Not a few residents in Tokyo and surrounding areas have reacted with fear and anger after being told that they live in condominiums constructed according to designs that included falsified earthquake-resistance data. Since Japan is a quake-prone country, this crisis should worry the whole nation.
On Nov. 17, the Land, Infrastructure and Transport Ministry announced that Aneha Design Office in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, fabricated such data for 20 condominiums and a hotel in Tokyo, Chiba and Kanagawa. The announcement was made following notification from a state-designated building design certification agency that it had failed to detect the data fabricated by Mr. Hidetsugu Aneha of the design office.
A 1981 stipulation under the Building Standards Law says that buildings, be they ferroconcrete or wooden, must not be damaged by a jolt of 5-plus intensity on the Japanese scale of 7 and must not collapse in a quake of at least 6-plus intensity.