Worried neighbors look up a residential building that fails to meet the quake-resistance standard.

The Nov. 17 news shook the country and the following day, Hidetsugu Aneha, a 48-year-old architect of Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, admitted he falsified quake-resistance data on more than 20 buildings.

"As a general trend in the industry, there has been pressure to cut costs, and I have been insensitive," he said.

"If the designated certification agency had carried out an ordinary check, (my application) would never have passed," added Aneha, pointing out lax standards at a company in charge of approving construction applications.

But other architects have sharply criticized what Aneha did and have called him unethical.

There are about 317,000 first-class licensed architects. According to the Japan Federation of Architects and Building Engineers Associations, their number is increasing 4,000 to 5,000 annually, reducing the amount of per-head work.

The certification of construction applications used to be done by local governments. Amid the trend toward deregulation, however, private companies were allowed into the act with a revision to the Building Standard Law in 1998.

One construction official said, "The selling point of private agencies is speed."

A structural strength calculation document is worked out by computer to analyze the resistance of buildings to external pressure from the number and thickness of reinforced beams as well as the volume of concrete to be used. Such a document for a 10-story building can be as long as 200 to 300 pages.

"It is impossible to check all the massive documents and data," said an official at a certification agency.

An official of eHomes Inc., a Tokyo-based certification company that failed to detect Aneha's false calculations, said Nov. 18: "The falsification was skillful, and we were unable to detect (it) during our normal screening process."

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport is planning to file a criminal complaint with the Metropolitan Police Department against Aneha's office and six construction designers by the end of November on suspicion that they violated the Building Standard Law, government sources said.

The Japan Times Weekly: Nov. 26, 2005
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