New Architects Queried in Japan Quake Safety Scam
Date: 10-Feb-06
Country: JAPAN
In the earlier case, architect Hidetsugu Aneha admitted late last year that he had fabricated data for nearly 100 apartment buildings and hotels to save costs, leaving some of them vulnerable to even moderate quakes.
The affair has outraged the public in a country that accounts for about 20 percent of the world's earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater and has spread concerns that other architects also falsified data.
On Thursday, the Land Ministry's branch in the southern prefecture of Fukuoka questioned architect Shoji Nakamori, a day after local city officials said they suspected him of falsifying data for three buildings that he helped design.
Nakamori has denied any wrongdoing and told reporters on Wednesday that while he might have made mistakes in compiling the data, he had been defamed by the local city's allegations and planned to contest them in court.
The vast majority of Japanese already believe similar misdeeds are endemic in the building industry.
Officials in Kumamoto Prefecture, just south of Kumamoto, also questioned several architects on Thursday in connection with six buildings that failed to meet earthquake resistance standards.
An official with the construction section at the Kumamoto prefectural government, however, said that the results of their investigation would not be released until sometime next week at the earliest.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's government has come under fire for contributing to the scandal by leaving safety checks to private-sector inspectors.
In a newspaper survey conducted in December, 93 percent of respondents said they suspected that buildings designed by architects other then Aneha might have been built with falsified data.
Memories are still vivid in Japan of a 7.3 magnitude tremor that killed more than 6,400 people in the western city of Kobe in 1995.
Experts have said the destruction from that quake exposed lax compliance with safety standards that has not been fully addressed.
