To commemorate the establishment of Kanazawa University Russia Alumni Association, a joint symposium on Training Program for Japan-Russia Innovative Leaders of Tomorrow supported by MEXT ’Inter-University Exchange Project’ was held online on September 29.

This symposium was featured in two parts; a kick-off event for the Kanazawa University Russian Alumni Association followed by three parallel symposiums on Cultural Exchange, Basic & Advanced Science and Technology, and Preventive medicine.

As an opening, our president Koetsu Yamazaki gave a video message to celebrate this event. And after that, Prof. Dmitrii Tayurskii (Vice-president, Kazan Federal University) expressed his hope to have a big gathering of alumni association in KFU in 2021. Next, Prof. Alla Salmina (vice-President, Krasnoyarsk Medical University) also introduced the exchange history between two countries and two universities.

To conclude the first part, an overview of Alumni Association was explained by the student ambassador Ms. Viktoriia Vovk. Videos which played in this session are now also available in our website(https://rutenkai.w3.kanazawa-u.ac.jp/purpose/).

In the second part, the symposium was divided into three programs in parallel and each group held own program to deepen exchanges with people who have been involved in our international activities for many years.

It has became usual to exchange with people using an online platform however, we start to realize importance of face-to-face exchanges these days.  From this event, we renewed our awareness of the way of reasonable combination of online and actual visit in the near future.