The techniques of initial stress measurement were developed and improved in Japan. It is recommended to standardize some dominant methods in domestic market at first, and then encourage related organizations to promote them to international standard, in order to take an advantageous position of the methods in the international market. Currently, stress relief method and hydraulic fracturing method are considered to be valuable and practical methods. The compact conical-ended borehole overcoring method, one of the stress relief methods, was assigned as the standard of the Japanese Geotechnical Society in 2012. In addition, the new committee has been organized recently for standardizing the high stiffness testing method, an improved hydraulic fracturing technique. If international standard methods that are not the method used in Japan were assigned in future, we may be at a disadvantage for international bids. We may lose opportunities to apply our valuable technical resources such as engineers, instruments, established standards, and know-how in international market. And our techniques may become irrelevant in the international market. Our methods havebeen applied in many domestic foundation investigation fields such as construction of underground power plants, nuclear power plants, and large scale tunnels. It is in our best interest to have our techniques become the international standard as we expect an increase of requirement of those techniques in developing countries in future.
