JAFPE Seminar: Building Tour at Nara Prefecture

A building tour was held on Friday, July 1, attended by 30 participants.
At last, this was the first face-to-face training session since the Japan Fire Protection Engineers Association held its “Annual General Meeting + Fire Protection Workshop” in February 2020.

Building Tour overview
Building　 MIRAI KACHI KYOSO Center ”Kotokurie”
Location　 Nara Prefecture
Opening Date　 October 2021
Basic Design　 Tetsuo Kobori Architects
Design, Construction　Daiwa House Industry Co., Ltd., Fujita Corporation

The facility is a minister-certified building for Building Evacuation Performance. The disaster prevention design work was done by the late Shigeru Yamada (Fujita), former director of the Japan Fire Protection Engineers Association.
The seminar included a tour by the Kotokurie guide staff, overview of the building and an explanation of its innovative environmental technology and disaster prevention design by architects.

2022 International Conference on Performance-Based Codes and Fire Safety Design Methods

The conference above was held from 23 rd to 25th of March. Since a web conference is easier to attend rather than in person, over 200 people were participated in it this conference. Though all the presentations are pre-recorded and discussion is done by live chat, it was a great opportunity to learn about the situation of performance-based design in the world. Presentation titles were mainly about current issues of fire engineering such as historical evaluation and future discussion about performance-based design, tools and modeling methods of performance-based design, mass timber structure, and sustainability.
From Japan chapter, voluntary team presented the case study about the renovation and extension by mass timber structure of historical office building. Our proposal included new concept of fire resistance based on size, location and building use, and also new performance-based design method for wooden middle -size buildings. It has higher level of completion than other five proposals of other countries. We will be having a seminar to introduce of this case study.
The next conference will be held at Copenhagen where conference of this year supposed to be held in 2024.

The 2022 General Assembly was held online on February 4th. Please see here for the detail.

The 2022 General Assembly of the Japan Association of Fire Protection Engineers was held online on February 4th with the participation of little less than 30 people. The number of participants including the power of attorney exceeded half, and the general meeting was authorized.
At the beginning, there was a speech from the president as followings. Last year, our activities were evaluated as “a series of social contribution activities for solving today’s fire prevention problems”, and won the achievement award of Japan Association for Fire Science and Engineering in the 3rd year of Reiwa. While there are restrictions on face-to-face activities under the covid-19 last year, we held regular online seminar of fire protection Engineering, and there were many participants that we had never seen before. It was announced that we will continue this seminar actively this year as well. In addition, as the Japan chapter of SFPE, we will actively participate in international exchange activities and international symposiums.
After discussion about the result of activities and settlement of accounts for 2021 and the activity plan and budget for 2022, all the proposals were approved. The president announced that activities promoting transmission from the homepage, and allocating the necessary amount to the budget, .under the covid-19 and digital transformation in our society.
At the end of the general meeting, a certificate awarding ceremony was held for Moe Seike, who was certified as a JAFPE fire prevention engineer last year.
Following the general meeting, we introduced the working group activities that were highly evaluated when receiving the achievement award of Japan Association for Fire Science and Engineering. We reported on the activities of the four working groups: fire safety at welfare facilities for the elderly, fire safety of capsule hotels, evacuation using elevators, and ideal fire prevention engineers, and received their opinions.

Online Exchange Meeting among SFPE Chapters in Asia-Oceania region

SFPE Asia-Oceania Chapters have been holding exchange meetings but, in these several years, it has not been held. We Japan chapter is planning to revive this
event online. Since it is a good opportunity to share the current situation of international fire safety engineering, we expect a lot of members will join this event.
Detailed information will be provided soon.
⇒Meeting details