The series of Summer Institutes in high energy phenomenology and string theory was started in 1995, thanks to the vision and efforts of Profs. M. Bando and T. Kugo.

The Summer Institute was held for two consecutive years in resorts towns, Ontake (1995), in the central mountain area of Japan, and Kashiko-jima (1996), on the Pacific Ocean.
The success of the initiative prompted the organizers to move it to a physics institute, the YITP in Kyoto, where it was held for two more years before it found its permanent location in Japan in FujiYoshida, a resort town in the foothills of Fuji Mountain.
It was here that the separation between the phenomenology and strings programs was accentuated. In the previous editions the two programs had had overlapping days and activities.

Funding shortages, however, forced a downsizing of the Summer Institute, with the end of the string program after 2001. An attempt to revive it was made in 2003, when a string program was held at the Fuji Educational Center on the other side of the mountain with respect to FujiYoshida. The surviving phenomenology program kept going on without interruptions in FujiYoshida, except in 2006, when it moved for the first time outside Japan. That year it was held at the APCTP in Pohang, Korea.

2008 is another landmark year for the Summer Institute as the string program, with a strings/cosmology focus, will be restarted and will take place in FujiYoshida. The phenomenology program, instead, will venture the subtropical summer of Taiwan, although in an elevated location, Chi-Tou.

The Summer Institute aims at drawing together participants from different areas of research and have them interact in the relaxed atmosphere that the contact with nature can create.

Listed below are the links to the Summer Institute pages (when existing) from 1995 to today, the locations, and the host institutes (in parenthesis).