This post is a little long, so let me start with the key points for those of you interested in volunteering:

  • Mashiki got plenty of volunteers today so they closed registration.
  • According to their Japanese web page, Minami Aso is accepting volunteers but you would probably need your own transportation to get out there and be fairly fluent in Japanese to communicate properly.
  • Kumamoto Prefecture has a page (only in Japanese unfortunately) with information about a variety of volunteering opportunities: http://www.pref.kumamoto.jp/kiji_15404.html?type=top
  • I hope those of you with such information will type it into a comment to this post.

Now, about this article, I should have shared it sooner. Now it seems that the situation has changed; volunteers in Mashiki have gotten a yellow light, not a green one. Information about volunteering in Mashiki, though only available in the Japanese language, can be found on Mashiki’s official Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/kumamoto.mashiki/

Today, they got so many volunteers that they closed their registration process at 9:10 AM.

The article has a link the the Kumamoto City’s information about volunteering but it doesn’t work. I went to the city’s website and searched with the Japanese word for “volunteer” and got the same link provided in the newspaper article (which, of course, didn’t work). It seems that at some point the city simply deleted the information that the felt was obsolete. I find this to be very problematic. If they had erased the original content and posted a short note about how the situation had changed, that would have been much better. Here’s a e-mail I sent to the city to report the problem:

ボランティァ情報のウェブページ上の問題についてご報告します。

「ボランティア」というキーワードで検索すると

http://www.city.kumamoto.jp/search/pub/Default.aspx?c_id=2&q=ボランティア

最初の二つの検索結果

https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.city.kumamoto.jp/hpkiji/pub/detail.aspx%3Fc_id%3D5%26id%3D12533&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwijs5GtxqPMAhXDEpQKHe8LAVoQFggFMAA&client=internal-uds-cse&usg=AFQjCNEvy195jxHco1LN3A_pOTArt1W8Mg

https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.city.kumamoto.jp/hpkiji/pub/detail.aspx%3Fc_id%3D5%26type%3Dtop%26id%3D12541&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwijs5GtxqPMAhXDEpQKHe8LAVoQFggIMAE&client=internal-uds-cse&usg=AFQjCNEcILPc2RbvJwN-xEshKlU8NVNdrw

は実際に存在するページにはつながりません。

サーバー エラー 404 - ファイルまたはディレクトリが見つかりません。 検索中のリソースは削除された可能性があります。または、名前が変更されたか、一時的に使用不可能になっています。

メディアで市のページへのリンクを見てこの問題に気がつきました。情報が古くなったら「削除」ではなく、変更またはredirectを使って修正していただきたいと思います。

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/04/20/national/quake-hit-town-mashiki-city-kumamoto-give-green-light-volunteers/#.VxrE0mNq0pY

Tags: Media, volunteering To see more Kumamoto International posts with these tags, click the following links: Media https://www.facebook.com/search/123734781033296/stories-by/str/media/keywords_posts/intersect/ Volunteering https://www.facebook.com/search/123734781033296/stories-by/str/volunteer/keywords_posts/intersect/