I am quite happy to inform you that delegates in various fields of sciences join in this Seminar from fourteen countries and area. We expect fruitful and successful presentations and discussion in this Seminar. My sincere gratitude should be extended to Prof. Dr. Tatsuzo Koga, president of the Tenroku Foundation for his helpful support, due to which we succeed to invite a number of distinguished delegates from overseas, and also to Mr. Yukio Kiuchi, head of the international exchange section, University of Tsukuba, and the other members of that section for their heartiful cooperation. I wish you will enjoy your participation and make an influential proposal in the name of this Seminar. The Seminar comes at a significant time - when we, in the United Nations system are reflecting on what 50 years of United Nations life means, and when the world is gearing up to confronting the third millennium in four years, or as a more immediate measurement of time, after just 211 more weekends.
People have strange reactions to what are otherwise merely symbolic events.
I have an animal photography book at home published just after the turn of 1900. This was a time when the world was enchanted with science and modernism, a time when the big issues were to do with exploring essences in art through cubism, essences of people through psychoanalysis, essences of the physical world through x-rays, essences of the universe through relativity theory. Animal photography was also exploring essences of animal behaviour, though with rather limited technological means at the time. In the middle of the book which otherwise is a highly respectable scientific work by a fellow of the Royal Society however are a series of photographs of a daisy and a frog before midnight and after midnight at the turn of the century - as if it made a difference. Centuries symbolize a major new age, in direct proportional impact to the coming of a new annual age symbolized in new year resolutions.