Professor Emeritus Kyoji Tanaka Receives 2022 Architectural Institute of Japan Grand Prize

Much of what this was awarded for was due to the support and cooperation of professors, colleagues, students, and others at Tokyo Tech. You are the reason for this award, and I am truly grateful. I was born in Sapporo and studied architecture in Hokkaido University. However, my research supervisor Dr. Michio Koike had transferred to Tokyo Tech, and because of this, I came to work at Tokyo Tech's Research Laboratory of Engineering Materials (later Materials and Structures Laboratory and Structural Engineering Research Center) as his assistant in 1971, immediately after finishing my master's degree program. Construction at the time was filled with well-known professors working at their prime, those I had known only from books, magazines, and the like—Dr. Makoto Yoshioka, Dr. Kazuo Goto, Dr. Toyokazu Shiire, Dr. Kiyoshi Seike, Dr. Kazuo Shinohara, Dr. Morihisa Fujimoto, Dr. Hiromi Kobayashi, and others—and I felt timid. The department was friendly, however, and the professors would approach me unassumingly and were quick to welcome me to the Construction Group. This continued until my retirement in 2011.

I think Tokyo Tech is liberal, and I think that is good for the Institute. It was strict about what I was researching and in the assessment against the standard, but there were no authoritarian constraints, and I was able to work on my research unhindered. What I found the most wonderful at Tokyo Tech was that I was always surrounded by my seniors, colleagues, and my juniors at a high level who would engage with me in debate about my research. It was the best environment for polishing the quality of my research. This is an asset that cannot be measured in monetary value, and I still believe that Tokyo Tech is a wonderful institute.