Japan Ergonomics Society

Following the third term, I have assumed the position of the president of the board for the fourth term (2014 – 2015) at the Japan Ergonomics Society (JES). I intend to put every effort in making the JES much more attractive to its members, while implementing our ongoing policy of activating the society at the same time. The biggest project from the third to the fourth term is the one to commemorate the JES’s 50th anniversary, for which we have various plans to carry out over the course of a year. The conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the JES was successfully held in Kobe, and it left a great impression on us. We greatly appreciate the cooperation and support from the Kansai branch members and all the other JES members.

To invigorate the JES activities and encourage it to contribute to society, the following three suggestions were made in the report of the Future Ergonomics Committee in 2007: (1) Try actively to link with society (or try to meet social needs), (2) Improve the quality and quantity of service to the JES members and (3) Strengthen and activate the organization. Based on these suggestions, Susumu Saito, the then President of the Board, took a variety of measures to link with society (1) and strengthen the organization (3), while the improvement of service to the JES members (2) was focused on during the third term. In order to “make the JES attractive” as in the slogan, another two goals, besides the three suggestions above, were set: (4) Make the JES an organization with promptness and (5) Expand the area of activities. For promptness, we tried to shorten the time from manuscript submission to its publication for the Japanese Journal of Ergonomics by digitalizing the process of submission and review. The tenure of the president of the board was also shortened to a maximum of two terms of four years to encourage change of the board members. For the expansion of our activities, the JES played a key role in updating the website of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA), and domestically, we tried to be careful so that chair persons of committees might not be appointed only from Tokyo or the Kanto region.

For the fourth term, under the slogan of “Aiming to be a more attractive society,” we have set the following targets: (1) Anticipate social needs and introduce our activities to meet those needs, and (2) Expand the areas of activities and the number of members. In order to demonstrate how sensitive we are to the latest social needs and how we try to answer them, we will energetically introduce the activities of our technical groups and promote the exchange between enterprises and the JES. Internationally, we will seek to strengthen the ties with ergonomics societies in Asia, besides contributing to the activities of the IEA. In addition, we have another important job of preparing for the Asian Conference on Ergonomics and Designs, which will be held in Japan in 2017. We will, of course, continue our efforts in correcting regionally uneven distribution of the members and activities so that the number of the JES members and its activities expand further. We would deeply appreciate it if many of you, including the members, would kindly support us.