Ricoh volunteers rescue 90,000 tsunami photos

"Save the memory' project collected, cleaned and digitzed photographs found in the disaster areas to return them to their owners.

The precious photos store photos once restored and digitized are stored in the cloud so that people can search them easily. Searches can be carried out on computers at local government photo centers. Once someone has found a photo they lost, the original and all associated data is returned to them via the relevant local government. In total, there are over 400,000 digitized photos on file. In the four years since the earthquake and accompanying tsunami, more than 90,000 of these photos have been returned to their owners through photo centers in five locations.

The driving force behind returning photos has been the determination of people affected by the earthquake and tsunami to retrieve valuable properties, irreplaceable photos, to their owners. Through these activities, Ricoh has built up considerable expertise in terms of using its resources, organizational capabilities, technology and facilities to make a difference in collaboration with local government.

In an ideal world, there would be no need to use this expertise again in the wake of a similar disaster. In the event that such a disaster does occur, however, Ricoh is keen to share its expertise as widely as possible in order to be of assistance. With this in mind, the procedure used to return photos, along with notes by staffs involved in the project, will be made available to the public on the website from March 9. Needless to say, Ricoh is happy if this information is used for other purposes, too, not just in the event of a disaster.

There were volunteer  518 employees from 17 Ricoh Group companies taking part in cleaning and digitizing photos in between their work hours, making the most of specialist fields at each company and open spaces in offices.