Mini-special issue of ISISH 2010.

The International Symposium on Industrial Safety and Health (ISISH) is a biannual meeting collaboratively organized by the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, Japan (JNIOSH) and some foreign institutes that have a research cooperative agreement with JNIOSH; its objective is to thoroughly discuss and exchange views on the lat-est trends and topics in the field of occupational safety and health. The first inaugural meeting was held in 2002 as a bilateral seminar on industrial safety at Pukyong National University (PNU) in Korea. The second symposium was held in Tokyo in 2004 as the International Symposium on Industrial Safety (then called ISIS, for brevity), and the third, in Seoul in 2005, was hosted by the Korean Society of Safety (KOSOS) with support of the Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency (KOSHA), focusing on industrial safety. Since 2006, with the reorganization of JNIOSH as a turning point, topics concerning health and hygiene at work were added to the program, and the name of the symposium officially changed to ISISH. under the main theme of " The frontier of studies on industrial safety and health in East Asia. " In this symposium from three countries (Japan, Korea, and China) and nine organizations 13 scientists participated in an excellent, informative presentation. Dr. Toshisuke Hirano, professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo, delivered a keynote lecture entitled " The world of crisis management. " In addition, two prominent scientists, Dr. Woo-Chul Shin, manager of KOSHA, and Dr. Yoshiyuki Matsubara, research managing director of NRIFD, lectured on current trends in association with industrial safety and health. An epoch-making change in this symposium was the idea to select superior original papers concerning industrial health and hygiene and publish them in the Journal of Industrial Health. This was considered to be especially important to maintain the quality of presentations by promoting the speakers' motivation. Through a strict review process, two papers were accepted for publication. It is our great pleasure that our plan to publish a special issue has finally come true. In the next symposium to be held in 2012, we hope that more papers will be selected for another special issue.