KEK Open House (September 15th)
KEK held an annual open house on the 15th of September, 1997. Despite of rather heavy rain fall, total 2,500 people visited various facilities. KEK open house started on 1977 and has been inviting outside people to see KEK in action since then. The open house included special lectures and kid's program of building a radio etc. in addition to tours through various KEK facilities.

Ceremony to celebrate the launching of the new KEK (September 16th)
On the 16th of September 1997, KEK celebrated the launching of the new organization. Total 290 people from various universities, institutes, embassies and industries from all over Japan attended the ceremony. From overseas to attend the ceremony were Paul R. WILLIAMS (CCLRC, UK), Goldon WALKER (RAL, UK), Shouxian FANG (Chinese Academy of Science), Virulh SAYAKANIT (Chulalongkorn U., Thai), Won NUMKUNG and Lee KWANG-SOO (Pohang Accelerator Lab., Korea), James ALEXANDER (Cornell U., USA) , Wolf GUENTER (DESY, Germany) and Satoshi OZAKI (BNL, USA). Following the address of the KEK Director-General, Hirotaka SUGAWARA, Nobutaka MACHIMURA (Minister of Education, Science, Sports and Culture), Keiichi KODAIRA (Director, National Astronomical Observatory), Shigehiko HASUMI (President, University of Tokyo), Masaru HASHIMOTO (Governor, Ibaraki Prefecture) and Paul WILLIAMS gave congratulatory address.
The ceremony was followed by a banquet at Tsukuba Dai-ichi Hotel. The banquet started with "Kagami-wari" ceremony, a Japanese-style ceremony of opening a "sake" barrel together. Many people who worked at KEK some time or another in the past 25 years came back for this occasion from all over Japan as well. They had an additional get together following the banquet.

KEK-CERN Steering Committee meeting (October 8th)
The 3rd KEK-CERN Steering Committee Meeting for the collaborative work of the LHC accelerator construction was held at KEK on October 8th, 1997. Yoshitaka KIMURA was nominated as the chairperson of the meeting. The progress of the insertion quadrupole magnet R&D in 1997 and the plan in 1998 were discussed and fixed in the meeting.

TARA project reached new phase (October 14th)
Collaborations between laboratories, universities and industries is getting more encouragement by the government so that scientific research results can be efficiently brought into industrial applications. One of such project called TARA (Tsukuba Advanced Research Alliance) officially started in 1995 and was led by Noriyoshi SAKABE who built a general purpose experimental facility for analyzing macromolecular structure at KEK Photon Factory. The project members consists of 145 people from 8 research laboratories, 17 universities and 14 industrial companies. Since the starting of the facility, 37 papers were published. After the recent completion of an office building next to the Photon Factory, they had a tour through the facility and a celebration on the 14th of October.

KEK Special Lectures (October 24th)
On the 24th of October, public lectures and a panel discussion were given in Tokyo.
Following the lectures by Makoto KOBAYASHI and Tadashi MATSUSHITA, a panel discussion chaired by Toshimitsu YAMAZAKI was presented. Haruo KURODA, Fumitaka SATO, Hirotaka SUGAWARA, Hiroyuki TORII and Kazuhiko NISHIJIMA were the panelists on the subject of "Frontiers of Science using High Energy Accelerators."

KEK Art Festival (November 4th ~ 9th)
The second week of November was the annual KEK Art Festival week. Oil paintings, photographs and hand crafts done by KEK members and visitors were exhibited. A music concert was also held on the 4th of November.
A performance of a Chinese mandolin

International Party (December 16th)
Over 10% of researchers working in KEK is from outside of Japan. International Affairs Division and International Collaboration Office were created recently to make KEK a more easy-to-work place for researchers from outside of Japan.
They hosted the first "International Party" on December 16th. Over 70 people came to the party and had a good time together.