similarities between the Ukrainian and Japanese medical systems.
“In the medical field in Ukraine, we feel the impact of European medicine and American protocols, but also Japanese ones too, and that’s why when we came here, it wasn’t too difficult to understand the work being done at the hospitals,” she said.
She pointed to the near-ubiquitous use in Ukrainian hospitals of medical equipment made by Japanese firm Nihon Kohden, which she said is favored in Ukraine over U.S. and European models due to low price tags, ease of use and high quality.
There were even things she could teach her Japanese counterparts about the machines, she said, given the amount of time she had spent using them in Ukraine.
As of April 25, six medical students, nine doctors and three researchers from Ukraine had taken part in the Juntendo program. Participants receive a round-trip airline ticket to Japan, free accommodation, a living stipend, fee waiver and access to different facilities, symposiums and training, depending on their specialism.
The university, known for its medical research and sports science programs, temporarily opened the program specifically to Ukrainian medical professionals and trainees in response to Ukrainian hospitals and other medical institutions being struck by Russian military forces during the invasion.
The invasion has “taken away opportunities to learn from and made a serious impact on the future of students, residents, and researchers,” the Juntendo program stated, and the aim of opening up the program to Ukrainian medical professionals was to help “support the leaders of tomorrow continue their studies.”
At a news conference held at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan in Tokyo on Aug. 22, Kashchii and her colleagues highlighted how 18 Ukrainian medical workers had, at that time, been killed and more than 50 injured in the six months since the Russian invasion began.
A further 300 Ukrainian medical workers had been in Russian captivity for more than three months, they said, pointing to what is an apparent attempt to target the nation’s medical infrastructure as part of the wider Russian invasion strategy.
Before arriving in Tokyo, Kashchii volunteered her services at a maternity ward in Kyiv where, she said, pro-Russian saboteurs had painted signs on the building to indicate that it should be targeted.
“There was a high building near the maternity ward, which was bombed,” she said, leaving a large hole between the 14th and 17th floors of the 20-story structure. “The rocket was aiming for the hospital, but luckily it missed.”
Knowing that incidents of this kind meant her skills were being missed at home, Kashchii often found herself feeling conflicted about her three-month stay in Tokyo.
Learning about and then applying for the fellowship just hours before the deadline while on a break during a 24-hour shift at the maternity hospital, she never imagined she would travel to east Asia, particularly with Ukraine at war, and she initially questioned whether or not she should leave.
“Three months is a long time after all, and my friends and I were joking, ‘What if we win during that time?’ To celebrate our victory, I’d have to come back,’” she said.
But eventually, her friends, family and the dean of her university persuaded her that the unique opportunity to spend three months training and adding to her skills as an anaesthesiologist at a hospital in Japan was too valuable to pass up.
Asked to name the highlights of her time in Tokyo, she said that — beyond Japanese food — it was Juntendo University Hospital, the medical environment and the chance to see the work being done there.
But it was also the feeling of calm and safety throughout the city.
“I’m going to walk around here as much as I can before I go and try to remember what it’s like not to hear real sirens everyday,” she said.
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