Hanshin Expressway reconstruction to be completed in October
Hanshin Expressway Public Corp. started on the night of January 6 erecting bridge girders for the 635-meter elevated section of the Kobe Route whose 17 bridge piers collapsed in the earthquake of a year ago.The main girders, each of which weighs 21 tons (2.0 meters wide, 1.5 meters tall, 11.7 meters long), were elevated by a truck crane to the top of pillars for both the eastbound and westbound lanes in the Fukae district of Kobe's Higashinada Ward.Currently, 27.7km of the Kobe Route is closed between the Mukogawa ramp in Nishinomiya City and the Tsukimiyama ramp in Kobe's Suma Ward.The 3.2km portion between the Kyobashi ramp in Chuo Ward of Kobe and the Maya ramp in the city's Nada Ward will open on February 19.Schedules for the rest of the closed portions will be moved up by two to four months thanks to advanced construction methods, traffic control and round-the-clock operations.The entire Kobe Route is expected to become serviceable by the end of October instead of the end this year as originally planned.
The rebuilt highway will be more quake-resistant, with the new pillars reinforced with concrete and steel plates.To prevent the bridges from collapsing, adjacent girders will be connected using two types of restrainers.Moreover, rubber-base isolators will replace steel bearings to reduce the pressure of seismic forces.
In addition, high efficiency noise absorbers will be installed on top of the existing noise barriers and continuous girders will be employed, replacing about 40% of the joints to reduce noise and vibration over girder joints.Low noise pavement that has numerous apertures in the road surface is also expected to help reduce noise pollution as much as possible.
JR West to make Sanyo Shinkansen bridges earthquake resistant
West Japan Railway Co. (JR West) started to reinforce the structure of elevated sections of the Sanyo Shinkansen Line in Okayama on January 11 to prevent bridge girders from falling during an earthquake.The project is in accordance with the Ministry of Transport (IU (Bs emergency railway reinforcement plan formulated last summer.In order to prevent girders from sliding sideways and falling from the bridge piers, JR West will expand the girder supports and connect the girders with steel joints.Around 1,700 bridge girders on the line will be reinforced this way over a two-year period.
The other part of JR West's quake-resistance project,reinforcing the piers of its elevated rigid-frame bridges, will start in late January.This involves doing work on some 15,300 piers, including about 14,800 between Shin-Osaka and Okayama.The remaining 500 are located in the area between Okayama and Hakata, where there are four active geologic faults.The work is scheduled to be completed in three years.
JR West plans to wrap the bridge piers with steel plates more than 6mm thick and then inject plasticized mortar to a thickness of 30mm into the space between the piers and the plates.
As for its other railway lines, JR West plans to complete the reinforcement of about 1,100 piers and finish work on 1,600 girders within five years.
Nippon Life to erect first post earthquake office building
Nippon Life Insurance Co. held a ground-breaking ceremony in Kobe on January 9 for a high-rise office building to be constructed on the same site where its previous building succumbed almost a year ago to the day to the Great Hanshin Earthquake.Tentatively called "Nissay Shin-Sannomiya Building," it will be the first major office building to be built in the area under reconstruction around the Sannomiya stations, the gateway to Kobe, servicing the JR and Hankyu railway lines.
Full-scale construction on the new 16-story, 71-meter high building, with the outer wall of glass and aluminum panels, is scheduled to begin in May, and is expected to be completed in December 1997.It will have four more floors than the old demolished building.
The building is being reinforced to the extent that it will be 25% more quake-resistant than required by the current Building Standard Law.Bird cage-shaped pillar and beam arrangements in what is called a "tube structure" willcontribute to improved earthquake-resistance.
Another outstanding feature will be the adoption of the "lateral shock-absorbing mechanism" in which special anti-shock materials are fitted into the beams so that quake energy can be absorbed into the building's four corners.The technology is being used for the first time in Japan.
