WATCHING from the safety of a high-tech control room, Akeshi Koike has a button that, when he presses it, will reduce a steel-reinforced concrete building to dust in just a few seconds.

In the vast hangar beneath him, Mr Koike’s 600 fellow engineers at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries are busily putting the finishing touches to a machine of awesome destructive power, one on which the Japanese Government is banking to save tens of thousands of lives. It is the world’s biggest 3D earthquake simulator, a mighty steel slab capable of first supporting the weight of a full-sized office block and then violently shaking it.

The hangar itself is large enough for a seven-storey, 300 square metre (3,200 sq ft)office block — the standard size throughout Japan — to be placed on top of it and “quaked”. Wooden-frame houses, of the sort in which millions of Japanese families live, will also be built on the table, as will large civil structures such as dams , and reservoir walls. Crucially, for an industry that is still trying to persuade the Japanese public it is safe, nuclear power industry buildings will also be tested.

The location of the world’s largest “shaking table” is no coincidence. From the top floor of the Miki laboratory hangar, there is a view over Kobe: an urban sprawl that, a decade ago, lost 6,500 people to the country’s biggest earthquake since the 1923.

The first full-scale test of the facility, which has been under construction since 1999, is timed to mark the tenth anniversary of the Kobe earthquake on January 17 next year.

Accurate earthquake prediction is an art that continues to baffle scientists and, as the Kobe anniversary approaches, the spectre of a “big one” hitting Tokyo or Osaka is high in everyone’s minds. Offices and apartment blocks have been built increasingly higher in both cities, and although their designers have decreed them “earthquake-proof”, none has faced the ultimate test.

Mr Koike, the centre’s chief engineer, believes that if the shaking table had existed 15 years ago, thousands of lives may have been saved. “The Kobe quake showed our past understanding to be inadequate,” he said. The £250 million National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention E-Defence centre in Miki will test Japanese construction standards to breaking point: an outlay justified by the £100 billion bill for rebuilding Kobe.

The shaking table has been commissioned by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology so that a wide variety of buildings can be put on it and up to 2,000 tons of building subjected to an earthquake of the same 6.9 magnitude as that which hit Kobe.

Hydraulic pistons will shift the table from all sides and below and have been designed to mimic the circulating motion that gives many quakes such a devastating impact.

Once the facility is functioning, Japanese construction companies will be able to book shaking-table time to test their building standards.

Kazuo Komoto, one of the science directors of the facility, acknowledges possible dilemmas that the experiments could throw up. Will landlords become liable if the centre “proves” that a certain type of building is at risk? Will the Government subsidise any improvements demanded by the emerging data?

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