(To our pleasure)All of the participants have successfully completed all the course works of 2004 Global Seismological Observation Course, which was held from October 22nd to December 17th, and returned to their home countries safely.

11 young engineers and researchers from 9 countries; Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, Indonesia, Jordan, Nicaragua, Turkey, Yemen, and Zimbabwe, attended lectures, trainings, field trips, and a party aimed at promoting mutual understanding and friendship. During the course period, we invited Dr. Gerardo Suarez and Dr. John Coyne from CTBTO in Vienna and they provided a seminar on its system and International Monitoring System. Ten years have already passed since the course was added as one of the crucial international cooperation activities that resulted from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Over the past ten years, we have accepted about 10 people every year. Now the number of the participants has exceeded 100 people. Seismological observation technology can be used to detect nuclear explosions once they have taken place.

From this perspective, this course aims at dissemination of knowledge on the technologies for detecting underground nuclear test explosions. As we are the only country devastated by atomic bombs as a result of war, we are proud of our incomparable technological contribution based on our disastrous experiences and we will do our best for our continuous contribution.

10 years have passed since the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake occurred in January 1995. The World Conference on Disaster Reduction was held under the lead of the UN at the Kobe International Exhibition Hall in International Conference Center Kobe from January 18th to 22nd aimed at drawing up new disaster prevention guidelines for various kinds of natural disasters, keeping the lessons learned from the disastrous Kobe-earthquake in mind.

As you have already heard from the news, the conference focused on the earthquake occurred off the Sumatra at the end of the last year which triggered deadly tsunami and caused unprecedenteddamage to many countries even far from the island and the UN took the lead in adopting disaster prevention measures such as an establishment of a global tsunami early warning system.

IISEE posted panels concerning the history of IISEE, current training courses, IISEE net, studies on early earthquake damage estimation system of buildings, strong motion observation, studies onearthquake, and technological cooperation on earthquake disaster prevention conducted with JICA, in an exhibition booth.

We introduced the process of a fault fracture in Niigata-chuetsu earthquake and building behavior during earthquakes on a television monitor. This became the center of attention with great curiosityamong visitors. The trainees of the regular course also attended the symposium as part of their field trip.

A field trip to Kansai and its vicinity area was carried out for the regular course participants from Jan. 16th to 22nd. They completed their crowded schedule by visiting the A-bomb Dome in Hiroshima, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, earthquake engineering and seismic disaster mitigation research facilities of Hiroshima Univ. and Kyoto Univ., a three-dimensional shaking table in National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention, Kobe earthquake-related facilities, and Higashi-honganji Temple restoration work site, and participating in the UN Conference on Disaster Reduction as part of the field trip. We are sure that the participants could reach out to a Japanese culture in the ancient capital and make use of these experiences for the understanding of Japan.