Japan Railway is well known for its practical convenience and on-time record, but our campaign enabled people to view the company in a more personal context. Using an interactive web app that was specifically designed for rail users, we created a pathway for people to engage in a conversation with the brand.

This effectively turned everyday commuting into a brand experience, changing the way people felt about the company. What's more, it encouraged them to travel by rail to more distant destinations, and gave them an outlet for their creativity as they visited scenic attractions throughout Japan.

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 after 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".

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.

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 over 900 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.

Our strategy was to focus on how people thought about railway infrastructure—particularly the train stations that serve as access points to railway services. We knew that stations were perceived as public spaces, not as places to which people felt any personal attachment, and that this caused people to think about railways simply as an everyday means of public transportation. By creating distinctive, collectable stamps for each station, we increased the value of the everyday commuting experience by transforming it into an adventurous treasure hunt.

This gave people a reason to talk about their favourite stations and railway adventures with others. Previously, it was only avid railway fans who loved trains and train stations enough to post about them on social media. But with the attractive content we provided, even ordinary commuters began to share their love, becoming a vast network public relations hubs for the railway.

Our web app captured the unique identities of stations and communities across Japan with images that have the warm, handcrafted look of traditional Japanese woodblock prints using only six Japan Railway Signature Colors. Because our web app shows the date and time each stamp was collected along with the number of other people who have already collected the same stamp, a sense of community is also created among stamp collectors.

To support the campaign, our billboards were placed in high-traffic station walkways and featured all of the stamps arranged in the shape of a map of Japan, while the posters were offered as prizes that people could win by completing in-app tasks. Our book is an encyclopaedic compilation of the stamps depicting train stations and railway scenes from across Japan.

When people no longer traveled abroad after the pandemic, our campaign successfully supercharged interest in domestic travel. 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 24,000 mentions and over 49,000,000 impressions on social media and been featured in magazine and newspaper articles. During the campaign to date, some 1,000,000 users have collected over 6,300,000 stamps, strengthening the brand-customer relationship and entertaining railway passengers of all ages.