The 42nd International Premium Incentives Show kicked off yesterday at Sunshine City in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, gathering manufacturers of promotional swag and other products geared toward businesses – store-front signs, digital photo frames, and tissue box covers, for example – as well as characters offered for licensing, such as Rose O’Neill’s Kewpie (not affiliated with the mayonnaise-producing Kewpie Corporation) and the characters from the manga-and-anime about the high school baseball club manager that read Drucker’s Management.

Though not a technology-oriented event, there were companies like Green House with some interesting tech-related things there – USB thumb drives were aplenty, because apparently, those things are commonly given out as promotional merchandise – but more prominent were products that exemplified Japanese ingenuity and eccentricity – plastic file folders with rough surfaces for pencils, or bandaids with national flags printed on them, for example.

Detailed posts of things I found interesting will follow, with edits to this article linking to them.

[Incentives Show] 3R Systems’s Levitating Photo Frames
[Incentives Show] Itano Shikou Inc Covers Boring Tissues Boxes with Interesting Designs
[Incentives Show] USB Thumbdrive Fashion Accessories
[Incentives Show] Green House’s Booth of USB Goodies
[Incentives Show] Famous Japanese Toys at Tomy Booth