How can Google help the Japanese earthquake and tsunami victims?Just after the earthquake, we went to the disaster site and found out that the tsunami had wiped out not only people's houses, but also photos and movies that were stored in tapes, albums and computer hard disks. Thus the memories of the victims have been lost.Our challenge was to ‘Recover the Memories’ of the victims.So we created a project to help the victims.

This project promoted people's action all over Japan and they answered to the voices of the victims.The website went over 5m page views.More than 20,000 photos and movies were gathered.

This promotion is a continuing platform which will go on until all their past memories are recovered and their hopes for the future restored.

A project uniting everyone to bring back the memories lost in the disaster.First we created a website where the victims could submit memories they wanted to recover.

We set post boxes at 45 refuges within the disaster area, so one could submit their memory in handwriting. We then uploaded that on to the website.Moreover, we spread the requests all over Japan through newspaper ads, banner ads, and TVC. We made a system where people from all over Japan could react to the victim’s request by uploading photos and movies onto YouTube and PICASA.

If they lose their past, it’s difficult to move forward to the future, because memories give us hope for the future, letting us know who we were and how we were supported in the past.This project couldn't be done by Google alone, so we let victims initiate requests and then receive help from public.We proved that the power of cyber and the technology of Google can activate the people and change the real world.

And setting 45 memory post boxes and collecting handwriting requests without using a PC resulted in Google's first-ever challenge in an analogue way.