In 1997, a seismic experiment using an airgun array and ocean bottom seismographs (OBSs) was performed in the forearc region of the northeast Japan (NEJ) arc. The objectives of this experiment were to clarify whole of the velocity structure around the forearc region of NEJ arc including a detailed plate boundary structure and the heterogeneous structure. In this paper, we estimated the heterogeneous velocity structure around the forearc region of northeast Japan by applying 2-D ray tracing and travel time inversion to the airgun-OBS data. The depth where the island arc Moho comes into contact with the subducting oceanic crust is about 20 km. We suggest the existence of an oceanic layer1 overlying the oceanic crust subducting down to at least near 18 km by comparing observed waveforms with these calculated using the reflectivity method. ¿ 2000 American Geophysical Union