Japan has spent a century building the best disaster-warning system in the world, and almost all of it now speaks your language. Warnings arrive on your phone before the shaking does, evacuation routes are signposted, and the people around you have practised this since primary school.
What follows takes about ten minutes to set up. After that you can put it out of your mind and enjoy the prefecture.
Ten minutes, once
Install one alert app. Safety tips is the official one from the Japan Tourism Agency, free, and it pushes earthquake, tsunami, typhoon and evacuation alerts in fifteen languages including English. It also has an evacuation flowchart and phrases you can show to people around you. NERV is the other favourite — faster, beautifully designed, and also available in English.
Sign up for the city’s alerts. Miyazaki City runs a free disaster-mail service in English, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Nepali and easy Japanese. It carries evacuation information, weather, earthquakes, tsunami, rivers and volcanoes for the address you actually live at.
Look at the map once. Open the Miyazaki City disaster portal and find where you sleep. You are looking for one thing: which way is higher ground, and how long does it take to walk there. Five minutes now is worth more than any amount of reading later.
Earthquakes
Japan’s Earthquake Early Warning reaches phones, television and radio in the seconds between a quake starting and the shaking arriving where you are — often just a few seconds, sometimes half a minute. It is a warning that shaking is coming, and roughly how strong; it does not predict how long it will last.
When it sounds, or when the floor starts to move:
- Get under a sturdy table or desk and protect your head. Hold the leg so the table stays over you. Away from windows and anything tall.
- Stay where you are until the shaking stops. Doorways are not safer, and running outside during shaking is how people get hurt.
- Outdoors, move to open ground away from walls, glass and power lines.
- Afterwards, turn off the gas and open a door so it cannot jam shut.
Japan measures earthquakes on the shindo scale, which describes how strongly the ground shook at a given place rather than the energy of the quake. It has ten steps: 0 to 4, then 5-lower and 5-upper, 6-lower and 6-upper, and 7 — which is exactly how you will hear warnings phrased on the radio. Anything from 5-upper is a serious shake.
The coast, and tsunami
Miyazaki faces the Hyūganada, so the prefecture takes tsunami seriously and has built accordingly: marked evacuation routes, evacuation stairways up the embankments, and designated tsunami evacuation buildings whose upper floors you may enter freely in an emergency.
The rule near the sea is simple and worth knowing before you need it:
If the shaking is strong, or if a weak shake goes on for a long time, walk inland and uphill straight away. Do not wait for a warning, do not go back for anything, and do not drive if you can walk.
In the prefecture’s 2026 planning assumptions for a maximum-class Nankai Trough earthquake, the first water reaches the Miyazaki City coast about 18 minutes after the quake, and 14 to 20 minutes along the rest of the coast. That is enough time to walk to high ground on foot — which is the whole reason to have looked at the map once, in advance.
The Nankai Trough, and what an advisory means
You will hear the Nankai Trough mentioned in Miyazaki. It is the offshore subduction zone that has produced Japan’s largest earthquakes historically, and Japan monitors it more closely than any fault on earth.
That monitoring is public, and it is worth knowing what it sounds like when it speaks, so it does not alarm you:
- In August 2024, a magnitude 7.1 quake in the Hyūganada led the JMA to issue the first Nankai Trough Megaquake Advisory ever. It asked people to check their preparations for one week. Nothing followed, and the advisory was lifted on 15 August.
- In January 2025, another Hyūganada quake was large enough to convene the evaluation committee. The final measurement came in just below the threshold and the investigation was closed the same night.
Both times the system did exactly what it is designed to do: look, tell everyone plainly what it found, and stand down. An advisory is a request to check your supplies, not an instruction to leave.
Typhoons and heavy rain
Typhoons reach Miyazaki mostly in late summer and early autumn. Unlike earthquakes they are forecast days ahead, so there is time to shop, charge things and change plans; see Weather in Miyazaki for how the seasons run.
Evacuation information comes on a five-level scale, and only two levels need remembering:
| Level | What it means |
|---|---|
| 4 — Evacuation instruction | Everyone in the area leaves now. This is the one to act on. |
| 5 — Emergency safety measures | Leaving is already unsafe; move to the highest, strongest place you can reach. |
Level 5 exists because someone waited. Go at level 4.
Volcanoes
The Kirishima range on the western border is active and monitored continuously, with alert levels published for each peak. When a level rises, specific trails and roads close and everything else carries on as normal — the mountains stay open far more often than not. Check Ebino Eco Museum for current conditions in English before hiking.
Numbers worth having
- 119 — fire and ambulance. Call an ambulance rather than walking into a clinic if it is serious; the crew will find the right hospital.
- 110 — police.
- Japan Visitor Hotline: 050-3816-2787 — 24 hours, every day, in English, Chinese, Korean and Japanese, for emergencies and for the questions that come with them.
Official sources
- Japan Meteorological Agency — warnings and forecasts (Earthquake Early Warning explained)
- Miyazaki City disaster portal · Multilingual disaster support call centre
- Miyazaki Prefecture — Nankai Trough damage assumptions, February 2026 · Tsunami inundation assumptions, August 2025
- Weather in Miyazaki — forecasts, warning links and hazard maps