I'm not sure I understand what the parent's point was, however I thought it would be interesting to point out that there are almost no old buildings in Japan. Especially for houses, you would be really hard pressed to find more than a handful of inhabited houses that are more than 30 years old in any given city. The Japanese fashion is to knock down the old house and build a new one in it's place. There is virtually no market for old houses (and, in fact, you will often get less money trying to sell land with a house on it than if you demolish the house yourself).

Of course there are lots of old temples and shrines but even those have often had every single piece replaced. I was really surprised a couple of years ago when one of the local shrines tore down their building completely and rebuilt it exactly the same!

Whether this has to do with earthquakes or not, I'm not entirely sure. My wife and I have been thinking of buying a house and I keep having to remind myself that I will lose money if I ultimately sell. Our current plan is to wait until we're a bit older and then buy a not-too-old used house at a discount ;-)

What part of Japan do you live in? At least in Nagoya there is at least one "Showa" house per block. They are knocked down when their inhabitants (generally older people) stop living in them, but it's not hard to find them.

It was known that older houses were dangerous in earthquakes (I believe the safer building code dates from the 80s), but no one was really worried about it until the Kobe earthquake where most damage was borne by older buildings.

I'm in Shizuoka. Possibly they are more sensitive due to overdue Tokai earthquake. I was actually living in one of the oldest buildings in my town and it was probably 50 years old. It was demolished 2 years ago.

From what I understand, the central pillar supporting many of those temples is reaching end of life, after 5-900 years depending on conditions. So you have to disassemble it to rebuild due to the heavy but rational reliance on the strength of the old growth timbers.

Damn near the whole country was burned flat in 44/45, so there's that...

I only meant that even among people who know how to build crazy well, accidents still happen. But that doesn't negate the need for standards of construction.