TOKYO: Until the scandal broke, Hidetsugu Aneha was just an anonymous architect, running a small Tokyo-area firm that carried out the mundane but crucial calculations to determine how much reinforced steel should be used to keep buildings from collapsing in an earthquake.
Now he is Japan’s most notorious cheat.
Claiming he was under pressure from condominium and hotel builders to cut costs, Aneha has admitted to fiddling with safety figures on at least 21 buildings, prescribing steel bars that were too thin and too few in number to absorb the shock of a major quake. If a big tremor shook those buildings, he confessed last month to the Japanese media mob that staked out his office, “there is a possibility they could fall down.
“Pillars might bend or crash,” he admitted. “I think there might be human damage.”
The aftershocks of that confession have rumbled across Japan. At least seven hotels have closed. Angry condominium owners have fled their homes, demanding their money back, and construction has stopped on other Aneha-related projects. Of the first 14 buildings reexamined by engineers, all but one were ordered demolished.
Investigators who went looking for signs of trouble in the rest of the 206 condominiums, apartment blocks and hotels that Aneha had a hand in designing have so far found he fudged the numbers on at least 43 of them.
The danger may be even graver than most believe. Aneha’s fall has exposed the often-clubby ties in Japan between architects, developers and those paid to inspect their work, raising the possibility that some construction companies have sought falsified data to flout the country’s strict earthquake safety code.
Suspicions deepened last weekend when police said they had found the body of Nobuhide Morita, an architect whose firm used Aneha’s calculations to build condos. Morita was discovered at the base of a cliff outside Tokyo, an apparent suicide.
The unsettling question now is whether Aneha was a rogue architect who was caught cutting corners or the tip of a much deeper problem: systematic cheating on safety by the construction industry. The government announced on Wednesday that it would conduct strength tests on every condominium complex in Japan.
It was Aneha’s initial public apology in mid-November that raised the alarm. His expression of remorse was widely seen as perfunctory rather than heartfelt, suggesting the architect believed he was being singled out for something that was conventional behaviour in the business.
More ominously, Aneha said others should bear the financial burden of compensating the owners of homes and hotels whose buildings may have to be razed or repaired.
In late November, Aneha told a closed-door hearing of government officials that three construction companies had ordered him to reduce the amount of reinforced steel in his designs or they would take their business elsewhere. The head of one of those companies later admitted to lawmakers that he asked Aneha to reduce the number of reinforcement bars.
Aneha’s cooked figures were uncovered after eHomes Inc., an inspection company that was paid to check his work, conducted an internal audit of its approvals. The review showed that the company had repeatedly okayed Aneha designs based on forged or flawed numbers.—Dawn/Los Angeles Times News Service
