Photo/Illutration A snapshot of the “easy Japanese” teaching materials on disaster management

A new program that teaches how to prepare for natural disasters in “easy Japanese” has been created for foreign residents, many of whom are inexperienced in those disasters.

The Osaka Municipal Lifelong Learning Center and Kobe Gakuin University jointly developed the teaching materials titled, “Osaka Bosai Time Attack!--Yasashii Nihongo de Bosai” (Osaka disaster management time attack!--Disaster management in easy Japanese).

Officials hope non-Japanese residents will use the teaching aids to learn about the importance of evacuation and preparations.

The narration in the videos is given in plain Japanese and includes such phrases as “from June to July is the rainy season, when there is heavy rainfall” and “there are many typhoons from July to October.”

The kanji in the subtitles are accompanied by hiragana to show how the kanji should be read and pronounced.

The teaching aids come in three courses, each of which involves learners first watching a video before being quizzed and checking their knowledge of disaster management on a “reflection sheet.”

The videos and the quizzes come with English translations.

Course A, titled “Basics,” includes overall features of typhoons and earthquakes, and also shows footage from the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake and the northern Osaka Prefecture earthquake of 2018.

Course B, “Nankai Trough mega-earthquake occurs! The Tsunami,” presents damage projections for a major temblor along the seabed depression to the south of Japan, as well as how people can protect themselves.

Course C, “Daily preparations,” encourages viewers to prepare for disasters, including by gathering information and stocking up on emergency supplies.

To develop the teaching materials, the officials interviewed 107 foreign residents, including those taking Japanese-language classes organized by the Lifelong Learning Center.

Twenty-five respondents said they had never experienced earthquakes, 39 had never experienced typhoons, and 47 had never learned how to prepare for disasters.

“Non-Japanese residents, who face language barriers and lack knowledge on disaster management, are vulnerable to disasters,” said Kiyokazu Maebayashi, a Kobe Gakuin University professor of the social studies of disaster management, who helped develop the teaching aids.

“They should be told how to protect themselves, all the more because evacuating from a tsunami spawned by an earthquake along the Nankai Trough would be a race against the clock,” Maebayashi, 67, said.

Users can download the teaching materials free of charge through the Japanese-language website of the Lifelong Learning Center at: (https://osakademanabu.com/bosai/).

The officials said they hope the teaching aids will be used during Japanese-language classes by businesses employing foreign workers and during community disaster management drills.

Slightly more than 285,000 foreign residents were living in Osaka Prefecture as of the end of June 2023, Immigration Services Agency figures show.

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