2023 Activities

Japanese Group Annual Meeting 2 March 2023

The Japanese Group of IABSE had the annual steering committee meeting on 2 March, which started with a silent prayer for Prof. Manabu Ito, the former president of IABSE, who passed away on 12 February. The group reviewed the NG activities in 2022 and then discussed how to make the NG more active such as: Young Engineers Colloquium (with China, Korea, Hong Kong and Germany), the support program for young engineers to participate in the IABSE conferences, nomination of the IABSE Awards, in particular, preparation of the IABSE Symposium Tokyo 2025.

Onsite Participants: Yozo Fujino (Chair), Akira Wada (Vice Chair), Koichi Takanashi, Manabu Inoue, Jun Sato, Shunichi Nakamura (Vice President).

Online Participants: Mitsuyoshi Akiyama, Yoshiaki Okui, Akio Kasuga, Yoshiaki Kubota, Toru Takeuchi, Tomonori Nagayama, Takashi Yamaguchi

The IABSE award celebration for the Mukogawa Bridge, the finalist for Outstanding Structure Award, was held on February 3, 2020 in Japan. The Mukogawa Bridge is the first recipient of this award as road bridge in Japan. A total of 60 persons attended the celebration including Prof. Manabu Ito (Former president of IABSE), Prof. Yozo Fujino (Honorary Member of IABSE), Prof. Shunichi Nakamura (Vice-president of IABSE), Mr. Toyohito Ikeda (Director-General, Road Bureau, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism), West Nippon Expressway Company Ltd (owner), Sumitomo Mitsui Construction (designer and contractor) and bridge engineers and experts. This bridge is the first structure in the world combining the butterfly web and the extradosed bridge. This led to a significant reduction in the total weight of the superstructure and increased seismic resistance. Due to the recent shortage of skilled workers in Japan, precast concrete technology was employed for labour saving construction to raise productivity. Prefabricated precast members were applied for the pier head and the external surfaces of the piers. These unique solutions were presented at the celebration. It is declared that we should make efforts to further develop new technologies in Japan and to release them to the world.