Osamu Morimoto President, Japan Quality Assurance Organization

For this, the eighth installment of the International Environmental Children's Drawing Contest, we called for entries on the theme of "harmony between humankind and nature."

In responce, we received a remarkable 20,748 entries from 53 countries around the world, each one expressing the desires to save the global environment in the heart of the child who made it.

The entries are brimming with the rich imagination and sensibility of the children, and clearly convey their concern for the earth as the home of nature, family, friends, other living creatures, and the children themselves. Each delivers the strong message that we must protect the global environment. In my opinion, all of them deserve a prize. I want to thank all the children for entering such exquisite drawings.

In closing, I would like to note that the contest is held in order to encourage children around the world to think about the global environment through the process of drawing pictures. It is our hope that the contest will help to stimulate the further spread of approaches to global environmental problems and again endow the earth with a rich environment where human beings live in harmony with nature.