A city hit hard by a powerful earthquake that jolted central Japan on New Year's Day had a higher rate of old houses than other municipalities, a Kyodo News survey showed Friday, signaling their potential vulnerability in the quake-prone country.
In Suzu, located on the tip of the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture, 65 percent of residences were built before 1981 when the country's seismic standards were largely upgraded to be able to withstand powerful temblors.
The ratios of such homes were also high in two other adjacent municipalities in the peninsula -- Noto town and Wajima city -- at 61 percent and 56 percent, respectively, based on the survey that looked into 1,086 cities, wards, towns and villages across the country for which relevant data were available.
The magnitude-7.6 quake on Jan. 1 killed 240 people, and many are believed to have died because houses collapsed. Areas that suffered extensive damage were seeing population aging and also had many old wooden houses.
The analysis used 2018 data targeting cities as well as towns and villages with the population of at least 15,000. Of the total residences in the 1,086 municipalities, 22 percent were built in 1980 or earlier.
The town of Yamato in Kumamoto Prefecture in southwestern Japan came in third for the rate of houses built before 1981 at 59 percent. Wajima ranked fifth in the list.
Japan has been upgrading its quake resistance standards, learning lessons from the M7.3 Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995 that flattened old wooden houses and killed 6,434 people. The current standards were reviewed and reinforced in 2000.
While buildings built before 1981 can also enhance their quake resistance through renovation work, the rate of houses that meet the current standards stood at 51 percent in Suzu and 45 percent in Wajima, well below the national average of 87 percent.
The Suzu city government has provided subsidies of up to 2 million yen ($13,600) for quake-resistance renovation work, but there were only five cases of the program's use between fiscal 2011 and 2022.
An official of the city said it is costly to refurbish its houses, which tend to be larger than in other areas, and subsidies may not be enough to fully cover the expenses.
"There may have been elderly people who thought they couldn't pay for that," the official said.
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