The 16th Japan Earthquake Engineering Symposium

Greetings

The 16th Japan Earthquake Engineering Symposium (16JEES) will be held on November 23–25, 2023. The symposium, which has been held every four years, was originally scheduled to be held in 2022, following the 15JEES in Sendai. Due to the global spread of COVID-19, the symposium has been postponed one year, in accordance with the postponement of the 17th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering (17WCEE in Sendai) from 2020 to 2021. Coincidentally, the year 2023 marks the 100th anniversary of the Great Kanto Earthquake, in which Yokohama City, the location of the venue, experienced compound disaster, consisting of strong motion, fire, soil liquefaction, and landslides.
 
The 16JEES will be jointly hosted by the following 12 organizations, Japan Association for Earthquake Engineering, serving as the coordinator, Architectural Institute of Japan, Institute of Social Safety Science, Japan Society for Disaster Information Studies, Japan Society for Disaster Recovery and Revitalization, Japan Society for Natural Disaster Science, Japan Society of Civil Engineers,  Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers, Japanese Geotechnical Society,  Japanese Society for Active Fault Studies, Seismological Society of Japan, and The City Planning Institute of Japan, a new member starting this symposium.
 
The 16JEES program will include not only regular and organized sessions, but also special sessions on looking back 100 years from the Great Kanto Earthquake and looking ahead into the next 100 years of earthquake engineering. As in previous symposiums, selected papers are planned to be reorganized into refereed papers to be published in a special edition of the Journal of JAEE, after the symposium.
 
The main theme of the 16JEES is "A century after the Kanto Earthquake, an outlook into earthquake engineering in the next century — Learning from the past, towards a sustainable society resilient to compound catastrophic disasters." The past century has been an era of development, in which earthquake engineering has made remarkable progress through experiencing disastrous earthquakes such as the Great Kanto Earthquake, the 1995 Hyogoken Nambu (Kobe) Earthquake, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, contributing to disaster mitigation. On the other hand, the coming century in Japan will be an era of low growth due to declining population from low birthrate and aging population, and amid concerns about aging and deteriorating civil infrastructure due to financial difficulties, it is necessary to prepare for various earthquake disasters, such as, large-scale interplate earthquakes (the Nankai and Sagami Trough earthquakes, and Japan and Chishima Trench earthquakes, etc.) and major inland earthquakes (earthquakes directly under the Tokyo metropolitan area, and active fault earthquakes, etc.).
 
Additionally, there is a need to prepare for compound disasters (multi-hazards) involving not only earthquakes but storms and floods intensifying due to the global climate change, in addition to pandemics caused by infectious diseases such as COVID-19. In the future, it will be necessary to gather knowledge across various disciplines on how to effectively utilize limited resources to realize a resilient and sustainable society against complex and diversifying disasters. This symposium is the first in 5 years in which people from various fields gather, so please utilize this excellent opportunity to think about the past and future of earthquake engineering.


September 1st, 2022.
The 16th Japan Earthquake Engineering Symposium Organizing Committee (16JEES Organizing Committee)

Chair Yoshiaki Hisada