In June 2004, Professor Button invited me to serve as the new Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Infrared and Millimeter Waves. Although I was hesitant to take on this additional responsibility, because I was at the time beginning my work as Director of the new Research Center for Development of Far-Infrared Region at Fukui University, I ultimately accepted his invitation. It was a great honor for me, and I would like to formally thank Professor Button for giving me such a valuable opportunity.

When I became Editor-in-Chief, my first task was to adopt a new referee system for selecting high-quality papers for publication. Before then, Professor Button handled the review of all papers personally. When I began to use expert reviewers in the field to evaluate submitted manuscripts, around 35% of submitted papers were rejected.

Some years ago, there were problems with the publication of the journal, and publication ceased for longer than half a year. I was afraid that our journal would disappear completely. However, Springer finally corrected the problems, and the journal has not seen a publication delay at all since this time.

In 2008, two conferences (International Conference on Infrared and Millimeter Waves and International Conference on Terahertz Electronics) were merged into the new International Conference on Infrared, Millimeter, and Terahertz Waves. Responding to this merging of communities, we decided to change the title of our journal to the Journal of Infrared, Millimeter, and Terahertz Waves. In the beginning of 2009, the volume 30 started with this new title and with the addition of a second Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Martin Koch, who represented the terahertz community. Together, we continued the effort to improve the quality and reputation of the journal.

Recently, I have decided to retire as the Editor-in-Chief at the end of this year. In the future, I hope to continually cooperate with the editorial board members to make the quality of our journal higher, so that the journal will become a leader in this research field.

I would like to say many thanks to my colleagues on the journal for your cooperation during the past 6 years. I hope you share my goal of continuing to improve the journal.

1 November 2010