171 earthquake rebuilding projects undertaken:survey
The number of large rebuilding projects in Kansai resulting from the Great Hanshin Earthquake numbered 171 as of the end of November 1995.Expenditures for 94 projects, for which figures were available, ran to some ¥13,060.2 billion, the Center for Industrial Renovation of Kansai announced on January 8.The survey covered projects budgeted at ¥1 billion or more and involving property at least 1 hectare in size.Of the 171 projects, 42 were planned as a direct result of the earthquake, while 129 were previously planned projects which have been redefined as earthquake reconstruction.Expenditures for the former, covering 9 projects for which figures were available, totaled ¥760 billion.For the latter, 85 projects, ¥12,300.2 billion.Cultural and recreation projects topped the list of scheduled building by number.In terms of spending, tranportation projects were the largest.New projects include the following: Kobe Port restoration; projected cost: ´310 billion.Urban redevelopment in the area south of Shin-Nagata station; ¥270 billion.Kobe's new eastern city center development; ¥75 billion.Construction of a park as a wide area disaster prevention base in Miki city; ¥37 billion.Meanwhile, the center also checked on the effects of the earthquake on the projects on line or on the drawing board in the quake-hit regions and in the Osaka Bay area.Of the 179 project organizers who returned valid answers, 48.1% said progress had been affected by the temblor. As for the future of the projects, 51.4% expressed determination to continue the projects as initially scheduled.This represents a 7.3 percentage point drop from the March 1995 survey.One developer has his project on hold to overhaul the plan.Three said they would freeze work while they conducted feasibility studies.Two organizers said they had already discontinued their projects.
Suntory buys major U.S. bottled water company
The Suntory group will secure the second largest share in the U.S. bottled water market through its purchase of Hinckley & Schmitt Bottled Water Group.The company holds the third largest share in the U.S.The contract was signed in New York on December 29 between Hinckley & Schmitt and Suntory International Corp., a U.S. subsidiary of Suntory Ltd.Hinckley & Schmitt, based in Chicago, Illinois, was established in 1888 and has 24 bottling plants and 13 water sources in the U.S.Its "Hinckley & Schmitt" brand of bottled water is the fifth most popular water in the country.It sells mainly in the Chicago area and on the West Coast.The 1995 sales of the company are estimated at $175 million.
The U.S. bottled water market was over $3 billion in 1994.It has averaged 8% growth during the past seven years and is considered to have further growth potential.
Suntory International bought soft drink maker Pepcom Industries Inc. in 1980 to enter the U.S. soft drink market.It started the mineral water business in 1985 and has since then expanded the sales network in the eastern U.S., through Atlanta, Georgia-based Suntory Water Group, a subsidiary of Suntory International.
Sharp to build flash memory plant in Fukuyama
Sharp Corp. will construct an integrated circuit fabrication plant for the next generation ICs including flash memory and "system-on-chip" ICs within the company's existing Fukuyama IC Group complex in Hiroshima Prefecture, the company announced January 9.The ¥110 billion facility will be the fourth plant in the complex.Construction of the new three-story, 26,000-sq. meter plant is slated to begin in June 1996 with production starting in April 1998.It is scheduled to fabricate some 10,000 wafers, 8 inches in diameter, per month in the first year.When operating at full capacity, the plant will process about 20,000 such wafers per month.Sharp established a business alliance with Intel Corp. of the U.S. to develop and produce flash memories in 1992.Flash memories allow their users to freely overwrite programs and data on their computers and are also able to store data even after the power supply is shut off.The new facility will also produce "system-on-chip" ICs which integrate complex, high-performance system logic on a single chip.These ICs are essential to the development of future multimedia equipment.With the completion of the new plant, there will be a total of eight Sharp factories dedicated to the design, development and production of integrated circuits, five in Japan and three overseas.
U.S. Ambassador Mondale to speak at Kansai Zaikai Seminar
U.S. Ambassador to Japan Walter Mondale will be among the speakers at the 34th Kansai Zaikai (business group) Seminar to be held on February 8-9 at the Kyoto International Conference Hall.The annual seminar, which acts as a forum for discussion and consensus building for Kansai business leaders, is cosponsored by the Kansai Association of Corporate Executives and the Kansai Productivity Center.Last year's seminar, held under the shadow of the Great Hanshin Earthquake, had to be hastily reorganized as an earthquake reconstruction conference and convened in Osaka.
