First of all, I would like to express my sincere wish for happiness and health of all tribology colleagues in the world in this hard time with COVID-19. Under many limitations and obstacles, we must continue our activities for advancing tribology and promoting international cooperation. I hope everyone's health and safety, and this pandemic to cease soon.

  Since the society was founded in 1956 as the Japanese Society of Lubrication Engineers, and later renamed as the Japanese Society of Tribologists (JAST) in 1992, the society has served as platform to provide opportunities to connect, cooperate, and promote research and development of tribology. Most of the members of the society are residents, companies and research institutes in Japan, and the society's services have been mainly domestic. However, while continuing activities for domestic members, the society have the important role of promoting exchange of people and information in the world through conferences, joint meetings, publications and other communication media.

  JAST organizes International Tribology Conference every four years. In the most recent one held in Sendai in September 2019, we had about nine hundred participants from over forty countries and regions where forty percent of participants were from outside Japan. JAST also organizes joint meetings with foreign tribology societies every year. JAST's another important global activity is publication of the journal Tribology Online, a peer reviewed Open Access journal with no page charge. The editorial board is international and consists of researchers from eight countries. Tribology Online welcomes papers on all aspects of tribology and related science and engineering areas from all over the world.

  As the science and technology of interacting surfaces in relative motion and of related subjects and practices, tribology has long been making a great contribution to make everything work in the broad industrial areas. The particular and most emphasized part of tribology has been to reduce energy loss and extend service lives through controlling friction and wear. This has become more important than ever now as the global warming is becoming the common critical issue in the world. International collaboration is necessary for utilization of renewable energy and decarbonization to realize carbon neutral energy society, and we tribologists have to play a big role. We have a number of technical issues to improve efficiency of existing machinery as well as to help development of new energy systems, to which our fundamental and applied researches must contribute.

  There are two essential points that we need for future developments. One is collaboration. Tribology is interdisciplinary in nature, and we collaborate with people from different areas and different countries, and also interaction between academia and engineers is necessary, and we need trustful relationship between researchers. The other point is the promotion of young researchers who have new viewpoints and pioneer to create new concepts. Tribologists and tribology society have to make efforts to make tribology more attractive to young people, and provide opportunities to promote communication between young researchers and engineers in the world. JAST continues the activities to promote these.

   Thank you for reading this and look forward to seeing you somewhere in the near future!

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