\n<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The account’s name “special service agency NERV” is a nod to an organisation in the show that issues alerts about threats to humankind.<\/p>\n
“I created NERV as a parody account because Twitter was getting popular at the time,” Mr Ishimori tells the BBC.<\/p>\n
“It started as my programming hobby to post automated tweets about weather alerts using the Japan Meteorological Agency data.”<\/p>\n
At the time, the account only had around 300 followers.<\/p>\n
But then in 2011, Japan’s most powerful earthquake on record struck. <\/p>\n
Best known for triggering a tsunami that caused a nuclear accident in Fukushima, the quake also caused great loss of life in his hometown Ishinomaki in Miyagi in the north-east of the country.<\/p>\n
For four days, Mr Ishimori was unable to contact his family. “To be honest, I thought they must be dead,” he recalls. He later found out that while his immediate family was safe, one of his aunts had died.<\/p>\n
“I realised we needed to have other ways – not just TV and radio – to communicate disaster information,” he says, as TV became useless during power cuts.<\/p>\n
He started posting about earthquakes, and as Japan experienced more natural disasters, the account added hundreds of thousands of new followers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n