Kirk here after a very long hiatus. The screenshot you see is from this website:
https://city-kumamoto.my.salesforce-sites.com/#
But don’t panic; the “evacuation order” is very, very misleading – despite the wording, we have not actually been ordered to evacuate.
Here’s a post I made a long time ago that explains what this “evacuation order” REALLY means:
So, if you got up in the middle of the night because you were worried about your alarmist phone (mine was very noisy!), you can probably go back to sleep as long as you are not living on an incline (danger of landslides) or in a low lying area (danger of flooding). I’m in neither situation so I would prefer that my phone be quiet but, alas, I’m not sure if that is even an option.
A footnote about where I found the “evacuation” (which really means, evacuate IF you are in a dangerous place) information. It’s being reported in the news but today I went to the city website:
This site has machine translation to English and other languages. In the information about evacuation centers I found this:
For more information, please visit the official website. https://city-kumamoto.my.salesforce-sites.com/ Last Updated at 4:20 on August 11, 2025
This site is in Japanese but it provides links to other languages. The problem is that, in order to switch to English you have to be able to read “言語選択” (language selection) and “英語” (English). Folks who can’t make sense of those kanji may be out of luck.
This issue of an “evacuation order” not really being an order is the same for Japanese and English. Whichever language you are reading, what the website tells you to do is not REALLY what you should do. If the 740,822 people subject to the “order” really did try to evacuate, that would cause its own disaster. Another issue is that 避難 (hinan; evacuation) isn’t really “evacuation”. The characters mean “avoid danger”; and, in Japanese, you can actually 避難する (hinan suru) at home!!
[Correction: I happened to be using a browser set to Japanese. If the default language of your browser is set to English, the indications from Google as to how to translate the page will be in English.]
So, in a situation where clarity and clear communication is needed, we have something of a house of mirrors: only those familiar with the system really understand what’s going on.