The paper is intended to find out the effect of building size on the frequency of fire starting for a variety of building use types:
1. Corporate Survey of Buildings is a useful source of information on non-residential commercial building stock in Japan.
2. Fire statistics data can be used to estimate the distribution of the size of buildings within which fire started for a certain period of time, while the size distribution of the buildings at risk in Japan can be derived from Corporate Survey of Buildings for specific building use types.
3. Ignition frequency of typical building uses in Japan was found to depend heavily on the size of the building, i.e. total floor area of the building.
