Hello everyone. Thank you, President Martini, and NSPE for inviting us. I am very honorable that I make a speech at this House of Delegates. And I would like to express my gratitude to Missouri and Kansas society for your hearty hospitality in the PE Conference. My heartiest congratulations for holding PE Conference in Kansas City which is “Heart of America”. On the beginning of last month, we were honored to invite President Aitken in our 19th annual meeting in Tokyo. In the annual meeting, we had fruitful discussion. Thank you, Mr. Aitken, for sharing your time in very busy month.
JSPE is a non-profit and non-governmental organization established in 2000 and is tied to NSPE with the affiliation agreement in 2001. Approximately 350 JSPE members are licensed or are seeking to be licensed in US as Japanese engineers. Since the US PE exam was made open to Japanese engineers back in 1996 at Yokosuka base, estimated around thousand engineers have been registered. According to the data provided by Japan PE/FE Examiners Council, about 200 people take FE exam and about 100 people take PE exam yearly in recent years. Japan has its own engineer qualification system, and there are not many benefits for PE holder working in Japan. What is the motivation for these people? We surveyed for JSPE members last year. There are many opinions to become an engineer working on a global basis. The acquisition of the PE license is an opportunity to be active globally for Japanese engineers. We, JSPE also think that the value of PE licensure system is balance of engineer’s important 4Es, those are the education, exam, experience, Mr. Golden told us yesterday, and ethics. In recent years, it has become necessary to respond to new technologies such as autonomous vehicles, Internet of things, artificial intelligent and so on. New infrastructure construction is also in progress for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics games. With this background in mind, we believe that engineers 4Es is still and more important. We have announced JSPE’s action policy in 2019 as “Build Community and Connect with Public”. Next year is 20th anniversary of the founding of JSPE and next year again is 20th anniversary of making agreement with NSPE. We have learned much from NSPE in the past. We hope to give back our knowledge and experience to NSPE, and thus strengthen the partnership. Thank you.
