臨床と研究という文武両道で
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A passionate cardiologist who masters both ‘clinical excellence and research strength.

It was on an ordinary day in 2019 when NAKAZAWA Gaku, then an associate professor of cardiology at Tokai University School of Medicine, opened his computer and noticed an unfamiliar email. The sender was SAKAGUCHI Genichi, professor and chair of cardiovascular surgery at Kindai University Faculty of Medicine. The message said there would be an upcoming faculty recruitment for the chair of cardiology—and asked if he might be interested.
“At first, I thought it might be a suspicious email,” NAKAZAWA said with a wry smile.
“I vaguely recalled having seen Professor SAKAGUCHI somewhere, but I had never had any direct connection with him. When I asked colleagues what kind of person he was, they all said, ‘He’s a really good doctor.’”
When NAKAZAWA reached out, SAKAGUCHI explained that a trusted cardiovascular surgeon in the Kanto region had personally recommended him. NAKAZAWA was flattered to be so highly regarded, but also hesitant. Born and raised in Tokyo, he had no ties at all to Kansai, where Kindai University is located. In fact, he had no dissatisfaction with his current position, and in truth, he had no complaints about his current environment. On the contrary, he felt almost overly fortunate.
“Still, Professor SAKAGUCHI suggested we meet over dinner. So, I decided to make a quick day trip to Osaka just to have that meal with him.”
NAKAZAWA joined the Department of Cardiology at Tokai University School of Medicine as an assistant professor in 2009, after returning from the CVPath Institute, Inc. in the United States. When he was preparing to return to Japan, Tokai University had approached him with a unique offer: there, he could pursue both clinical practice and pathology research.
“I wanted to do both—the clinical side and the research side, like mastering both the arts and the sciences. At Tokai, even as an assistant professor, the system allowed me to establish my own laboratory and secure my own research funding. So, I set up a pathology lab from scratch. The papers I had written in the United States were well received, and companies began bringing research projects to me. With those funds, I was able to hire people and expand the lab. Professor IKARI Yuji, who chaired the Department of Cardiology, gave me complete freedom. The younger doctors looked up to me and worked alongside me like extra hands. Honestly, I lacked for nothing at Tokai,” he says.
Looking back, NAKAZAWA recognizes that it had been a journey from zero at Tokai University —building a place where he could do exactly what he wanted, carving out his own path. Yet at times, he would catch himself wondering if he had grown too comfortable in that success. Perhaps, he thought, moving to Kansai, where he knew no one, might be a good thing.
Gradually, the idea of Kindai University began to loom larger in his mind.

“You look like the surgical type. So why internal medicine?”

NAKAZAWA Gaku was born in 1974 in the United States while his father, a pediatrician, was studying abroad.
After the family returned to Japan, he enrolled at Musashi Junior High School in Tokyo, one of Tokyo’s elite schools. But throughout his middle and high school years, basketball practice and hanging out with friends always took precedence over studying. With a sheepish scratch of his head, he admits that academics came second. Even so, he advanced to the Faculty of Medicine at Toho University.
“In high school, I hadn’t really thought about my future at all. My father was a doctor, and I thought, well, maybe it could be interesting—that was about the extent of my reasoning,” he says.
Even after entering medical school, NAKAZAWA says his life as a student was anything but “serious” for a while. The turning point came in his fifth year, when clinical training began.
“That’s when I started to take an interest in medicine itself, and how doctors relate to patients. Once I began studying, I found it fascinating. From then on, I really applied myself. By the sixth year, I was good enough to teach my classmates. At that point, I thought, there’s no way I’ll fail the national licensing exam.”
He chose cardiology as his specialty because, as he puts it, “the tempo and speed of the heart just suited me.” Another factor was perhaps the fact that his father, though a pediatrician, had also specialized in cardiac care.
Another reason was the rapid rise of catheter-based procedures in cardiology. Catheter surgery involves inserting a thin tube called a catheter through the femoral artery in the groin and guiding it up to the heart, where treatment is carried out from inside the blood vessels. Compared with open surgery, it places less strain on the body, allows for faster recovery, and carries a lower risk of complications.
Cardiologists are often seen as the “cultural types” of medicine, while surgeons are cast as the “athletic types.” NAKAZAWA remembers how this perception followed him early on.
“During my training rotations in internal medicine, people would often say, ‘You seem more like a surgeon. Why are you here in internal medicine?’ But in the end, interventional cardiology and catheter-based surgery turned out to be almost like surgery anyway.”
After graduating from the Toho University Faculty of Medicine, NAKAZAWA spent a year as a resident at the University of Tokyo Hospital before moving to Mitsui Memorial Hospital.
“Mitsui Memorial was renowned for its cardiology department. Personally, I wanted to be in a place where I could work flat-out, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year. Mitsui Memorial was exactly that kind of hospital.”
Days began at 7:00 a.m. and often didn’t end until 11:00 p.m. or even after midnight.
“If we finished by 10 p.m., we thought of it as an early night. We’d go out drinking until about 2 a.m., then head back to the hospital, crash on the floor, and start work again in the morning. Everyone there was glued to the hospital, driven purely by the desire to experience as many cases as possible.”
At Mitsui Memorial Hospital, the principle was simple: one physician took full responsibility for one patient.
“If a patient was critically ill and on ECMO, you couldn’t just hand them over to the on-duty doctor. If there was an empty bed beside the patient in the ICU, I would take naps there, sometimes staying for an entire week. Even when it wasn’t my assigned patient, if someone in critical condition was admitted, I couldn’t stand the thought of others gaining that experience while I missed out. Everyone would come in, saying, ‘Let me observe too.’”

