On 2026-07-28 at 16:27 JST, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck near Uto, Kumamoto Prefecture, registering a maximum intensity of shindo 7 in Uki and Hikawa. Dozens of people were killed. Thousands are still in evacuation centers as we write this, in August heat, with water and power service partly restored, and aftershocks continuing. Our thoughts are with everyone in Kyushu, and with the people working the response.
Kumamoto has been here before. The 2016 quakes hit the same region, and the stone walls of Kumamoto Castle, still under repair a decade later, came down again in places.
We're an IT company in Tokyo, not a relief organization. What we can usefully offer is the thing we happen to be good at: getting accurate information organized so people can find it fast. So we maintain a set of Japan disaster and emergency reference pages, free and with no sign-up, aimed squarely at the international residents and visitors who have the hardest time in the first hour of an emergency.
What's on the site
Japan Emergency Contacts is the to look at first. It's a searchable, filterable directory of 66-plus contacts: 110 for police, 119 for fire and ambulance, 118 for the Coast Guard, embassies, hospitals, English-language crisis lines. Filter by category, region, and priority, then export what you need as CSV or as a vCard file you can load straight into your phone's address book — which is the copy that still works when the mobile network is congested and the website won't load.
Japan Emergency Numbers & Safety Guide covers the context around those numbers: what to expect when you call, disaster preparation checklists, and basic earthquake and tsunami guidance.
Essential Apps for Japan lists the disaster, translation, and transit apps worth installing before you need them, with iOS and Android availability.
J-ALERT explained covers Japan's national warning system: what the alert tone means, why your phone screams at you without being asked, and how to get the alerts in English.
Can your desk phone dial 110?
Many office phone systems cannot. This sits in our territory rather than a disaster agency's, and it catches people out.
If your office runs an IP-PBX or a cloud phone service, emergency calling may not work at all from a desk handset, or it may route your call to the wrong municipality's dispatch center, based on where the service is registered rather than where you're sitting. Plenty of companies have never tested this, and an emergency is a poor time to find out.
Ask your provider directly whether 110 and 119 work from your desk phones, and what location the call presents. Then tell your staff the answer. If the answer is no, the fallback is a mobile phone, or a public payphone, where 110 and 119 calls are free.
Ten minutes now
Open the contacts directory, filter it down to what's relevant to you, and export the vCard to your phone. Then install the disaster apps and switch the alerts to English, while you still have bandwidth and the patience for it.
The last takes a conversation rather than a download. Agree with your family, and separately with your team, on how you'll check in when the phone network is saturated. It will be saturated. Settle the method while everyone is calm enough to remember it.
None of this works retroactively.