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A collapsed restaurant after the earthquake in Yatsushiro City, Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan, last month. Buildings that collapsed during the quake appeared to be older, traditional timber-framed structures. Photo / Chang W. Lee, The New York Times
After deadly tremors a decade ago, Kumamoto built earthquake-resistant buildings and even trained locals in search and rescue.
When a 6.8-magnitude earthquake jolted southwestern Japan on July 28, its force mirrored the kind of seismic shocks capable of flattening cities and claiming hundreds or even thousands
of lives.
Yet across the island of Kyushu, the violent shaking destroyed or heavily damaged just a few hundred buildings. One week after the quake, the death toll was 38.
In Kumamoto, the prefecture near the epicentre, seismologists and local officials credit painful lessons learned a decade ago, when twin earthquakes of similar scale ravaged the region, toppling more than 8000 buildings and ultimately causing more than 270 deaths.
Experts say the recent Kumamoto earthquake shared significant similarities – including its ground-shaking intensity, shallow depth and proximity to heavily populated areas – with the June tremors in Venezuela, which levelled coastal areas, killing more than 6000 people.
“But we see that there are huge differences in the number of casualties,” said Katsuichiro Goda, a professor of earthquake engineering at Western University in Canada. Goda, who conducted field reconnaissance in Kumamoto after the 2016 quakes, credits much of that difference to how the prefecture has rebuilt over the past decade, including spending tens of billions of dollars on earthquake proofing.
In the days following last week’s disaster, two colleagues and I travelled throughout Kumamoto. Damage was scattered across the region: wooden homes had collapsed, roads were warped, and a shopping centre gutted by a post-quake gas explosion stood in ruins.
But from earthquake-proofed city centres, bridges and homes to communities trained in search and rescue, there were also clear signs of a region well prepared for the worst.
Perhaps the most striking example of this readiness was in Uto, a city of 35,000 situated near the quake’s epicentre. In 2016, the town’s five-storey City Hall warped and partially collapsed, crippling local officials’ ability to co-ordinate disaster response during those critical first days.
Municipal leaders designed a new City Hall, which opened in 2023, specifically engineered to remain standing through severe earthquakes. Even with last week’s epicentre less than 8km away, the concrete structure and its long stretches of glass windows stood unscathed.
Beneath the building was one of the secrets to its survival: a seismic isolation structure. In a dimly lit subterranean passage between the foundation and the building above, a web of rubber and steel absorbed and dissipated seismic energy, allowing the earth to shift below while the building above remained relatively still.
Shogo Mitsui, the mayor of Uto, explained that the new complex embodied a lesson from a decade ago: critical city infrastructure must be focused on during earthquake-proofing so that essential services never lapse during a crisis.
“We have already been damaged once,” Mitsui, clad in blue and orange emergency response coveralls, said in an interview. “Because of that, the new building was designed with great consideration.” In the aftermath of the recent quake, Uto residents “have a base to rely on,” he said. “It leads to a sense of security.”