Almost the entire Pacific coast of the Tohoku region suffered catastrophic damage from the great earthquake and the tsunami in particular. Indeed, almost 20 000 people, both young and old, perished. It was the greatest tragedy for Japan since the Second World War. The response to international aid for this disaster, as at the time of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, was exceedingly quick and large-scale, for which we are sincerely appreciative. It is already a year since the disaster, when normally the hammering

sounds of reconstruction would be reverberating loudly. But there was an additional disaster, one that might be described as man-made. It was of course the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, a global-scale major accident on a level with Chernobyl. The radioactive contamination from this accident affected LEE011 the international community as well as Japan. For several ten years to come it may continue to adversely affect the health of men and Doxorubicin chemical structure women. Although embarrassed by this catastrophe, the Japanese government has been unable to work out effective countermeasures, which has been aggravating the situation. The radioactive contamination problem on top of the damage from the earthquake and tsunami requires constructive actions from us in the medical profession. We have been going to the disaster site as volunteers

and giving help to many. We have learned firsthand the importance of disaster medicine. Stress-related ulcers, intestinal infections and other gastroenterological disorders also occur frequently and many specialist gastroenterologists have been out to hospitals in the Tohoku area. However, damage to health from exposure to radiation, although experienced in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, is an unknown area for us and is an important one for future research. Creative research in the field of gastroenterology may also be called for. We shall also have to consider covering the topic of disaster

and radiation medicine in gastroenterology in the next Symposium. Under such circumstances, we were forced to cancel the 14th Taishotoyama International Symposium on Gastroenterology and hope you understand. However, many excellent research outcomes had been submitted for that Symposium and, although it could not be held, we thought that these should be published as papers. To date medchemexpress the findings in these symposia have been released in international journals, and therefore this time too we decided to include them in the Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology. Fortunately there was general agreement to this and 19 papers were received. Following their peer review, these have finally been published. For this we are grateful for the assistance of the peer reviewers and numerous medical scientists. The cover shows the beautiful Rainbow Bridge over Tokyo Bay, representing the Bridge of Friendship. It could also be a symbol of the current reconstruction work following the major disaster.