Japan’s little company reports earthquakes

When a very strong earthquake hit a remote part of Japan on New Year’s Day, a small company warned millions of people. The company has a history of doing big things even though it is small.

NERV is managed by a small private company called Gehirn, which means brain in German. Gehirn has only 13 full-time employees.

However, its alerts about Japan’s frequent earthquakes are usually quicker than the ones issued by official organizations and the country‘s public broadcaster, NHK.

NERV’s account in Japanese on X (formerly Twitter) has 2. 2 million followers, and there are 35,000 people who use it in English. The app came out in September 2019 and has been downloaded over four million times from the Apple Store and Google Play.

It was made in 2010 as an account by a 19-year-old named Daiki Ishimori.

X is very popular in Japan and is the main social media platform for getting information about disasters in the country, especially after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

NERV gives information about earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions as they happen. They also tell people about bad weather like typhoons, flooding, and heavy snow.

The account gathers and shares information about natural disasters from different agencies. It often shares the information faster than the agencies do.

Mr Ishimori said that NERV is very affected by a popular anime TV show called Neon Genesis Evangelion. The show is about a world after a big disaster where half of the people are gone.

The account is named after an organization in the show that warns people about dangers to humanity.

“I made NERV as a fake account to make fun of Twitter because it was becoming popular,” Mr. Ishimori tells the BBC.

“I began as a hobby to program tweets automatically about weather alerts using data from the Japan Meteorological Agency. ”

Back then, the account only had about 300 people following it.

However, in 2011, the strongest earthquake ever recorded hit Japan.

The earthquake caused a tsunami and a nuclear accident in Fukushima. It also caused a lot of deaths in Ishinomaki in Miyagi.

Mr Ishimori couldn’t reach his family for four days. “Actually, I thought they were probably dead,” he remembers. He later learned that although his close family was safe, one of his aunts had passed away.

“I found out that we needed different ways, not just TV and radio, to share disaster information,” he says, because TV didn’t work when the power went out.

He began talking about earthquakes, and as Japan had more natural disasters, the account gained lots of new followers.

But, the recent changes to X affected NERV during the earthquake on New Year’s Day.

Last year, X started making users pay to use its application programming interface (API), which connects X to outside systems and allows for automatic posts on the platform.

Before, the platform’s API was free to use, but now you can only make up to 1,500 free automated posts every month.

Brain has a basic plan that costs $100 (£79) a month and allows 100 posts a day.

NERV sent out alerts about an earthquake and tsunami on Monday. They said it looked like they reached the limit and told their followers to download their app.

A few hours later, X registered its accounts in both Japanese and English as “public utility”, which fixed the problem.

However, NERV had already begun moving away from the platform in 2019 when its account was temporarily locked during an earthquake.

Mr Ishimori says that if we use someone else’s platform, their rules can change. That’s why we should focus on our own platform.

He says his goal has always been to “make Japan safer” – not to make money. He also wants to make the NERV app easy for everyone to use, including people with disabilities.

However, Ishimori agrees that as the app becomes more popular, his company needs to make money.

In 2020, the company started a paid membership program called the “supporters’ club” to help pay for its expenses. The cost is about 120 million yen ($829,200; £653,172) per year.

Mr Ishimori says we are not making money yet. He also says that about one third of our costs are paid by supporters.

“We need more money to buy new information, so that’s why we’re still losing money,” he says with a laugh.

Mr Ishimori feels really bad because he couldn’t help his aunt in 2011 and it still bothers him.

“We are aware that there will be another strong earthquake and a big tsunami. ” My goal is to make it easy for people to get information about disasters.