Kirk here, back from a trip to the U.S. to see family. I’ll write about that experience later. (Preview: It’s a lot harder to travel abroad from Kumamoto than it would be from Tokyo and the app the government gives you doesn’t seem to take that into account.)
The image you see is a bar graph from the Kumamoto Prefecture website showing the daily number of positive test results for COVID-19. You can see that the numbers seem to be subsiding. However, they are still relatively high. The graph is from the following page:
https://www.pref.kumamoto.jp/soshiki/30/92000.html
I’d like to carp a bit about how the prefecture publishes information on its website. My complaint is “pre-English.” By that I mean that presenting information in English would be nice but the first thing that needs to be done is to make sure that information is easily accessible in Japanese. If the Japanese is a mess or hard for the general public to access, merely translating that won’t do much good.
The problem is that the prefecture’s main COVID-19 page doesn’t have any graphs of the sort I’m sharing in this post. Here’s the URL of that page:
https://www.pref.kumamoto.jp/site/kumamotoken-covid-19/
The main way in which information is published is via PDF files. Those files only have text – no graphs or images. At this writing, the latest pdf is for September 3rd. If you open it up, you can see that Kumamoto City had 87 positives and that areas outside of the city had 43, making the total 130 on that day. This is OK but it’s just one tree in the forest. To get a look at the whole forest you need to look at the “simplified” (簡易) page (first URL in this post). However, a link to that page is not featured prominently. If you scroll down and look at “People who viewed this page also viewed these pages” (このページを見ている人はこんなページも見ています) you see the “simplified” page at the top of the list. Well, of course it’s at the top of the list! It’s a much better source of information for the general public!
Before I left the country I called the office in the prefecture that is in change of this page and said that I thought they needed to put a link on the page (that can be found easily) to take users to the simplified page. Unless the “People who viewed this page . . . " feature is new, I don’t think anything has changed.
I’d like to close with a comment about pdfs. The pdf format is convenient for the workers at the prefecture (and, of course, other governmental offices) – not for the general public. In other words, since they make A4 (regular paper size) documents all of the time and it’s very simple to convert such documents to pdf files, throwing pdf files up on the web is pretty easy. I think those of you who are reading this post of mine on a smartphone will agree, however, that it’s not so convenient for smartphone (or even computer) users, especially when you have to view multiple files to try to get the big picture.
This lack of concern for ease of access to public information and a preference for whatever is easy for officials as a problem that has bothered me for almost as long as I have been publishing information on this page and via the mailing list that preceded it. Needing to translate Japanese to English is one problem but why should I have to struggle with badly organized Japanese information in order to do so?
End of rant. Have a nice day and wear a mask. :)