What will our section do?

We had been thinking this and that about the principle and strategy of maintaining the section activities, which were about to start at the beginning of 1999, and finally came up with the following thoughts. This was in mid-1998.

First of all, a board member of any academic society is essentially a volunteer who keeps trying to elaborate on the valuable new services available to members. We may, therefore, need some means by which to prevent the people who believe the post to be filled is honorary, when in fact it is granted by election.

Next, every member should be encouraged to manage the necessary operations to set him/herself up as a fellow candidate. It is really harmful that any local organization participates in the pre-selection of fellow candidates prior to the official evaluation by the authorized committee. We, thus gaining a greater number of people of outstanding leadership, expect the basis for the development of academic activities to be significantly strengthened.

Finally, the students, as candidates of those taking the coming years leadership, will have the experience of organizing and maintaining a symposium for themselves. Owing to the tremendous efforts of active volunteers, those things, even more than what I intended, will be brought into practice by making their results visible before long.

How has our section come about? – An Internationality named locality –

Where is the center of the world? You will be at a loss how to answer. The center may differ depending, at least, on the fields of human activities such as academia, art, and politics. Suppose you were asked where the center of Japan was. ? The answer is obvious. Tokyo unifies and maintains all kinds of activities, and so it is the center. Since there is a center, other places are all called local counties (or countries) here in Japan.

When I moved from Tokyo to Hiroshima, I used to say to my university olleagues and students: you may want to keep watching Tokyo. Sorry, you can’t see it because Hakone mountains are hiding Tokyo behind them. Try to look across the ocean. There you will see Los Angeles. To be honest, however, what we could actually see there, from the Hiroshima coastline, was Miyajima island. At any rate, people started presenting their research outcomes in our local language which was commonly used in Los Angeles from that time. In fact, such a local language is called the international language.

In such a local county as Hiroshima, an IEEE section was newly organized in 1999. People will say: the Hiroshima Section actually came into existence simply as a result of the unexpected break up of the overweight Tokyo Section into eight parts, following the government administrative division principle. Such a concept, however, can’t get acclimated to the world of local language. We started having people in other cities in Chugoku Prefecture as members of the Hiroshima Section, in the hope that they would soon be independent and eventually gain their own sections in Okayama, Yamaguchi, Tottori, and Shimane with a greater number of members enrolled.

The organization of the Hiroshima Section has thus been worked out. We now hope that our section, in turn, will have members from outside Chugoku Prefecture, or even from outside Japan, by developing attractive programs on the basis of the section’s internationality named ‘locality’

In closing this note, I highly appreciate Dr. Takao Hinamoto for his effort and contribution in forming Hiroshima Section and also Drs. Ikuo Awai, Mitiko Miura-Mattausch and Yoshiaki Kakuda for their valuable assistance and collaboration in the early stages of building up specific section activities.