Foreign Resident Voices on Information Access

The purpose of this study was to investigate the current level of accessibility to public information and public services intended to facilitate foreign residents with limited-Japanese proficiency. This paper provides a summary and comparative analysis of the initial findings of survey of 90 websites and the responses of 38 English-speaking foreign residents’ online questionnaire. The analysis focused on the of multilingual availability and quality of international centers and local municipalities information meant for foreign residents compared to where the respondents’ reported how they obtain information for daily life, public support services, their level of trust of the information, and how they would prefer to access this information.