Kirk here with one more point about the rain and evacution notices. The notices come as images from which the text cannot easily be copied and pasted. If you can read the Japanese, good for you, but if not, you’re forced to find a workaround or suffer the anxiety of having received a very loud, heart-stopping message that seems bad but that you can’t read.
One workaround is to put the Google translate app on your phone, take a screenshot of the annoying alert, open up Google translate, select the screenshot and then get it translated – not exactly something you appreciate being forced to do in an emergency – but a possibility. (The image shows how a warning that I just got comes out.)
I’m not about the extent to which this is an iPhone issue or an issue with how local governments send out warning, or both.
Carlton McCycle said that he can get the same warnings on LINE and then use LINE’s translate function. I checked on my app but the only message I was able to find from Kumamoto City was slightly different.
I’d be interested to know if others out there find this as irritating as I do and if you have other workarounds.