In this study, the micro-tremor measurements were conducted both for a wooden framed house and ground surface beside it in Kobe City. A part of the house under investigation was damaged seriously compared with the other part. In order to explain this local damage, the authors studied the vibration characteristics of the timber house in detail. Furthermore, the behavior of the house was analysed by assuming the discrete mass system taking the elasto-plastic characteristics of the walls into consideration and estimating the earthquake motion to identify the cause of the damage. The elasto-plastic constitutive equation of the wall was assumed to be degrading tri-linear reduced from the behaviors of two major components of the house. Analytical response was obtained using the observed earthquake motion as input. As a result, the cause of the local damage of the house was proved to be the torsional vibration due to insufficient amount of bearing wall on the west side of the first floor.
