Guest Editorial.

The article highlights the 5th Asian Meeting on Ferroelectrics held at the Tokyo University of Science in Noda, Japan on September 3-7, 2006. The meeting program comprises three plenary lectures, three concurrent sessions of oral presentations including invited talks daily and two poster sessions highlighting research areas of current interest. The meeting covered recent advances in the broad and rapidly progressing field of dielectrics, piezoelectrics and ferroelectrics.