IISEE NEWSLETTER No.3 April, 2005
Dear Ex-participants of IISEE Training Course!
Ladies and gentlemen,
I believe you are working actively and successfully in seismology and earthquake engineering
related fields, hoping that our training efforts have taken a certain role in your career. The IISEE willkeep trying to improve the training program by obtaining your kind supports.
Toshibumi FUKUTA, Director of IISEE

1. Global Seismological Observation Course has successfully completed(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 aparty aimed at promoting mutual understanding and friendship. During the course period, weinvited Dr. Gerardo Suarez and Dr. John Coyne from CTBTO in Vienna and they provided aseminar 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 fromthe Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Over the past ten years, we have accepted about 10people every year. Now the number of the participants has exceeded 100 people. Seismologicalobservation 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 fordetecting underground nuclear test explosions. As we are the only country devastated by atomicbombs as a result of war, we are proud of our incomparable technological contribution based on ourdisastrous experiences and we will do our best for our continuous contribution.

2. World Conference on Disaster Reduction at Kobe
10 years have passed since the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake occurred in January 1995. TheWorld 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 unprecedented
damage to many countries even far from the island and the UN took the lead in adopting disasterprevention 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 curiosity
among visitors. The trainees of the regular course also attended the symposium as part of their fieldtrip.

3. Study Trip for the Regular Course Participants
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 theunderstanding of Japan.

Please feel free to send us your comments and opinions.
Contact Us: iisee@kenken.go.jp