The 124th Annual Meeting of the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan (PSJ) will be held in Osaka, March 29 (Mon.) - 31 (Wed.), 2004. The annual meetings are the biggest event of the PSJ. Almost all the active researchers, research-minded pharmacists, and students in every field of pharmaceutical science in Japan get together once a year to demonstrate and learn about new and exciting achievements.
  The Osaka meeting this year is packed with 24 symposia (duration 3 hours each), 15 mini-symposia (2 hours each), and 3396 contributed poster presentations, attracting more than 9,000 participants. In terms of numbers of attendees and scientific papers, this is probably the largest scientific pharmaceutical meetings in the world, reflecting the PSJ's traditional science-promoting efforts. In terms of quality, we hope that this meeting will inspire not only the Japanese audiences but also researchers overseas. The symposium theme and speakers have been selected by the Organizing Committee to include topical, advanced, or interesting subjects in a variety of educational, social, and basic and applied pharmaceutical research fields in Japan. The mini-symposia are organized by young, energetic researchers and focusing more on specific themes.
  We are moving rapidly to globalize routine PSJ meetings to share our fresh research results and knowledge with overseas colleagues. We will make our meetings more open and visible, so that researchers outside Japan can immediately access our most recent information long before it is published in journals. The PSJ welcomes assessment of our activities from overseas. For ultimate internationalization, we will exclusively use English in all regular PSJ meetings to facilitate the participation of non-Japanese. Currently, we are bilingual and welcome foreign participation. Meanwhile, we have started publishing abstracts from the routine symposia in English in our regular journal YAKUGAKU ZASSHI (Journal of the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan) as special issues to distribute them worldwide. The English abstracts are also available on our Web site (http://www.pharm.or.jp/index_e.html).
  It is our hope that these English abstracts will attract the attention of overseas researchers to help them to understand how the pharmaceutical sciences are progressing in Japan, and encourage them to participate in our meetings to exchange information for the health and welfare of all mankind.
  March 2004
Eiichi Kimura
2003-2004 President,
The Pharmaceutical Society of Japan