Many foreigners have hard time obtaining disaster info in Kumamoto quake

KUMAMOTO, Japan - Many foreigners in Kumamoto Prefecture may have had difficulty in obtaining information in the aftermath of last month's magnitude-7.1 earthquake, as only few municipalities in the hard-hit areas had services specifically designed for non-Japanese residents, a Kyodo News tally showed Sunday.

Although government statistics show some 31,000 foreign nationals resided in the southwestern Japanese prefecture as of Jan. 1, only three of the 19 municipalities surveyed said they had such arrangements in place.