A fund-raising campaign titled “Let’s Send Love to Devastated Parts of the Tohoku Region by Donating Our Money” took place at ITOCHU Corporation’s Tokyo Head Office and Osaka Head Office on February 14, which was St. Valentine’s Day. This campaign started with the idea of “sending money kept for buying gifts for St. Valentine’s Day and the so-called White Day (a Japanese invention for returning St. Valentine’s gifts) to people in affected areas,” conceived by volunteers among ITOCHU employees, and spread from them to people in the entire company.
At the Osaka Head Office, volunteer ITOCHU employees collected goodwill donations energetically in elevator halls and at their respective places of work in the morning and at lunch time. At the Tokyo Head Office, many ITOCHU employees began donating their pocket money to the fund-raising campaign during their lunch break, spurred by the “first donation” President and C. E. O. Masahiro Okafuji made as the first thing in the morning. ITOCHU will donate 378,817 yen raised through this campaign to a public service corporation called Nippon International Cooperation for Community Development (NICCO), which has been undertaking reconstruction support activities in Miyagi and Iwate prefectures since the period immediately after the earthquake and tsunami, requesting the aid-supplying corporation to apply the donations to programs for supporting schools in devastated areas.

On January 19, first-year employees of ITOCHU Corporation participated in a community service cleaning up a segment of Aoyama-dori (a major thoroughfare) in the vicinity of the Tokyo Head Office. This was the ninth time the first-year employees cleaned the sidewalk and gutter as part of the social contribution activities they launched for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2012. On this occasion, despite the cold weather, a group of sixteen young women from ITOCHU joined neighborhood organizers, local police and volunteers from other companies in the area to clear the street of debris and hand no-littering reminder leaflets out to passersby. A troop of thirteen volunteers from ITOCHU Group company CI Shopping Service Co., Ltd. also lent a hand to participate in the social contribution activity. In all, more than 30 volunteers from the ITOCHU Group showed up, including the organizers, much to the gratitude of the other participants. They were offered warm words of praise for a job well done from the passersby and the police on guard at the Crown Prince’s palace. It was a cold day out, but we were all warmed by the sense of com-munity we felt as we participated in the cleanup.

Soon after the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred last March, Eastern Microelectric Lab Inc., an ITOCHU business partner in Taiwan, donated about 1,500 blankets to ITOCHU as emergency relief supplies. Although this was a warmhearted act of support, a huge amount of blankets had already been given by bodies in Japan and overseas, and at the time it wasn’t possible for us to deliver this donation immediately to the stricken area. However, the first winter since the earthquake came round. On the two days this year of January 21 and 28, we delivered these warm blankets directly into the hands of local people with the help of an NPO active in the area called Sweet Treat 311. The blankets were given to people living as evacuees in their homes and the residents of temporary housing complexes at nine locations centered on the district of Ogatsu-cho in Ishinomaki City in Miyagi Prefecture. On these two days, some ITOCHU employees volunteered to join in and give out the blankets. ITOCHU continues to sincerely hope that this region can fully recover as quickly as possible.