The volunteer who built Japan's disaster filter, then added twenty people to check the AI's work
Tokyo, Japan · Kenjiro Murakami
Published August 3, 2026
In the wreckage of the 2011 earthquake, Kenjiro Murakami noticed the fastest damage reports were coming from ordinary people's phones, and spent the next decade making them trustworthy enough for a prefecture to reach for.
The story
The person and the place
Kenjiro Murakami is the founder and chief executive of Spectee, a company in Tokyo whose stated mission is to make crises visible. It exists because of a trip he took in 2011, when he went to the area hit by the Great East Japan Earthquake as a volunteer.
The problem Kenjiro cared about
What he found there was not what he expected. "At that time, I found social media more reliable than mainstream media in gathering the latest information about damage and vital supplies," he told the Government of Japan's KIZUNA magazine. The most useful account of what was actually happening was scattered across strangers' phones, in fragments, mixed in with everything else.
The agency moment
He did not wait for the news to get faster. He set out to build the filter instead, and shipped the first version in 2014 with the goal of judging every post automatically. No human in the loop, no bottleneck, just the machine sorting the real reports from the noise.
What changed
It did not work. The system kept flagging genuine disasters as fake posts, and by around 2015 the company had rebuilt the flow to put people back at the end of it. Roughly twenty people now sit on the verification team, confirming reports by phone and cross-checking them against other data before an alert goes out, and Nikkei xTECH reports that users came to treat the human check as the reassuring part. When the Noto Peninsula earthquake hit Ishikawa Prefecture in January 2024, the prefectural government had already adopted the service, and Nikkei xTECH reports its information was used as material for judging evacuation instructions. With roads cut, the service weighed transport ministry road cameras against driving data from cars that had actually been down those roads, supplied by Toyota. One pharmaceutical company used it to identify its supplier factories inside the disaster zone and had the damage status of all of them confirmed by the next day. There is a catch the Noto quake exposed: when a disaster is bad enough, the posts thin out too. The worse it gets, the quieter the phones.
The move worth copying
He had the more impressive version and let it go. Twenty people checking a machine's homework is a worse sentence than full automation, and it is the reason a prefectural government picked the tool up. If something you built is only trustworthy with a person standing next to it, that is not a failure to hide. Know someone who shipped the honest version instead of the impressive one? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"Disaster response is a race against time. It is crucial to identify and provide the most critical information as quickly as possible so emergency responders can focus on efficient action." — Kenjiro Murakami, Government of Japan KIZUNA magazine
Verified sources
Sources
Here is where this story came from. Go read the originals.
Sources last verified August 3, 2026.