Abstract
It is important to give physical evaluation to the intensity of the ground motion which have been indicated by the seismic damage of wooden houses, especially for the earthquakes before 1960's in Japan. In this paper, assuming that the seismic damage of Japanese wooden houses built in the traditional manner have been caused by the relative displacement of response during earth-quake, the statistical distribution of yielding strength and other characteristics of wooden houses were surveyed. After the response analyses, it is concluded that the maximum displacement of a wooden house can be estimated by the Fourier spectrum of the ground acceleration |Ga|. The values of |Ga| correspond to 16, 50 and 84 % in the rate of collapsed house were estimated and compared with the values of B/H which is the seismic intensity defined by overturned tomb-stones.
