The present invention provides a system including a stereoscopic endoscope having left and right image pickup units for picking up parallactic images of an object through objective lenses laterally arranged at a distance from each other and CCDs laterally arranged at a distance from each other. In the stereoscopic endoscope, the focal distance is variable by moving focusing lenses. A display control unit is constructed so as to mask image pickup areas in left and right images display in left and right display elements on the basis of information regarding the distance to an object, the image pickup areas being picked up-only by one of the left and right image pickup units. Thus, images corresponding to an area that is picked up in common by both the left and right image pickup units are displayed.