Welcome Remarks by President Jun-ichi Nishizawa
at the Open Session of the 7th Roundtable Meeting of Engineering Academies of China, Korea and Japan
October 29, 2003; Keio University, Mita Campus

Welcome ladies and gentlemen, who are colleagues to guard the life of every human being all over the world. Human lives are now being threatened by many causes; poison and illnesses caused by bacteria and virus.

Moreover, world is suffering also from the confused economic situation now. Especially, Japan is still deeply sunk and it seems very difficult even to start reconstruction. However in such situation, it is the best occasion to find and ascertain the optimum direction for the just started 21st century.

As is well known, in Chinese character, engineering can be represented by a letter "工," which is made up of two parallel horizontal lines and a vertical line connecting both the horizontal lines at the center. Upper horizontal line means Heaven or Nature created by the God and the lower horizontal line corresponds to Earth. A vertical line combining the two horizontal lines means the effective application of the natural phenomena or natural resources for the happiness of the human beings and of the society on the ground. Therefore, it is a little bit different from the European philosophy. In every engineering, we include the happiness of our human beings.

As a result, we engineers should be so eager to detect harm and diminish obstacles for every sort of affairs. Especially nowadays, as a result of a rapid progress of engineering, too much of unexpected bad results have been induced such as pollution and other environmental problems. Unexpected new diseases like SARS have been occurring. Additionally, we human beings have been suffering from the increase of the illnesses like cancers as well as the unexpected release of bacteria like anthrax.

We should fight for the safety of our lives in every means. A Japanese genius poet, Kenji Miyazawa described, "If even one person remains unhappy, other human beings can never be happy."

This is the mind of our Asian human beings. In this sense, engineering can represent as a fused compound of humanism and science.