The Tokyo Congress That Never Was: A Look Back at FAOPS 2020

In early 2020, perinatal researchers across Asia and Oceania were preparing for what promised to be one of the most consequential gatherings of the decade. The 21st Congress of the Federation of Asian and Oceania Perinatal Societies, paired with PREBIC AA 2020, was slated for Tokyo and designed to bring together leading clinicians, scientists, and trainees around a shared agenda of maternal and newborn health. For many, particularly those based in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth, the meeting represented a regular touchpoint with regional colleagues and a critical opportunity to share findings that often struggled to find a stage in purely Western forums.

Australian researchers have long punched above their weight in perinatal medicine. Institutions such as the Royal Women's Hospital in Melbourne, Westmead in Sydney, and the Mater Research Institute in Brisbane contribute heavily to evidence on preterm birth, neonatal ventilation, and pregnancy hypertension. A Tokyo congress falling across the late Australian spring would have allowed many of these clinicians to drop in for a week of dense programming without sacrificing much clinical cover, a logistical reality that has shaped how Australians engage with international perinatal meetings for decades.

When news broke in the first week of April 2020 that the meeting would not proceed in its physical form, the disappointment ran deeper than inconvenience. For early-career researchers, the abstract deadline represented a chance to defend work on a regional stage. For senior figures leading collaborative networks, it was a venue to renegotiate joint projects across Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, and Australia. The pandemic did not merely cancel flights; it paused an entire choreography of scientific exchange that had been rehearsed for years.

A Vision Built on Regional Cooperation

The Federation of Asian and Oceania Perinatal Societies has always framed its work around the practical realities of birth outcomes across a vast and uneven geographic region. Where European neonatal consortia operate across relatively homogeneous healthcare systems, FAOPS member societies cover everything from tertiary Japanese NICUs to district facilities in Papua New Guinea and remote Indigenous health services in northern Australia.

Organizers had spent the better part of three years assembling a scientific programme that reflected that breadth. Plenary sessions were arranged around preterm birth prevention, the developmental origins of health and disease, and quality improvement in low-resource settings. Several satellite symposia were to focus on kangaroo mother care, neonatal resuscitation training, and the still-controversy-rich field of magnesium sulfate protocols for neuroprotection. The congress website, still archived at the congress portal, lists dozens of invited speakers drawn from 18 countries, including a meaningful Australian contingent.

For Tokyo specifically, the choice carried symbolic weight. Japan's perinatal outcomes remain among the best in the world, and Japanese hosts had committed to making the 2020 meeting a showcase for national strengths in fetal imaging, congenital diaphragmatic hernia management, and extremely preterm infant care. The cultural programme woven into the schedule was meant to give international visitors a curated glimpse of the host city beyond the conference hall, with planned excursions and networking evenings carefully timed around the academic agenda.

Why the Programme Mattered for Australian Practice

Pregnancy and newborn care in Australia operate within a layered system that includes Medicare-funded antenatal care, state-run tertiary maternity hospitals, and the Australian National Perinatal Epidemiology and Statistics Unit. Researchers working within this system depend heavily on international dialogue to benchmark outcomes and to interrogate guidelines issued by bodies such as the National Health and Medical Research Council.

The Tokyo programme offered specific relevance to Australian priorities. Several proposed sessions addressed the early detection of fetal growth restriction, an area where Australian rural and remote services have long sought better tools. Others focused on emerging evidence around probiotics for the prevention of necrotising enterocolitis in preterm infants, a topic with active research programs at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital and at the Mercy Hospital for Women.

A further strand would have explored maternal mental health in the perinatal window, including emerging Australian data on culturally safe care for First Nations women. With Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander maternal and infant health outcomes remaining a stated policy concern under the Closing the Gap framework, any chance to compare Australian findings with regional experience typically resonates strongly at FAOPS meetings. The Australian researchers booked to present in Tokyo had tailored their abstracts specifically for those conversations, making the cancellation a particular loss for ongoing community-led work.

The April 2020 Cancellation

By the end of March 2020, the International Health Regulations emergency committee had already declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and a growing number of countries were closing borders to non-essential travel. Australia's own departure from international travel was unusually sharp, with the federal government announcing outbound restrictions in mid-March and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade warning against all non-essential overseas travel within a matter of days.

The organizing committee watched these signals carefully. Tokyo had not yet entered the kind of community transmission phase that would later trigger the Olympics to be postponed, but the practical risks of gathering several thousand clinicians from more than 20 countries were evident. Refunds, visa assistance, and the redirection of accepted abstracts became the immediate administrative focus, even as the symbolic weight of cancellation settled in.

What unfolded across the perinatal research community over the following months was an uneven transition. Some content was salvaged through partner-society webinars. PREBIC AA sessions found homes in online formats. But the wider FAOPS programme, with its carefully choreographed networking and poster walks, simply did not translate into a virtual substitute. The congress would not simply be postponed; the structure built around a physical Tokyo gathering was, in practical terms, dismantled.

Comparing the Plans to What Survived

The contrast between what was scheduled and what actually reached delegates illustrates both the cost of cancellation and the resilience of parts of the network. Selected programme strands capture that contrast in summary form.

The pattern across these rows tells a clear story. Sessions built on passive dissemination, talks and structured panels, found second lives online. Sessions built on skill transfer, simulation, and small-group deliberation, lost the most. For an Australian audience accustomed to hands-on teaching at events such as the PSANZ Congress, that distinction would have shaped which elements felt truly missed.

The Legacy Four Years On

Time has clarified what the 2020 congress left behind. The abstracts and poster content that had been prepared for Tokyo fed into later regional congresses and journal special issues, much of it after substantial rewriting by authors who had already moved on to different projects. Several Australian research groups used the disrupted momentum to publish extended versions of their work in international journals rather than conference proceedings, an unintended benefit that nonetheless arrived only after considerable labour.

More broadly, the cancellation sharpened debate within perinatal societies about how to value in-person meetings in an age of widespread virtual participation. Many Australian clinicians now attend three to four major international meetings a year without leaving the country, balancing the convenience of remote attendance against the irreplaceable texture of corridor conversations. FAOPS 2020, by forcing that reckoning abruptly, sits in retrospect as the moment when regional perinatal research reorganised its expectations of the meeting format.

The congress is remembered now less as a specific event than as a turning point. Plans for host city tours, paper folders in conference bags, and a closing ceremony at a Tokyo venue gave way to back-to-back video calls and shared screen fatigue. Within a couple of years, those same researchers were gathering in different cities with a different rhythm, but the memory of what was meant to happen in 2020 still shapes how they prepare. Anyone curious about the original programme can still find the archived material through the congress portal, a quiet digital record of an event that invited thousands across Asia and Oceania and then simply did not happen.

Researchers across Australia continue to find ways to keep that particular thread of conversation alive, and supporting the ongoing work of regional perinatal societies remains one of the most practical ways to honour what this congress set out to achieve.