The powerful earthquake that hit Japan’s popular tourist destination of Hokkaido, the country’s northernmost main island, has highlighted a lack of preparedness to provide information to foreign visitors in a time of a disaster. With the number of foreign visitors expected to grow ahead of the 2020 Tokyo
The powerful earthquake that hit Japan’s popular tourist destination of Hokkaido, the country’s northernmost main island, has highlighted a lack of preparedness to provide information to foreign visitors in a time of a disaster.
With the number of foreign visitors expected to grow ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, the government is introducing multilingual emergency information apps and other tools, but a lot more work is needed to train people who can provide direct assistance to non-Japanese in a crisis, experts say.
Hokkaido gets close to 2.8 million foreign visitors a year.
“The hotel staff only responded in Japanese,” complained a South Korean man, who was among many such foreign visitors seeking information following the M6.7 quake that caused a massive blackout and transportation disruptions in Hokkaido on Sept 6.
A Chinese man said most information posted on signs in stations and in other public areas was in Japanese and English. “I wish there had been information posted in Chinese, too,” he said.
Many foreign tourists could be seen wandering aimlessly in parks in central Sapporo, the prefecture’s capital city, or stuck at airports, worried and frustrated because they were unable to obtain crucial information due to the language barrier.
The Sapporo government set up a special evacuation center on the afternoon of the quake, dispatching staff there capable of speaking English, among other languages. The Hokkaido prefectural government also started a phone hotline for foreign visitors in English, Chinese and Korean.
But an official in charge admitted, “We were so busy with the response effort at the evacuation center that we were unable to supply information in other languages.
