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.