The image you see is part of an English pamphlet prepared by the Kumamoto police…

The image you see is part of an English pamphlet prepared by the Kumamoto police to inform non-Japanese residents of Kumamoto about services available to crime victims, etc. I happened to find it while searching for other information. The same information is also available Japanese and Korea in similarly formatted pdf documents. To find those links go to

http://www.pref.kumamoto.jp.e.qp.hp.transer.com/police/page63.html (English machine translation)

or

http://www.pref.kumamoto.jp/police/page63.html (original Japanese)

There is also an English pdf about how to handle traffic accidents.

I think’s it’s great that this information has been made available in other languages but I wonder how many people have actually been able to find it. The primary links are from a Japanese page and the only links in English are from the machine translated page. Sadly, the machine translation is the same as that used by Kumamoto City and Kumamoto Prefecture. I say “sadly” because the machine translation system provides no links to the original Japanese information. I had to analyze the URL and take an educated guess in order to find the original page. I’ll share a more detailed explanation about why this is problematic later.

– Kirk