In Japan, there have been annual meetings on several complex variables in summer and winter for decades of years since early 1970's. The informations had been circulated inside Japan until 1994, and so the participants had been consisting mainly of Japanese mathematicians except for special occasions. In March, 1995 the First Hayama Symposium was held as the third MSJ (Math. Soc. of Japan)-Internation Research Institute, titled ``Geometric Complex Analysis'', whose proceedings was published from World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore in 1996. The total number of participants was 150, and among them 43 participants were invited from 13 foreign countries.
This was an exceptionally large international conference on several complex variables ever held in Japan, and has been recognized as a big success among the Mathematical community at home and abroad. Motivated by this success, we began to make the meeting more international. So far, about 10 to 20 Mathematicians from abroad have participated every year. It is our principle that the Hayama Symposium on Several Complex Variables is open to public in the international sense.