Thank you for visiting the Oto-Rhino-Laryngological Society of Japan website. Our society works tirelessly to support the provision of excellent otolaryngological care.
While otolaryngology includes head and neck surgery, it also encompasses many areas of internal medicine, and is an extensive medical care field that covers all of the five senses, except sight, namely, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Japan is currently facing a super-aging society, the like of which the world has never seen before. As elderly patients experience sensory organ deterioration, which results in impaired balance, difficulty in swallowing, etc., the patient’s mental state and cognitive functions, as well as their quality of life and ability to carry out the activities of daily living are greatly affected. In turn, this affects the vitality of our society as a whole. We, of the Oto-Rhino-Laryngological Society of Japan, are actively engaged in a range of activities aimed at preventing and abating such ailments in our aging population.
Even as we face an era of unprecedented population decline, our society is committed to taking steps for providing high-quality otolaryngological care. These steps include improvements in the quality of care, cooperation among medical institutions, cooperation with ophthalmologists, plastic surgeons, neurosurgeons, pulmonologists, dentists and oral surgeons, provision of emergency care, support for home care and health education in schools, campaigns to improve patient awareness of otolaryngological disorders/care, etc. By supporting groups working to achieve these goals, and with efficient distribution of roles among medical institutions, we hope to create a medical system that patients can place their trust in.
In recent years, medicine has become increasingly fragmented as the number of specializations has increased. As a result, the level of medical care has risen dramatically. However, as medical care becomes more specialized, the society’s need for otolaryngologists who can treat the patients holistically is also increasing. Under this specialist system aimed at improving the quality of specialist care, fears of the collapse of regional medical care have led to an overhaul of organizational structures and objectives, and many are now looking towards primary regional societies for a fresh start, in the form of completely new programs. Of all the primary regional societies operating under the former system in fiscal 2017, the Oto-Rhino-Laryngological Society of Japan is the only one to have responded to the needs of the people by establishing a new (tentative) specialist training program with a focus on clinical results. Within our highly specialized field, this training program will create skilled specialists and preserve regional care by having students learn at affiliated facilities and primarily university hospitals. Otolaryngology is an area of medicine that overlaps significantly with other fields; as the first to combine the fields of rhinology and laryngology to create an academic organization focused on otolaryngolology 124 years ago, we have now returned to our original intention of expanding our reach through cooperation and harmony with other disciplines, working together to create more value and hone our expertise, so as to be better able to serve our patients.
With a simple-to-use website, we hope to encourage lively two-way communication not just among members, but also with medical students, and patients and their families, making our society open and accessible to everyone. We would like to ask everyone visiting this page to keep up the good work this year, and thank you all for supporting us on our path to achieving reform.

Hiroshi Moriyama, MD, PhD
Chairman, Board of Directors
The Oto-Rhino-Laryngological Society of Japan, Inc.

(January 17^th, 2017)