Jim Ivanoff
From March 7th through 10th, BC Wood participated in Nikkei Messe at Tokyo Big Sight. Each year, this show represents the largest gathering of construction industry professionals in Japan taking up all of Big Sight’s 10 halls, but it expanded for 2017 by also utilizing the recently completed two new halls in the east wing. As a result, the section of Nikkei Messe that BC Wood exhibits in, the Architectural & Construction Materials Show, was able to expand this year to cover over two full halls. The quality of the exhibitions throughout Nikkei Messe is also improving every year.
As usual, BC Wood organized the Canadian pavilion on behalf of our industry and included our Canada Wood partners from Canada Tsuga and the APA in addition to our member companies. We maintained the same overall design theme but refreshed our WRC display which gathered a great deal of positive feedback. BC Wood has long enjoyed priority access in booking space for this event, so we were able to have a prime location on the intersection of the two main aisles running through the show. Other country pavilions were not as lucky and had to settle for tighter quarters as the show was overbooked.
BC Wood also organized several evening events to further promote our industry and members during the week. On the first night of the show, the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo hosted the “Canadian Innovation in Building” seminar for us. We recruited participants through our contact database and the Embassy was thrilled to have 125 professionals involved with large wood construction attend. The topic of greatest interest to the attendees was the 18 storey Brock Commons project at UBC.
We followed this talk up a few nights later at the BC Wood office in Ebisu by hosting a casual discussion with the Timberize organization. This group was the pioneer in promoting the concept of using timber buildings in Japan’s urban areas and is led by a Tokyo University professor who is one of the leading wood design experts in Japan. Both the Canadian and Japanese sides gave presentations about mass timber projects and exchanged ideas on how to develop this market further in Japan. Toward the end of the evening, we took the group for a walk along the nearby Log Road development so they could see the beauty of WRC.