On February 28, the International Student Affairs Section (ISAS) and the Center for International Students and Scholars (CISS) hosted the NAIST International Stage at Millennium Hall.

 NAIST has held the International Friendship Meeting every year to deepen friendship between international students and researchers, faculty and staff, and guests from the various international exchange organizations that offer support to the NAIST international community. However, since the 2020 academic year, this event has not been held due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

 As an alternative, this year we held the NAIST International Stage, which mostly consists of performances by international students.

 As NAIST is still implementing measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19, in-person attendance was limited to those on-campus public and organizations, local community, scholarship organizations, and international exchange groups were able to view via live-streaming.

 The stage began with the pre-recorded videos that were kicked off with a cooking show by Thai students and was followed by a Filipino student singing a few songs and playing the guitar. Following this there was a mixed group of students who performed dance numbers together and a Japanese student from the extracurricular 'All Instrument Circle' group sang while playing the guitar to close out the video part of the show.

 Moving on to the live performance, Indonesian students played and danced J-POP using the traditional instrument Angklung, the Kungfu circle gave Kungfu performances, and American students sang a ballad and a popular musical song. Finally, students from Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and India gave a dance performance that mixed the cultures of various countries. The audience watched the passionate performances and cheered and applauded from start to finish. The audience even jumped on stage to join in during the performance, adding to the excitement of the event.

 This year was the first time in three years since the COVID-19 pandemic that a live performance was given, and it was a very meaningful event as a total of 113 international students and foreign researchers gathered and enjoyed themselves in what is recently a rare opportunity to get to know each other.