Wanting to study abroad somewhere no one had gone before, he went to Gaithersburg, America.

Over time, NAKAZAWA began to view cardiology as a discipline where, “You don’t aim to score 100 points slowly—you must hit 70 quickly.”
He explained: “There’s always another person who needs saving right after. You need to get the patient to a stable 70 points fast; the fine-tuning to 100 can come later. If the heart stops, you have five minutes to act. Even if you come up with the right answer in twenty minutes, by then the patient will be gone. It’s like trying to solve a chess puzzle while sprinting the 100-meter dash.”
The exhilarating yet relentless days of rivalry and camaraderie at Mitsui Memorial Hospital eventually came to an end. There, it was common to move on after five or six years.
“I had already been accepted into the University of Tokyo’s graduate school. My strength, I knew, lay in dealing with patients with speed and precision. Could I really stand in a lab shaking test tubes and compete on equal footing with the people at Todai? Still, I was aware that to deepen my clinical expertise, I had to engage in research. By my fifth year, I started looking for a place abroad where no one else had gone.”
The place NAKAZAWA chose was CVPath, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, a small city of fewer than 70,000 people. There, he would study under Renu Virmani, a world authority in cardiovascular pathology. In July 2006, NAKAZAWA boarded a plane for Gaithersburg to begin the next chapter of his training.
“I wanted to become fluent in English. That’s why I chose an environment where there were no Japanese, so I would have no choice but to improve. At first, it was extremely difficult because my English was so poor. But by the third year, my English had really taken off.”
At CVPath, he advanced his research on the pathological changes caused by drug-eluting stents. Under Virmani, he learned more than just science—he learned the importance of holding firmly to one’s convictions.
“She would never bend her opinions. She was the kind of person who could convince you that black is white. In the world of research, sometimes that kind of strength is necessary.”
NAKAZAWA’s papers earned high praise, and Virmani herself encouraged him to stay on at the institute. Offers also came from other medical institutions across the United States. Yet, in the end, NAKAZAWA chose to return to Japan.
“The reason I pursued research was because I wanted to work on the very front lines of clinical medicine. To work at the forefront, at top-tier hospitals, one must also be someone who can conduct research. It is the dual path—both clinical practice and research. My career goal had always been patient care. The truth is, research ended up yielding more results than I expected. For a moment, I wavered, wondering if I should just stay on in America. But if I remained there, I wouldn’t be able to practice clinical medicine.”
With these thoughts in mind, NAKAZAWA returned to Japan in 2009, accepting an enthusiastic invitation to become an assistant professor in the Department of Cardiology at Tokai University School of Medicine. A decade later, in 2019, came the unexpected email from SAKAGUCHI Genichi of Kindai University Faculty of Medicine. By then, NAKAZAWA had spent ten years back in Japan. “When life becomes too comfortable, your growth slows,” he reflected. With that in mind, he decided to apply for the professorship at Kindai University.
In January 2020, NAKAZAWA assumed the role of Chief Professor of the Department of Cardiology at Kindai University Faculty of Medicine.

Osaka, once a place with no ties for me, is now becoming a home.

NAKAZAWA’s first impression of Kindai University Faculty of Medicine was simple: “Everyone here is genuinely kind.”
“The first thing I was told was to strengthen and revitalize the department’s clinical practice. What I always say during conferences and discussions is that the patient comes first. We must never practice medicine for the sake of our own ambition.”
In recent years, when it comes to cardiovascular diseases—particularly heart-related conditions—the term “heart team” has become widely used. Coronary artery disease, valvular heart disease, aortic disease: for each of these diseases around the heart, numerous treatment options are available. Catheter-based procedures such as PCI and TAVI/TAVR, medical therapies, and drug treatments all need to be weighed carefully to find the optimal solution for each patient’s condition. To do so requires close collaboration between cardiologists and cardiovascular surgeons, as well as anesthesiologists, radiologists, nurses, and rehabilitation staff.
At Kindai University, NAKAZAWA now leads this heart team alongside SAKAGUCHI, who first invited him. Their partnership remains strong.
“The number of cardiovascular surgeons is already small, and it keeps shrinking. If there aren’t enough people who can actually perform surgery, both we and our patients will be in trouble. That’s why it’s absolutely vital to protect the mental and physical health of the surgeons. So, starting in 2025, we decided to exempt them from night duty, with us cardiologists taking on that coverage. After all, when emergency surgeries arise, they may have to operate through the night. It’s a relationship of mutual support—give and take,” NAKAZAWA explains.
Since 2021, NAKAZAWA has served two terms as Director of the Emergency and Disaster Medical Center. To fill the previously vacant chair in emergency medicine, he personally recruited SHINOZAKI Koichiro, the current professor and chair. This time, it was NAKAZAWA’s turn to reach out through his network.
Though he had once had no ties to Osaka, he now finds it steadily becoming home.
“I’m also serving as Deputy Director of Kindai University Hospital. With relocation to a new hospital on the horizon, I feel a responsibility to build strong teams and help raise Kindai University’s brand,” he says.
NAKAZAWA’s guiding principle is clear: to boldly keep moving forward toward whatever challenge or goal lies directly before him. He remains unwaveringly focused on the future.