This ‘Eagle’ Is a Rare Bird in Disasters : Medicine: Japan’s Dr. Masahiro Koyama, who visited Northridge last week, is a heralded specialist in emergencies.

The Eagle had landed. And boy, he must have been tired.

Even at rest, on vacation visiting old pals at a Northridge hospital last week, scenes from a dozen disasters seemed to haunt the physician’s cool, dark eyes.

The Mexico City earthquake in 1985.

The Mount Pinatubo volcanic explosion in the Philippines in 1991.

The Kobe earthquake in Japan in January.

The Tokyo subway nerve-gas attack in March.

And, last month, the Sakhalin Islands earthquake off Siberia.

Dr. Masahiro Koyama--code-named “the Eagle” by Japanese Red Cross colleagues because he sometimes literally parachutes into disaster scenes--was among the first medics to arrive at each emergency. A specialist in disaster medicine, he is a rare bird. His courage, self-effacing nature and full-time volunteerism makes him perhaps a vanishing breed.

In the chaos of Kobe in January, he met a group of doctors and nurses on a mercy mission from the San Fernando Valley. Meeting him again in an air-conditioned luncheon room at Northridge Hospital Medical Center last week, they reminisced about an event so unusual for them and yet so ordinary for him.

Dr. Carol Turek, an obstetrical anesthesiologist, gave him a big hug on sight. She admitted to a twinge of jealousy mixed with her respect.

Her awe was only heightened, when, eight hours later, he leaped to help a child suffering a seizure at a Universal City restaurant where they took him for dinner. Though beaten to the rescue by a Fire Department paramedic team, Turek discovered that Koyama always carries a medical kit with him in a small leather bag.

“The way he practices fulfills our ideals of medicine,” she said. “In the U.S., those ideals sort of get beaten out of you because medicine is such a business.”

In Kobe the week they met, the business was only about saving lives.

The lovely seaside city lay in ruins from the magnitude-7.2 quake, smoke from hundreds of gas-line fires still curling up from the rubble. The Northridge team had volunteered to join a U.S. medical response group, and landed in the city as fast as they could--one week after the temblor cast 325,000 people from their homes.

Yet Koyama had proven even quicker. He tore out of Tokyo with his Nippon Rescue Community organization at first word of the quake just before dawn on Jan. 17. He took a train as far as possible toward the ruined city where 5,200 people would ultimately die, then hiked another 25 miles.

Members of his team fanned out with small medical kits in hand, and set up aid stations to help the thousands of injured around the city while fire engines and rescue helicopters screamed in the blistering pandemonium around them.

Independent of the slow-moving Japanese government, Koyama rapidly set up a clinic in a corner of an elementary school in the suburb of Suwayama. It became a model for refugee centers citywide.

He leaned on his experience at previous disasters to ensure good hygiene at this cold and overcrowded school, where the sound of coughing split the air.

He demanded that windows stay open despite the frigid winter temperatures, figuring that only the free circulation of air could combat the threat of a fatal influenza epidemic. He also made frequent public-address announcements urging refugees to wear surgical masks, to wash their hands, to gargle, and to exercise outside in the sunshine.

And unlike nearly every other medical professional in Kobe in those first two weeks, he welcomed the assistance of U.S. doctors because it would boost the number of patients he could treat--and promised to allow him a few hours’ rest.

By the time the U.S. medical team discovered his clinic, the exhausted Eagle had not been relieved by any Japanese assistance squads--and had managed to get less than 20 hours’ sleep in eight days.

On Wednesday, basking in the the cozy reception at Northridge Hospital, he thanked the Americans again and praised their speed and selflessness.

“At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing was real,” he said, recalling their arrival at his impromptu aid station six months ago. “I was in shock. I couldn’t understand why an American team could reach my clinic faster than any Japanese. I thought I was seeing angels!”

In that frosty schoolroom six months ago, Dr. Turek and critical-care nurses Chitra Rao and Kim Bingaman soon won his confidence with their sure-handed, high-spirited management of patients.

On Wednesday, they kissed him and wept. Their memories were fresh and vivid.

Turek had been allowed to run the clinic while Koyama napped. It was an unusual role for her, and she relished it.

“Normally I stick needles into people and put them to sleep,” she said at the time. “This is really different, and really fun.”

The U.S. doctors stayed just a week, but Koyama stayed another three months. He said his patients praised the American team, and felt ashamed that their government had not welcomed them more amply.

“They thought the American doctors were much nicer than their typical Japanese doctors--they took more time, asked more questions, and seemed more concerned,” he said.

Delighted to learn that they had been appreciated, the Northridge medical personnel pressed Koyama to tell them what he had learned from Kobe. As it turned out, he said, the adventure proved valuable elsewhere in Pacific Rim earthquake country just four months later.

When he learned of the temblor that flattened a jerry-built industrial town in Russia’s Sakhalin Islands just north of Japan’s northern frontier, he said, he put a top priority on bringing dozens of blankets and gallons of water for victims.

He said his team treated 500 patients over two weeks before being kicked out by embarrassed Russian authorities, but the brief experience reinforced his belief in the importance of making emergency patients well-hydrated and warm before and during field surgery.

Koyama could regale the group with many such stories, as recounted by associates and Japanese newspapers and magazines: The time in 1990 when he slipped secretly into Kuwait with a team formed to spirit out Japanese nationals just after the Iraqi invasion. The two times he parachuted into Philippine jungles to check on the health of kidnaped Japanese executives. The time he assisted in a secret operation to assist a Korean kidnaping victim. The time he parachuted into a village near the Philippine villages where the Mount Pinatubo volcano showered ash and caused murderous mudslides.

But he is a modest man, and inspired them more by his dignity than by his daring.

The Northridge doctors reorganized their schedules to entertain him over the remainder of the weekend, compelled to assist in the R & R of a free spirit who so consummates the promise of their profession.

“Unfortunately,” he acknowledged, happy for a second time to accept their relief, “it’s been a very busy year.”