Japan: some hope

As structural engineers are drafted in to check major structures’ integrity after the Japanese earthquake. Jan-Carlos Kucharek reflects on the damage to buildings in the city and along the rural east coast.

The aftermath of last Friday’s tsunami that hit the east of the central Japanese island of Honshu, has been a devastating display of the raw power of nature. The images of huge fishing boats beached in devastated village centres are not ones that anyone is likely to forget. But interestingly before the wave, the towns seemed unaffected by what was a magnitude 8.9 earthquake. 

Tokyo too fared very well. I spoke to Ben Nakamura, a Japanese architect I know out there, who pulled over after losing control of the car, thinking his tyre had burst. He spoke of crouching on the road and looking up at the buildings in central Tokyo shaking so much that he was convinced that the cladding on the towers were going to peel away from their housings and crash down onto the crowded streets. Despite it being by far the most violent earthquake he’d experienced, when it finished, he got back in and drove home. He saw damaged bus shelters and fallen electricity pylons (wires are run overhead here for precisely this reason), but the structures held. 

For this, we can thank the sheer mass of concrete that the Japanese throw at structures, and their rubber isolated concrete foundations, dampening the movement. And, of course, the bracing and cross-bracing that allowed structures to flex under stress, like the ones Foster and Partners used in the Century Tower, or the in-built pendulum-like dampers, like those installed in Kenzo Tange’s Tokyo City Hall. 

Humble timber homes, through history proving amazingly pliant in earthquakes, bore the terrible brunt of the ensuing tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear power plant has suffered a ‘perfect storm’ of problems. But maybe there’s some small consolation in the fact that, through adherence to building regulation, Tokyo was not raining deluges of glass on its millions of city dwellers.