Greeting

The 69th Congress will be held from Friday, November 22 to Sunday, November 24, 2024 at the PACIFICO Yokohama Conference Center. The last time this meeting was held in Yokohama was 12 years ago, when the 57th Congress was held there in 2012 under the presidency of Professor Hiroto Kimura of Hirosaki University. I myself belong to the Kyushu Division of JSOMS, and as a member of the Kyushu Division organizing a congress in a city outside Kyushu I am following in the footsteps of Professor Masaaki Goto of Saga University, President of the 59th Congress held in Makuhari in 2014, and Professor Izumi Asahina of Nagasaki University, President of the 65th Congress held in Nagoya in 2020. I will make every effort not to sully the names of my predecessors, and am grateful for your support and guidance.

As the theme of the 69th Congress, I have chosen “Creative Evolution toward New Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. ”Homo sapiens is believed to have appeared around 200,000 years ago, and we basically continue to carry the genome acquired through the hunter-gatherer lifestyle all those years ago. As we are unable to modify our genome in order to adapt to and survive in our new technological world, we are faced with the unavoidable necessity of changing our consciousness, thinking, and established concepts. That means creative evolution. New stirrings in the sphere of oral surgery, such as the application of artificial intelligence (AI), may be involved in this creative evolution. In particular, the title embodies my hope for creative evolution by the younger generation. (In fact, the term “creative evolution” is the title of a book by French philosopher Henri Bergson, which emphasized the élan vital, or inner dynamism, of life in contrast to the tendency at the time to understand life merely in terms of mechanistic materialism. You could say that the inner dynamism of the young is actually the theme of this Congress.)

Like the 68th Congress, this meeting will be held primarily in person, with the Special Lecture, Educational Lectures, and symposia available for streaming on-demand. The Special Lecture will be given by Professor Hiroaki Mitsuya, Director-General of the National Center for Global Health and Medicine Research Institute and Head of the Experimental Retrovirology Section of the National Cancer Institute’s Center for Cancer Research in the USA, who was the discoverer of the AIDS treatment drug AZT and who is nominated every year for the Nobel Prize. We are also planning to cover a wide variety of other topics, with the goal of stimulating creative evolution.

The other day I had an opportunity to visit PACIFICO Yokohama, and this country boy was overwhelmed by the liveliness of the city environment. It’s an even more stimulating site than Makuhari. I hope that as many of you as possible, older and younger, men and women, will attend the meeting, both to discuss the future of oral surgery and to enjoy the shopping and night life of Yokohama.