Train lines operated by Japan Railway form the backbone of public transportation infrastructure in Japan. They traverse the entire country, and have made life more convenient and helped society grow for 150 years. In fact, they are so integral to daily life that people often take them for granted. To address this issue, we were asked to develop a campaign that would reconnect Japan Railway with its customers in a personal way. Despite the fact that Japan is a small island nation, only 6% of Japanese have visited all 47 prefectures. So our objectives were twofold: 1) to maximise interest in domestic travel that had grown during the pandemic and encourage people to visit Japan's scenic attractions, and 2) to inject an element of fun into rail travel and engage people in an interactive activity that enabled them to create their own personal "My Japan Railway".

Our creative idea was to imbue train stations all across Japan with their own unique identity, transforming them from simple transportation access points into destinations of personal significance that people could feel a strong emotional connection to. We began by researching railway stations across the country, reviewing historical records, newspaper articles, archival and current photos and social media. Based on our research, we created woodcut-style stamps for some 600 stations nationwide, and a web app for collecting the stamps on a smartphone. Metadata displayed with the stamps also allows people to see how many others have collected the same stamp, creating a sense of shared experience with other travellers.

To execute our stamp designs, we used the signature colours of the six companies that comprise the nationwide Japan Railway network. Although the medium of stamp delivery is digital, we gave the stamps a warm, analogue feel by using woodcut-style lettering and imagery, and enabled people to personalise the stamp images by varying the ‘stamping force’ according to how long the smartphone app screen is pressed. This fusion of analogue and digital technology creates an online/offline experience is at once retro and trendsetting. Stamps can be displayed in the order they were collected, by rarity or popularity, or as a personalised map of the user's travels. To support the campaign we used in-station billboards showing all of the stamps arranged to form a map of Japan, and to heighten user engagement, we created stamp books, posters, and promotional items that can be obtained by completing in-app tasks.

Our campaign successfully supercharged interest in domestic travel during the pandemic, when restrictions on international travel had caused people to adopt a ‘stay home’ mentality. This not only benefitted the railways, of course, but also helped boost regional economies nationwide. In a survey of campaign participants, 71% said “It made traveling around Japan by train more fun,” and 68% said “It made me want to visit places I hadn’t visited before.” In addition to bringing about this positive change in attitude, the campaign has also garnered over 16,000 mentions and over 18,000,000 impressions on social media and been featured in magazine and newspaper articles. During the campaign to date, some 770,000 users have collected over 2,000,000 stamps, strengthening the brand-customer relationship and entertaining railway passengers of all ages.

The tradition of collecting woodcut-style stamped images in a travel scrapbook has a long history in Japan. It traces its origins to the nation’s shrines and temples, where visitors can have the official “seal” of a shrine or temple stamped into a travel scrapbook as a way to commemorate their visit. The collection of such stamps is something of a national passion, and “stamp rallies” have become a popular way to encourage people to visit all of the points of interest at travel destinations. Our campaign was conceived from the insight that we could leverage this traditional stamp rally culture and national affinity for stamp collecting to communicate with customers in an interactive way.