The fact that 10 of 11 victims of the recent Niigata Prefecture Chuetsu Offshore Earthquake were senior citizens, with six of them buried under the rubble of their collapsed houses, highlights the major challenge of how to strengthen the earthquake-resistance of houses. 

As a member of an inspection team from the Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution (DRI), an antidisaster research institute established by the Hyogo prefectural government, I visited one of the areas devastated by the magnitude-6.8 earthquake on July 17. I was shocked to see a house crushed under the weight of its heavy roof tiles and another that had collapsed sideways and was flattened. 

"Old houses and houses that had been enlarged collapsed as if they were targeted," said Yoshiaki Kawata, executive director of DRI and director of Kyoto University's Disaster Prevention Research Institute, who headed the inspection team. 

All of the 10 killed were aged at least 70. Six of them died after being buried under wreckage. This indicates that a number of elderly citizens live in houses with insufficient quake-resistance. 

It does not necessarily mean that quake-resistance measures for houses lag behind in Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture, where damage to houses was heavy. After 27 housing units were destroyed in the city in the Niigata Prefecture Chuetsu Earthquake three years ago, the municipal government introduced this spring a system under which the city finances one-third of the cost of antiseismic retrofitting with a subsidy of up to 600,000 yen for quake-resistance work on houses built before 1981, when the current quake-resistance requirements were adopted. 

Municipal government officials are skeptical about whether the subsidy system will contribute to improving the safety of houses for elderly people. The July 16 earthquake has done little to dispel their skepticism. 

The subsidy system requires residents to reinforce their house to the level at which it can "avoid collapsing," as called for by the Building Standards Law. This means that the flimsier a house is, the greater the work and cost will be. If the cost exceeds 1 million yen, the maximum subsidy of 600,000 yen will look less inviting. 

As of January this year, 27.8 percent of municipal governments across the nation had adopted a system to provide subsidies for quake-resistance repair work on detached houses. Most of them have the same subsidy application standards as in Kashiwazaki. 

Director Yoshiteru Murosaki, director of the National Research Institute of Fire and Disaster of the Fire and Disaster Management Agency, said: "Elderly people lack the desire and funds to conduct reinforcement work on their houses. The amount of subsidies should be boosted, or subsidies should be provided even for work that they can afford to finance by themselves." 

In Sumida Ward, Tokyo, which has a graying population, and old wooden houses stand close to one another, the ward government launched a system in January 2006 to provide a subsidy even for simple repairs do not meet the quake-resistance requirements under the Building Standards Law. 

The subsidy also covers work on "one room," such as a living room or a bedroom, based on the thinking that one can flee from a house unless it collapses instantly, so reinforcing a room will increase the chances that a householder will survive. This will lead to a reduction in the cost of reinforcement work, thereby reducing financial burdens on residents. 

Kei Horie, a research fellow at the DRI, considers such "reinforcement work only for one room" as a "system to protect human life" and has called on the government to adopt it as a policy. The system calls for diverse work, ranging from simple work to prevent furniture from falling down to reinforcement work on one room only. "Requiring people to ensure their houses meet the earthquake-resistance standards doesn't conflict with allowing them to take advantage of a subsidy system that covers repairs that don't meet such standards," Horie said. 

Of the about 47 million housing units in the nation, about 11.5 million lack sufficient quake-resistance capability. The houses that meet the earthquake-resistance standards account for a less-than-satisfactory 75 percent of the total. The Central Disaster Prevention Council has set the goal of raising the rate to about 90 percent in 10 years. 

It is vital to promote this goal, but we must face up to the reality that an increasing number of municipal governments, including those of Adachi and Itabashi wards in Tokyo and Kobe, have been implementing a subsidy system to help finance small-scale reinforcement work such as that just for one room, although it is feared such houses still will not meet the quake-resistance requirements. 

The Niigata Prefecture Chuetsu Offshore Earthquake highlighted the fact that elderly citizens were left out of the subsidy system for reinforcement of quake-resistance. A flexible policy on this issue should be devised by learning a lesson from this.  

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