Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

In Japan, a performance-based code has been added to the existing Building Standard Law (BSL), rather than making a new Law. Before the revision, performance-based design had been done under the “equivalency” concept. Today, the law itself has been transformed to allow performance-based design. The revision is a result of requests from the legal sector that the Law, rather than the Government, should set standards to rule. As a result, government discretion has become more limited. In order to preserve continuity from the past, the current BSL includes both conventional prescriptive clauses as well as performance-based ones in the evacuation and fire resistant structure sections. The most important point is to clarify the objectives of regulation and their performance criteria. To avoid disturbance of technological development, definite requirements in the BSL and the Enforcement Order have been limited only to functional expressions. To allow efficient implementation, the government has set standard verification methods, new plan review routes and executive bodies. The strategy of verification of fire safety is that each value of prescriptive requirement transfers to the time that is calculated, and performance is required for not only each components of building and their testing method, but also for a unit of the whole floor, or the whole building.