Masaru Kono
– Citation
He served as the Meeting Committee chair of the first Joint Meeting of Geoscience Related Societies and as the initiator of the Roundtable Meeting of society presidents of geophysics and related fields. Then on, he continued to greatly contributing to the founding and development of the Joint Meeting of Geoscience Related Societies.
– Comment
My personal history shows enhanced activities related to geoscience union in 10 plus years since 1990. I served as Meeting Chair of the joint meetings in 1990 and 1998. The year 1990 marked the first joint meeting and was hosted by Tokyo Institute of Technology. The 9th joint meeting in 1998 was hosted by the University of Tokyo but the venue was set outside the university campus for the first time at the Olympics Memorial Youth Center at Yoyogi as the meeting had grown in size. By the extraordinary teamwork of Terasawa, Iwagami, and Nakamura, we could create a template for running our meetings. This experience influenced the meetings held in 2001 and thereafter when the Geoscience Joint Annual Meeting Administration Organization was established and succeeded meeting organization from universities. For example, it was Terasawa-san’s original idea to print out and distribute daily programs as a double-page spread view of the matrix of schedule and session rooms on a big sheet of paper; and it has remained so over the many years.Since then, in 2003 when the IUGG General Assembly was held in Sapporo, I was President of IUGG. I also served as a Member of the Science Council of Japan for 3 years since 2005. In order to effectively active in these activities, it is essential for a large number of related societies to have a strong cooperative relationship, and there is no doubt that the organization of the RENGO progressed rapidly during this period.I myself did not take the initiative in activities to promote the development of RENGO. However, I have tried as hard as possible to carry out tasks that were required by the workplace I was in at the time and the position I was elected to. I would be very happy if this has been an impetus for the development of RENGO.