KOBE--Sun Television Co., a TV station based here, received praise for immediately airing a multilingual video calling on viewers to evacuate from the tsunami following the Jan. 1 Noto Peninsula earthquake. 

Social media posts praised Sun Television for airing the warnings in English, Korean, Chinese and other languages.

“Well done--that’s what you’d expect from a local station that’s experienced an earthquake,” one post read.

A newscaster who has survived two major disasters played a role in the preparations.

A tsunami warning was issued for northern Hyogo Prefecture, of which Kobe is the capital and which faces the Sea of Japan, at 4:22 p.m. on Jan. 1 following the magnitude-7.6 quake.

Sun TV repeatedly aired the video they had made, interspersing it with live broadcasts from a studio, from about 4:30 p.m. until midnight that day.

The video is about six minutes long.

It opens with an announcer calling out in Japanese: “A tsunami warning has been issued for Hyogo Prefecture. Evacuate right now to save your life. Evacuate to high ground as best you can.”

A sign language interpreter also appears in the scene.

Later in the footage, an English teacher, a university associate professor and others hold a flip chart in their hands as they say the same thing in English, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Nepali, Tagalog and Portuguese.

A Sun TV representative said there are three videos that can be used in the event that a strong earthquake has hit Hyogo Prefecture: one for a tsunami warning, another for a major tsunami warning, and the last one warning viewers about fires and other risks even though there is no tsunami danger.

Officials selected the top seven foreign languages based on Kobe’s demographic statistics, the representative added.

JUST IN TIME

“This is great. We should make this the example,” one poster said in Korean on social media after the video was aired.

Sun TV had also received 14 comments by the morning of Jan. 5, officials said.

One of the comments lauded the TV station for having prepared the video.

Another said, however, that it may have been difficult for non-Japanese viewers to understand which areas of Hyogo Prefecture were covered by the warning based on the map of Japan that appeared on the screen, the official added.

“We will take the comments seriously, and we hope to be able to make improvements wherever possible,” the Sun TV representative said.

The video is the brainchild of Yuki Fujioka, 39, a newscaster with Sun TV’s city news reporting division, who made the video to quickly call for evacuation despite a limited number of available staff workers on duty.

TV stations, in principle, broadcast live in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.

Given how small it is and its limited workforce, however, it is not easy for Sun TV to immediately do a live broadcast. And Sun TV does not have the option of airing the content of a Tokyo-based key broadcaster because it is not affiliated with a national TV network.

Fujioka, therefore, came up with the idea of airing a prerecorded video while the TV station worked to do a live broadcast.

He wanted it to be multilingual to ensure as many viewers as possible could grasp its contents.

Fujioka had previously interviewed officials of FMYY, a community broadcasting station based in Kobe’s Nagata Ward that was founded in the aftermath of the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995, which has been airing community information and other content in multiple languages.

He learned that people of overseas origins, individuals with hearing difficulties and others were inconvenienced following the Hanshin quake, which destroyed much of Kobe and its surrounding areas, because they did not understand the information being broadcast.

Sun TV began filming footage for the video in July 2022 with the idea of a major earthquake occurring along the Nankai Trough, a seabed depression to the south of Japan. The video was completed in December 2023.

“I never expected it to be aired as soon as the following month,” Fujioka said.

DOING WHAT CAN BE DONE

Fujioka has focused on disaster reporting for a reason.

A native of Sumoto, Hyogo Prefecture, Fujioka experienced the Great Hanshin Earthquake when he was 10.

He joined Asahi Broadcasting Aomori Co., a TV station based in Aomori Prefecture, as an announcer in 2007. He was there at the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 and called from a studio for viewers to evacuate from the tsunami.

Fujioka bore in mind at the time that he should remain calm in calling out to viewers, but he has since been concerned that some viewers might have chosen not to flee because he did not call out strongly enough.

“In the first place, you can’t even turn on the TV when the power gets knocked out,” he said. “I’ve realized we’re just so powerless.”

But he said he thought he should still do what little he could.

Eager to return to his homeland, Fujioka joined Sun TV, which has put a lot of work into reporting on the Great Hanshin Earthquake, in mid-career in April 2015.

He has since participated in projects related to the 1995 disaster with the motif of passing on the experiences to younger generations.

The prerecorded videos cannot be adapted to specific circumstances of a natural disaster, but Fujioka is undaunted.

“Airing a video at the time of a disaster is certainly an uncommon practice,” he said. “But I still believe it was significant, that we managed to air it at this time as one available means.”