The theme of the seminar is "Challenges toward a New Economic Society - Japan's Structural Reform Urgently Needed."Participants will discuss a wide range of topics such as economic globalization, the information revolution, deregulation, the creation of new industries, employment issues, natural resources and energy, the environment, quake reconstruction and Kansai's aspirations of becoming a "global metropolis."
In addition to Ambassador Mondale, other prominent speakers will be Shoichiro Toyoda, chairman of the Federation of Economic Organizations (Keidanren); Masafumi Ohnishi, chairman of the Osaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry; Tetsuro Kawakami, chairman of the Kansai Economic Federation; and Edward R. McCracken, chairman and CEO of Silicon Graphics Inc. of the U.S.
APEC Finance Ministers to meet in Kyoto
The Ministry of Finance announced on January 8 that it will host the third APEC Finance Ministers Meeting at the Kyoto International Conference Hall on March 16 and 17.The finance ministers of the 18 APEC member economies will participate in the meeting to address broad economic issues facing the APEC region.
They will continue to review macroeconomic developments and market situations in the region, as well as to explore further the fundamental economic challenges facing the region, in particular, financial and capital markets, mobilizing resources for infrastructure development and effects of exchange rate movement on trade and investment.
The first APEC Finance Ministers Meeting took place in Honolulu in March 1994 and the second meeting was held in Bali in April 1995.
Kansai in Focus: Kobe rebuilding moving forward but work remains: KCCI Chairman Maki
One year after the Great Hanshin Earthquake, reconstruction is moving briskly forward in Kobe but quite a few problems that could not be resolved over the past 12 months remain.On the current situation and remaining tasks for rebuilding Kobe's industry and economy, Fuyuhiko Maki, chairman of the Kobe Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI), remarked as follows:If we were to compare current production levels in Kobe with those before the earthquake:big companies in such areas as shipbuilding, machinery, rubber and steel have recovered close to 100% through their own efforts.
Among the indigenous industries, the sake distilling industry has drawn on the power of tradition to reach 90% of pre-earthquake production. The recovery rate of the synthetic material shoe industry, however, is barely over 50%.The reasons for this are the large number of small businesses in the industry, and the huge losses due to fire.Providing the shoe industry with assistance - financing and equipment - to help it get back on its feet is an urgent task.Tourism and retail trade, industries dependent on large numbers of customers, play a major role in Kobe's economy.Here too, recovery has reached just 50% of pre-quake levels.Damage in the city center was enormous and people just aren't coming to shop and dine out as they used to.As for Kobe Port, there are 239 public and private berths.Of these, about 40% of the public berths are now usable.Among container berths the figure is 50% to 60%, but since they are being used around the clock, volume has recovered to 70% to 80% of pre-earthquake levels.Over the past year, important tasks that lay ahead of us have come into focus as well.First is the reconstruction of roads.There are seven highway and railway routes stretching east from Kobe to Osaka, Kyoto and other areas.All of them sustained heavy damage.Although the railroads are all up and running again, roads, including the Hanshin Expressway which carried 100,000 vehicles a day before the earthquake, are still closed.As a result, traffic jams have become a fact of life in the Kobe area.The reopening of the expressway is scheduled for October this year, but that is too late.We will continue to request an earlier reopening.Second, buildings in the center of town must be rebuilt.Third, we must bring back Kobe's image as a city of fashion and elegance.The past year has seen very little reconstruction of downtown buildings, as a result people are staying away.This not only affects shops, restaurants and tourism, but also gets in the way of Kobe regaining its cosmopolitan image.
To counter this, the KCCI established a building reconstruction council at the end of last year.Fortunately, plans for office building, department store and convention hall construction have been announced since the start of 1996, so we have hope for the future.As I've just outlined, Kobe is moving forward even while facing some major tasks.Some 2.5 million people attended the city's festival of lights, Kobe Luminarie, during its 10 day run last December.With events like these, we hope to continue attracting people to the city, to show them how vibrant it really is.People tend to think we're still buried under rubble.We would like to correct that perception.