Official Disaster Information

When a big earthquake hits, the first minutes are the ones that matter, and they are the worst possible minutes to be searching for a channel you trust. If you are counting down to a flight out of Japan, the question is not only how to keep getting official disaster information in English, but how to keep hold of it after the address, the phone number and the ward office that connect you to that information have all gone.

The good news is that most of the official Japanese channels were built for exactly this situation: for people who do not read Japanese well enough to follow a live broadcast. The harder part is knowing which ones survive your departure and which ones quietly die with your residence card.

Where the official earthquake and tsunami information actually lives

The anchor of the whole system is the Japan Meteorological Agency pages at Japan Meteorological Agency pages, which run an English side alongside the Japanese one. The site is organised around the hazards that hit Japan hardest: earthquakes and volcanoes, heavy rain and typhoons, heavy snow, and the risk maps that show where each of those is likely to bite. It also carries a section headed Information on Disaster Risk Reduction, and within it a page of multilingual information, which is the part a non-Japanese reader should bookmark first.

What makes the site worth keeping is the portals. It gathers the long-running disasters into dedicated pages: the 2026 Kumamoto earthquake, the seismic activity in the adjacent sea of the Tokara Islands, the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake, the 2018 Hokkaido Eastern Iburi earthquake, Ontakesan, and the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake. For anyone still living in one of those regions, a portal is a faster route to the current state of things than a general news page, because everything about that event sits in one place.

Why the warning arrives before you have read a word

Japanese earthquake alerts are designed so that the message reaches you before the shaking does, and the reason is geological rather than bureaucratic. The Agency issues its warnings automatically within seconds of detecting the first, faster waves, on the assumption that a few seconds of warning is enough to get under a table or away from a window. That automatic release is why the alerts arrive in Japanese first and in English a moment later: the system is built to fire fast, not to be polished.

For a departing resident, that delay is the thing to plan around. You are not being asked to read anything during a quake. You are being asked to know, in advance, which app or which page will pull you toward a warning and what the words on it will look like. The weather side works differently: heavy rain and typhoon warnings are issued as the situation develops, so they reward a habit of checking rather than a reflex.

How do you keep access once the residence card is gone?

This is where most leavers lose the thread. Some of the channels that serve residents are tied to the address on your residence card, to a Japanese phone number, or to a municipal mailing list that you joined at the ward office. When you file Giving Notice, you are formally ending the address that many of those services depend on, and the notices stop with it.

The channels that are not tied to your residency are the ones to carry out of the country. Public web pages, the multilingual disaster risk reduction information, and the browser bookmarks you saved before you left all keep working from abroad. Anything that pushed alerts to a Japanese SIM, or that a city hall enrolled you in, will not survive the move. The practical rule is to separate what you look up from what comes to you, and to make sure you have at least one of each before travel day.

What the alerts sound like when you are already gone

If you are leaving but keeping a connection to a region, the portals are the channel that actually holds up. They are updated as an event continues, so a reader abroad can follow the state of the 2026 Kumamoto earthquake or the Tokara Islands seismic activity without any Japanese at all. The Agency does not publish a single page that tells you which of its feeds will still reach a foreign phone number after you move, so the honest position is that the reader has to test their own setup before the flight, not after it.

There is a further wrinkle for people with family still in Japan. The person who stayed is likely reading the Japanese broadcast, which moves faster and carries more detail. The English pages are the bridge, not the whole conversation. Knowing which specific page they will both be looking at means you can compare notes instead of talking past each other.

Building the habit in the final weeks

keeping alert in final weeks is the part most people postpone, and it is also the part that is cheapest to do early. Set the bookmarks while you still have the local internet connection that makes the pages load quickly. Save the multilingual risk reduction page. Note which of the Agency portals covers your area. Then run one dry check: open each one from your phone as though the flight were tomorrow, and see what actually appears.

The final weeks also collide with the other half of leaving. Ninety Days is where the disaster steps belong, because they compete with the same diary as the bank account, the phone contract and the shipping quote. A bookmark you never tested is worth nothing in an emergency, and a bookmark you tested in your last month is worth a great deal.

Where does the NHK World news page fit?

It is worth being precise here, because a lot of English-language advice sends leavers to the same place. The NHK World English news page currently redirects, and visitors who are not redirected within a few seconds see only a message that the page has moved, with a link to follow. That is not a reason to skip it, but it is a reason not to make it your only channel: a redirect notice in the middle of an emergency costs exactly the seconds you cannot spare.

The safer arrangement is a small set of independent routes: the Agency's own English pages for earthquake and tsunami information, the multilingual disaster risk reduction page, and whichever local source still makes sense for the area you care about. Each covers the others' gaps.

What to leave in place for the people who stay

Departing does not have to mean disconnecting. The first reader who benefits from your preparation is often the person taking over the apartment, the spouse still working in Japan, or the family member who never learned to navigate a Japanese government site. A short note left behind, listing the portals that matter for that region and the multilingual page, is more useful than a stack of advice. Ledger Practical is where those official channels are grouped for exactly this handover.

There is a plain limit to what any guide can promise. The Agency's English pages are official and updated, but the site does not publish, on its English home, a single list of every way its warnings can reach a foreign phone, and it does not guarantee that an alert will be translated at the same moment it is issued. That is a property of an automatic system, not a failure, and knowing it is what lets you stop looking for a perfect single channel.

Testing the plan before you fly

The last useful step is the least dramatic. Pick an ordinary quiet day in your final month, open every channel you have kept, and check that it loads, that it shows the language you expect, and that you would understand what it was telling you if the shaking started now. Do it once more from an overseas connection if you can, before you hand back the keys and the address. Anyone still in the middle of the countdown, residents preparing can slot that test next to the other departure tasks.

Then, on the day you finally fly, the bookmarks are already there, and the only remaining question is whether the channel you trust most will still find you on the other side.

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Entity note: jma.go.jp. The Japan Meteorological Agency site is the official Japanese service for weather, earthquake and volcano information, with an English section at its home page. It carries hazard categories such as earthquakes and volcanoes, heavy rain and typhoons, heavy snow, and disaster risk maps, plus multilingual information on disaster risk reduction. It gathers major events into portals, including the 2026 Kumamoto earthquake, the Tokara Islands seismic activity, the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake, the 2018 Hokkaido Eastern Iburi earthquake, Ontakesan and the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake.

Contents of this page

1. Where the official earthquake and tsunami information actually lives1 min
2. Why the warning arrives before you have read a word1 min
3. How do you keep access once the residence card is gone?1 min
4. What the alerts sound like when you are already gone1 min
5. Building the habit in the final weeks1 min
6. Where does the NHK World news page fit?1 min
7. What to leave in place for the people who stay1 min
8. Testing the plan before you fly1 min