Countdown to #IAPH2025: Mayor of Kobe takes the helm

IAPH returned home to Japan for its 1967 conference held in Tokyo – an event that was approached as a matter of national importance by the Japanese government. The minister of transport was appointed as chairman of the organising committee and 20 IAPH representatives were received by the Emperor and Empress at the Imperial Palace. Appropriately, the conference saw the mayor of Kobe, Dr Chujiro Haraguchi (pictured), elected president of IAPH. Haraguchi had been instrumental in Kobe’s selection as the venue for the first conference. He had also spent nearly two decades developing Kobe into an international city, enhancing its transportation infrastructure and ensuring the modernisation of the port facilities, preparing the city for the global industry shift to containerisation. Kobe was not alone among IAPH members in recognising that containers were going to revolutionise trade: containerisation was perhaps the most pressing concern at the 1967 conference, along with the question of international port development. On that topic, a proposal was made to establish an IAPH Technical Assistance Fund for ports in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. These industry trends were then extensively addressed at IAPH’s first southern-hemisphere conference, held in Melbourne two years later (notably with the participation of the Soviet Union). By this time, developments of equal importance were taking place outside the biennial conference: in 1967, the association had been officially designated as a consultative NGO by the UN Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organization (IMCO, now IMO). Faced with surging membership, the Tokyo head office modernised its operations, relocating its head office to larger quarters and consolidating the organisation’s communications so that its newsletter was merged with the quarterly Ports & Harbors magazine to create a single monthly publication. The magazine – like the association’s strong links to the city of Kobe – remains an enduring strength of IAPH to this day.

 

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