It's Japan though. They don't have non-resistant buildings.

There's plenty of old buildings here that are not built up to the latest standards; increasing exponentially the further you get from the core of a big city.

Japan is _very good_ at tearing down old buildings and building better in their place; but it doesn't mean that there are zero old buildings around.

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amelius an hour ago | parent [-]

Wouldn't the not so strong old buildings have collapsed during previous quakes?

	▲	Cthulhu_ an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Possibly, and then rebuilt. They rebuild houses every 20, 30 odd years anyway (according to https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...), and temples too https://longnow.org/ideas/long-term-building-in-japan/.
	▲	klausa an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They could have been further away from the epicenter of the previous ones, or the previous ones weren't strong enough to cause that specific structure to collapse, the previous ones might have weakened the structure and this one brought it down, a million different things factor into this. Earthquakes aren't a perfectly repeatable occurrences you can run a regression test against.

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asutekku 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Like half of the buildings are non-resistant since they are old and made of wood. IIRC only buildings built after 1991 are guaranteed to be earthquake resistant.

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markdown an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Earthquakes didn't start in 1991. The Japanese have always had to live with earthquakes and build accordingly.

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klausa an hour ago | parent [-]

For a long time "live with earthquakes and build accordingly" meant "make it easy to rebuild", not "engineer the structures to withstand the earthquakes".

	▲	egeozcan an hour ago \| parent [-]
		In Gölcük/İzmit, there was a huge 7.4 earthquake in 99. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake It took around 10 years until the city felt "normal" again (source: a close friend lives there). My point is, it's never easy to rebuild.

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crest an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

One of the reasons Japan uses wood for construction is that combined with their traditional building techniques it results in earthquake resistant buildings.