Japan Works on Perfecting Art of Trade Shows : U.S., European Consultants Had a Hand in Asia’s New Convention Complex

The Japanese have demonstrated time and time again their knack for taking foreign business innovations, improving on them and then setting new industry standards.

Something similar could be afoot in the convention and trade show industry. Next month, the $350-million Nippon Convention Center, the largest meeting complex in Asia, will open 20 miles east of Tokyo in the prefecture of Chiba. The state-of-the-art, 1.4 million-square-foot center has been built with significant input from convention professionals from the U.S. and Europe, where the convention industry has been elevated to an art form.

The first major show slated for the Nippon center will be the Tokyo Motor Show in late October, an event expected to draw up to 230,000 visitors a day.

Notwithstanding the popularity of events such as the Tokyo Motor Show, exhibitions per se are not yet as popular in Japan as here. That’s because the shows’ role as major sales and marketing events, where large numbers of deals are routinely consummated, goes somewhat against the grain in Japan. The custom there is generally for deals to close only after repeated sales calls, considerable socializing and then a decision by committee.

Expert Assistance

But as Japanese business practices become increasingly Westernized, trade shows inevitably will become more popular, Japanese officials say. And the opening of the sprawling Nippon Convention Center, strategically situated on a new rail line between Tokyo, Tokyo Disneyland and the expanding Tokyo International Airport in Narita, should speed that acceptance.

Among the American consultants who contributed to the planning of the Nippon center was Sheldon Adelson, chairman of Interface Group of Needham, Mass. and the promoter of the hugely successful Comdex computer trade show, who suggested ways of designing efficient floor plans.

Bob Birkfeld, group vice president of Edgell Expositions of Norwalk, Conn., a leading organizer of trade shows in the United States, Europe and Far East, assisted in market feasibility studies. “The trade exposition concept as originated in Europe has been refined in the U.S. over the last 30 years,” Birkfeld said. “Now the Japanese are poised to take the best of both our worlds and go on to the next evolutionary stage.”

Birkfeld and others familiar with the Nippon center describe it as a comprehensive, impressive facility. The exhibition hall will offer up to 600,000 square feet for one show but has movable walls and an be subdivided for smaller events. By the end of 1991, the site will have six contiguous hotels with more than 3,000 new hotel rooms.

The crown jewel of the complex is the Makuhari Event Hall, a theater-like facility that seats 9,000 people. It will provide spontaneous translation in four languages. The entire complex will have 6,000 parking spaces.

Apart from physical design, the Nippon center management has also sought U.S. input on how to market the convention center. Toward that end, Chiba Gov. Takeshi Numata has made several visits during the past few years to U.S. and European convention center sites, the latest of which occurred late last week. His prefecture is financing construction of the Nippon center.

Visit From Delegation

On this most recent swing, Numata and officials of Chiba’s convention and visitors bureau sought marketing advice from convention and visitor bureaus in San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago and New York, said Chiba Convention Bureau Managing Director Shojiro Tabei.

Al Reese, vice president of the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau, said the Japanese delegation was “over here to see what they could learn from us.” Reese’s organization has a new convention center of its own to market, the 450,000-square-foot San Diego Convention Center, which opens in November.

“They were interested in the balance between marketing for the pleasure traveler and for the convention business,” Reese said. “Both are necessary if you are to have a healthy tourist industry. If you are just a convention city, then you are not going to get the mass market that is going to fill up hotel rooms year around. . . . There are peaks and valleys in the convention business.”

Recognizing the importance of tourism to augment its convention business, Chiba prefecture is helping to finance the construction of 11 new resorts in the district, Numata said in an interview here last week. The resorts, which will include a 1,000-room complex on the slopes of Mount Kano, an area he compared to Aspen, will be built around golf, tennis and water sports themes.

“The resorts are a good move,” said Graham Hornel, director of communications for Pacific Asia Travel Assn., a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization of 2,000 worldwide travel groups.

“When you are selling a destination to a meeting manager, more than meeting facilities come into play,” Hornel said. “There are the bonus extras that cause the delegate to want to bring along his spouse and kids and turn the meeting into a mini-vacation. . . . Look what Disneyland has done for the Anaheim Convention Center and vice versa.”

Built in Under 2 Years

A 10-mile bridge across Tokyo Bay linking Tokyo with Chiba prefecture is planned for completion in 1996, a project that will increase access to the new resorts, Numata said.

The Nippon center, which is being completed after less than two years of construction, is expected to replace the Harumi convention site as metropolitan Tokyo’s premier convention complex. Birkfeld described Harumi as inadequate for major conventions because it consists of seven separate buildings, five of which lack heating and air conditioning.

Most U.S. convention center officials agree with general manager Steve Walsh of the Los Angeles Convention Center that the Nippon center poses little threat in taking meeting business away from U.S. venues. “Most trade shows are not going to be shipped to Tokyo for a three- or four-day exhibit,” Walsh said.

But Ed Greeley, president of the National Assn. of Exposition Managers, a New York trade organization, said the Nippon center could become an industry force. “The world is shrinking,” Greeley said. “Depending on the value of the yen, it might not be that difficult to attract groups to Asia as opposed to Europe.”

Birkfeld foresees Nippon, as a “major new venue in the Orient,” as accelerating the recognition by U.S. exporting firms that trade shows are a good way to market their products overseas.