Because of the heavy rain, the residents of Nishihara were asked to evacuate this morning. According to a page provided by Yahoo (see link below) this is the only evacuation notice that has been issued in the prefecture today. Amazingly, we have to rely on Yahoo for this information because the prefecture does not provide a similar service. More troubling still is that the Yahoo page

http://crisis.yahoo.co.jp/evacuation/43/

does not work with services that automatically add hiragana

http://www.hiragana.jp

or machine translation

https://translate.google.com

so it is not accessible unless you are quite good at Japanese.

This is not a new problem. I’ve tried to talk to officials in the prefectural government about this in the past but to no avail. Very frustrating. :(

– Kirk