Dentsu Inc. Tokyo crafted “My Japan Railway” for the JR Group, transforming the everyday commuting experience into an adventurous treasure hunt with distinctive, collectable stamps for railway stations.
At 2023 Cannes Lions, “My Japan Railway” won the Industry Craft Grand Prix, a gold Industry Craft Lion in the Brand & Communications Design category and a gold Design Lion in the Brand Collateral category.
CHALLENGE
PERSONALIZE THE RAILWAY JOURNEY
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:
First, to maximize interest in domestic travel that had grown during the pandemic and encourage people to visit Japan's scenic attractions.
Second, 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.”
TURNED EVERYDAY COMMUTING TO AN ADVENTURE
For Japan Railway’s 150th anniversary campaign, we decided to change that mindset by reimagining the country as a giant interactive game board on which people could engage with the railway and travel destinations nationwide.
We began by searching historical archives and social media for stories about train stations throughout Japan.
Based on our research, we created woodcut-style stamps for each station and an interactive web app for collecting the stamps on a smartphone.
This encouraged people to visit more stations and discover new sights, turned everyday commuting to an adventure, and gave stamp collections a sense of shared experience.
Not only did we give visual form to each station’s unique identity, we engaged customers in a dialogue with the brand and turned the entire country into an interactive playground.
Even more importantly, it made people think about trains in a new way, and started a dialogue with the brand that is helping to shape the railways of tomorrow.
Our book is an encyclopedic compilation of some 600 traditional “stamps” that were created for a campaign celebrating Japan Railway’s 150th anniversary.
The stamps depict train stations and railway scenes from across Japan, and can be downloaded to rail passengers’ smartphone via a custom-developed web app when passengers visit a station.
The book—which is offered as a prize to people who successfully complete in-app tasks—arranges the stamps into thematic categories such as the seasons, mountains, animals, architecture and festivals.
Viewed in this way, the book serves to remind people of the romance of travel, and the vast range of scenic attractions and destinations that can be reached via the Japan Railway network.
“I wonder what the land beyond this mountain looks like. I wonder what lies beyond the sea.
How has travel changed, between the ancient past and the world of today? Travel makes us wonder about things like this.
The varied nature, animals, regional cuisine, architecture, people and more. We take inspiration from new sights and experiences.
Today, too, we hope you will encounter a Japan you have never known before.”
To replicate the look and texture of traditional Japanese woodblock printing—and to emphasize the historic nature of the role that railways have played in Japan—we deliberately chose to work with a restricted color palette of just six colors.
And for the stamp designs, we used only simple letterforms and graphic elements that could actually be reproduced in analogue form on wooden or rubber stamps.
Although the medium of stamp delivery was digital, our designs had a warm, handcrafted look that evoked nostalgia for the past and a sense of human connection that directly supported the psychology of the brand-customer relationship the campaign sought to create.
