To the foreign database researchers in Japan It is with great sadness that we announce the sudden passing of Prof. Yahiko Kambayashi, due to cerebral hemorrhage at 4:42AM on February 06, 2004. Prof. Kambayashi was the Dean of Graduate School of Informatics at Kyoto University. He was a Fellow of IEEE. He contributed to several areas of database research such as database design, query processing, and object databases. Prof. Kambayashi served as a VLDB trustee from 1991 to 1996, receiving the SIGMOD Contributions Award in 1995 for his many professional services in Japan and internationally. He did a great contribution to database research community in Japan and was a Fellow of IPSJ(Information Processing Society Japan) and a Fellow of IEICE( Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers). We are deeply saddened by the untimely loss of Prof. Kambayashi. Many of us will remember him as a friend, mentor, and a leader of the Japanese database community. We will miss him dearly. Katsumi Tanaka(Kyoto University) Hiroshi Ishikawa(Tokyo Metropolitan Univ.) Takayuki Kitagawa(Tsukuba Univ.) Masaru Kitsuregawa(Univ. of Tokyo) Yasushi Kiyoki(Keio Univ.) Akifumi Makinouchi(Kyushu Univ.) Yoshifumi Masunaga(Ochanomizu Univ.) Shojiro Nishio(Osaka Univ.) Shunsuke Uemura(Nara Institute of Science and Technology) Kazumasa Yokota(Okayama Pref. Univ.) Haruo Yokota(Tokyo Institute Technology) Masatoshi Yoshikawa(Nagoya Univ.)