A NOTE ON MITSUMATSU'S CONSTRUCTION OF A LEAFWISE SYMPLECTIC FOLIATION

Mitsumatsu(9) constructed a leafwise symplectic structure of the Lawson foliation on S 5 . Combining his construction with a previous result of the author(12), we obtain a path of almost contact structures connecting a contact structure to a leafwise symplectic foliation on a certain closed manifold of dimension > 3. This leads us to generalize the notion of confoliation (Eliashberg-Thurston(1)) to higher dimension by means of almost contact geometry.