Abstract
In Japan, whenever the severe earthquake occurred, many residents were injured or died by the collapse of old wooden houses with poor seismic strength. However, the seismic strengthening for existing wooden house is not carried out in Japan. The reasons why the resident dose not carried out seismic strengthening are high cost, long work period and so on for retrofit works. We developed the new seismic strengthening method by the thick plywood with openings; the high wall strength performance was obtained by the proposed strengthening method. In this study, the horizontal loading tests for some kinds of thick plywood with openings were carried out.
