Ricoh has successfully returned almost 90 000 photos through its Save the Memory Project, which it has been carrying out as part of its reconstruction support activities after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in August 2011.
The aim of the project it to return photos lost and damaged in the tsunami to their owners. The project involves collecting precious photos found in the disaster-affected area and cleaning them, with the help of local government and countless volunteers, and then using MFPs to digitise and store the photos on the cloud so that people can easily search them.
Searches can be carried out on computers at local government photo centres. Once someone has found a photo, the original and all associated data is returned to them via the relevant local government.
In total, there are more than 400 000 digitised photos on file. In the four years since the earthquake and accompanying tsunami, almost 90 000 of these photos have been returned to their owners through photo centres 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.
The operation has so far digitised 418 721 photos thanks to the efforts of 518 volunteer employees from 17 Ricoh group companies. Volunteers cleaned and digitised photos between work hours using the talents of specialists from Ricoh and using open spaces in existing offices.
