Sendai Places Campaign: Now Open

Ever since the earthquake and tsunami hit Northeastern Japan, the Tokyo team has been working on different ways to help the affected areas. Now that the relief efforts have shifted from immediate crisis response to community recovery, we’ve mobilized a city-wide campaign around Places in Sendai, Tohoku area’s biggest city, to help energize the local economy. We want to make sure locals and tourists alike know about all the great restaurants, bars, and stores that Sendai has to offer.

The first part of our program is the “Sendai, Now Open” website, which features videos from Sendai-based celebrities introducing their favorite establishments. The videos include singer Muneyuki Sato, model Midori Kuzuoka, and famed children’s characters Gachapin & Mukku, who are in Sendai this summer to support the city’s famous Tanabata Festival. All of these videos have English subtitles, so even if you can’t understand Japanese, feel free to take a look!

Secondly, locals and tourists who head up to Sendai on the weekends are likely to see giant Google Maps pins. These are not just decorations, but special stations where you can speak your destination through voice search, see the results come up on a map of the city, and then swipe your NFC-enabled phone to get the exact location of the place that interests you sent to your phone. We hope this’ll make it super easy for tourists to find famous spots, and for locals to discover new places.

In addition, more than 450 local Sendai businesses will have fans in the shape of a Google map pin that they’ll be able to pass out to customers. The fans are printed with a QR code that links to the store owner’s Place page. (And with how hot it gets in the Japanese summer, we hope these fans also help folks keep cool!) Stores will also have the QR codes pasted on the signs in front so that passersby can scan the code with their phones and quickly learn more about the establishment before going inside.

We’ll be conducting this Google Places campaign through the summer until the famous August 8 Tanabata Festival, so if you’re in Japan over the next few weeks, we encourage you to head up to Sendai. Get ready to be introduced to lots of awesome places!

Posted by Kaori Negoro, Senior Product Marketing Manager