Dear Members,

A Happy New Year to all of you.

I hope this message finds you well. We are also very grateful to the medical personnel for their dedicated work and other people making great efforts for preventing the pandemic. I guess everyone spent new year holidays quietly this year not as usual.

The Covid-19 continuing since last year has changed the whole world drastically. In these situations, we regrettably had no choice but to cancel our New Year’s Reception this year. We guess the pandemic is changing also everyone’s life and work style considerably. On the other hand, it might be a good opportunity to make the basis to respond to these drastic social changes for the new era. For example, because of Covid-19, we have been hardly able to go abroad and face-to-face social gatherings have been considerably restricted since last year and we are still struggling with it to overcome the situations. However, since the Internet infrastructure has been advancing more than before fortunately and online meetings and teleworking have become more popular and used actively, we could communicate with people more smoothly not only in Japan but also in foreign countries using these systems.

Under these unusual situations, we are sincerely sorry for not implementing most of JASO events last year, but we would like to rethink what we can do under the circumstances of the pandemic. We cannot predict future situation. Actually, Covid-19 is reported to be changing into the new variant and its infectability seems becoming stronger. Therefore, I think we would need to manage the activities of JASO differently. We would make the best efforts to protect member’s safety and relief and try to restart our activities not only in a usual way but also in a different way.

Thank you very much for your continued support for JASO this year in advance.

We sincerely wish all the best for you and your family.