A man whose wife and daughter died under a collapsed building in the Noto Peninsula earthquake has sued the building's owner and the state for about ¥200 million in damages, telling TV Asahi he had no other way to find out why the building fell.
Kenji Kusunoki, 58, filed the suit at the Tokyo District Court on Thursday, the day after he spoke to the broadcaster at his izakaya — a Japanese pub — in Kanagawa Prefecture, where he moved after living in Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture.
The magnitude-7.6 quake struck on January 1, 2024. A seven-story building next to Kusunoki's home and pub in Wajima collapsed onto the house. His wife, Yukari, then 48, and his eldest daughter, Shuran, then 19, were killed.
The suit argues that the state and the owner left standing a building at risk of collapse. Asked by TV Asahi what led him to file, Kusunoki described the difficulty of suing other survivors of the same disaster.
“Disaster victims suing disaster victims isn't normal. The other side are probably disaster victims too.”Kenji Kusunoki, plaintiff
He said the deaths left him with one question. "All I could think was that the two of them were crushed and died because the building fell," he told the broadcaster. "How could I get to the bottom of the cause? I felt this was the only way to investigate it in detail, so I went ahead."
Kusunoki now runs an izakaya in Kanagawa Prefecture under the same name as the Wajima pub, Wajimamma, serving fish from the Okunoto coast. He told TV Asahi that regular customers are what keeps him going. "I'm a lonely person, so I want to drink with someone," he said.
He said he had been with his wife constantly, and that he does not want anyone else to go through the same loss. "I loved them, so we always went drinking together," he said. "We fought a lot too, but we were married, so we were always together. Losing my beloved wife and my beloved daughter — I don't want anyone else to end up like this."
The defendants declined to comment to TV Asahi. The state said it would refrain from commenting, and the building's owner said no one in charge was available to comment.