Japan earthquake: The tiny firm that alerts millions about disasters

When a 7.6 magnitude earthquake hit Japan's remote Noto peninsula on New Year's Day, millions of people were alerted by a small company that has been punching above its weight for years now.

NERV is run by a small private firm called Gehirn - meaning brain in German - with just 13 full-time staff.

Still, its warnings of Japan's frequent earthquakes are often faster than those issued by official bodies and the country's public broadcaster, NHK.

NERV's Japanese-language account on X (formerly Twitter) has 2.2 million followers while another 35,000 people use it in English. Its app, which was launched in September 2019, has been downloaded more than four million times from both the Apple Store and Google Play.

It was created in 2010 as an account by then 19-year-old Daiki Ishimori.

X is huge in Japan and is the go-to social media platform for disaster information in the country - especially since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

As well as offering real-time information on earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions NERV also provides updates on extreme weather events like typhoons, flooding and heavy snow.

The account collates and tweets out data from a number of agencies that track natural disasters - often releasing information faster than even they do.

Mr Ishimori said NERV is heavily influenced by hit anime TV show Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is set in a post-apocalyptic world after half of the human population has been wiped out.

The account's name "special service agency NERV" is a nod to an organisation in the show that issues alerts about threats to humankind.

"I created NERV as a parody account because Twitter was getting popular at the time," Mr Ishimori tells the BBC.

"It started as my programming hobby to post