ATTN: Foreign editors
The Japan News/Yomiuri
TOKYO — Learning from the Kumamoto Earthquake in April this year, the tourism ministry will compile manuals for smoothly evacuating foreign visitors during a major disaster.
The manuals will be primarily aimed at travel agencies, and hotel and inn operators. The Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry is drawing up an edition for the Kyushu region this fiscal year, and plans to make manuals for other areas in the future.
The ministry is also renewing a smartphone alert app for foreign visitors, to help them quickly find evacuation centers and other facilities at a time of disaster.
Many foreign tourists visit Mount Aso, hot spring resorts and other attractions in the Kyushu region, because it is linked by air to many major cities in Asia. When the Kumamoto Earthquake occurred, tourist groups from China and South Korea were blocked by the closure of Kumamoto Airport. Local municipalities sent them to Fukuoka Prefecture on large buses at the request of the Chinese and South Korean consulates.
At the same time, small hotels could not smoothly evacuate foreign tourists due to difficulties with verbal communication. The tourism ministry therefore decided to create an evacuation manual for the Kyushu region.
The ministry is conducting a questionnaire survey on 200 hotels and Japanese inns in the Kumamoto Aso area and Yufu in Oita Prefecture. It will compile the issues raised by the survey and reflect them in the manual concerning how to tell foreign tourists such things as how to evacuate, what damage has been caused and steps for returning home.
The ministry intends to make similar manuals for other regions after fiscal 2017.
The number of users of the alert app provided by the Japan Tourism Agency soared after the Kumamoto Earthquake. When the agency surveyed foreigners about how to make the app more convenient, there were many requests to show information about such things as evacuation centers and the restoration of public transportation. It was therefore decided to revise the app.
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