After watching back our video letters there were several things we wanted to improve.

“We say “TCS needs your help” but people won’t know what TCS is…”

“When my Dad watched the video he said he thought we should do a self introduction”

We realized that the English we had tried so hard to remember wasn’t quite enough; we still needed to ask more.

It has been about 2 weeks since we sent the first lot of letters, and we haven’t had a single reply. We know that the project is a long term project but we don’t want to lose momentum or hope. To spark their enthusiasm again the teacher suggested that the letter could still be improved.

“The letter you wrote is very good, but it isn’t perfect yet. What can we do to really move people to help us out?” he asked.

In addition to inserting a self introduction paragraph the students realized that simply saying our “collecting stamps and making a map” idea will not be enough to spur people into action.

“I think we should give people who send us stamps the feeling that they are really participating in making the map”

“So what do you think we can do?”

“We could actually show them our idea”

“Yeah, it will have more impact if people can see an example of what we want to make!”

This led to a series of quick and sometimes heated discussions about what kind of map to make and the class eventually broke into 2 groups. These groups then made an example map on large pieces of paper.

The first group’s map was based on the Mercator projection style map and involved putting sent stamps onto the country where they come from.

“Should we draw country borders?” asked one student.

Which is when we posed the question: “Why are collecting stamps again?”

“So we can connect with people all over the world….” came the reply.

“So do you think that country borders really encourage the spirit of the theme?

“Huh?????”

When we looked at the map again we noticed the dead straight lines between countries and though this was strange.

“But if course you can’t see these lines in real life! Let’s leave them off!”

Under the borderless map the students decided to write “BORDERLESS WORLD” in English.

The other group on the other hand chose to draw the globe of the Earth with people around the edges holding hands. There are bridges connecting the countries on the map to represent connecting with each other.

“The bridges can be made out of the stamps that people send us!”

The map was completed with the message “We are friends.” This map really showed the essence of our theme and will really catch the eye of people around the world.

After completing the map we started to think in detail about our message, the reason for wanting to collect world stamps. The problem of our message being a bit vague came back to mind. Of course we want to know about other country’s culture and famous things but that is not all.

“If we just ask people to send stamps it becomes just an exchange of things…”

“My grandmother used to collect stamps” says one student suddenly.

In preparation we had found an NGO which puts used stamps into good use so we showed them the information.

“Wow, they change the used stamps into money and send it to doctors in foreign countries…”

“1kg of stamps is worth 1,200yen”

Japan Overseas Christian Medical Cooperative Service (or JOCS) is a Christian NGO which sells old used stamps to collectors and uses the money to provide doctors and medical staff to countries in need.
Click here to see the JOCS website

“Stamps from outside Japan fetch more money!” said one student after reading the pamphlet. JOCS asks for domestic and international stamps to be separated and we realized that we really need to collect stamps from abroad so we can help others.

“We have only said we will put the stamps onto the map” notices one student.

“So…instead of sending some stamps we actually would like people to send as many stamps as they can!”

We decided then to change this, along with the sentence that reads “we would be happy to send you something from Japan.” Instead we need to explain about the charity and what good use the stamps will be put to. This way we can really connect with people all over the world and help people less fortunate than ourselves.

To start with we wrote this part out in Japanese but found it very difficult to make it compact and accurate and before we knew it class should have finished 15 minutes ago!

The next step was to change this in English and reshoot our video letter…stay tuned for more!

If you think you can send stamps to us please send an email to school＠tokyocs.org