[2] Its longest length is a steel girder viaduct built on reinforced concrete piers, and its main span is of an arch-shaped truss design.

The "Philippine-Japan Friendship Highway Bridge" was part of a large bundle of high-visibility foreign-loan-funded infrastructure launched by then-Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos' administration during the 1969 presidential election campaign.

[10] At the time the project was conceived, there was not yet much traffic between the islands of Leyte and Samar because they were relatively underdeveloped,[2] and as a result, the construction of the bridge was not seen as economically viable,[2] but was nonetheless funded by foreign loans that would charge interest.

The Philippine-Japan Friendship Highway project started out in the mid-1960s with a single US$25 million Japan Export-Import Bank loan meant for the purchase of equipment for road development.

[16] According to former National Economic and Development Authority deputy director Ruperto Alonzo, the project was initially criticised as a white elephant that was "a possession that is useless and expensive to maintain or difficult to dispose of",[2] because its average daily traffic was too low to justify the cost of its construction.

[11] The bridge's abutments are founded on steel H-piles while its piers are rock seated pedestals built using the Prepakt method, having single cylindrical shafts and tapered cantilevered copings.

[27][28] It involved a person being beaten while the victim's head and feet lay on separate beds and the body is suspended as though to form a bridge.

The most popular one involves a woman overseeing the project who follows a fortune teller's advice and orders workers to mix children's blood with the bridge's foundation.