Kirk here with some information about free COVID-19 antigen test kits available in Kumamoto.
The situation is pretty confusing because Kumamoto City and Kumamoto Prefecture have separate programs with completely different rules. Moreover, they don’t refer to each other on their web pages so I had to do some detective work to figure out that there are actually two completely different programs. In regard to the city’s program here’s a page in English (machine translation): https://www.city.kumamoto.jp.e.fm.hp.transer.com/hpKiji/pub/detail.aspx?c_id=5&id=43827&class_set_id=2&class_id=128
The original Japanese is here:
https://www.city.kumamoto.jp/hpKiji/pub/detail.aspx?c_id=5&id=43827&class_set_id=2&class_id=128
For this one, you need to be between 16 and 39 years of age and have symptoms.
Here’s a translation of the prefecture’s page:
https://www.pref.kumamoto.jp.e.qp.hp.transer.com/soshiki/30/120272.html
And the original Japanese:
https://www.pref.kumamoto.jp/soshiki/30/120272.html
For this one, you must NOT have symptoms (go figure) but there’s basically no age limit.
Both of the English translations are pretty awful so I’d recommend going to the Japanese and manually checking the content with DeepL:
https://www.deepl.com/translator
I think both the city and the prefecture are pretty darn lame when it comes to promoting new programs in a way that people can understand. I saw a TV segment on RKK about few people taking advantage of the city’s new program:
https://newsdig.tbs.co.jp/articles/rkk/129420
This made me hesitate to even post about this (the linguist hurdle compound confusion and difficulty) but I thought some people might want a heads up about the new system.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/08/05/national/antigen-test-kits-explainer/
