Kirk here. After over 25 years of providing, or attempting to provide information in English for the benefit of folks in Kumamoto who may not be fluent in Japanese, I've come, ironically, to be concerned about how the usefulness of Japanese to foreigners is often discounted. A recent example was my August 13 post about Kumamoto City presenting translations without links to the original (more detailed and informative) Japanese and without internal glossing of the original Japanese terms that they translate (without such glossing we foreigners are forced to struggle to "back translate" when trying to communicate with actual Japanese people about the content we read).

Here's that post:
https://www.facebook.com/1379708514190936/posts/1484195123742274

To their credit, the City responded to my email and added a link to the original Japanese (but the pdfs are still unglossed; you have to go to the original Japanese documents to find the key terms).

At any rate, since this "foreigners only need translations; have no need to use Japanese" stereotype is a pet peeve of mine, I've been particularly pleased to observe the rise of the yasashii (easy) Japanese movement, including the fine work described in this article.