Japan IT Week 2026: Dates, Venues, Expos & Free Entry Guide

Japan IT Week 2026 (Tokyo Autumn Show) runs October 21-23, 2026 at Makuhari Messe in Chiba, from 10:00 to 17:00 daily. Organizer RX Japan plans for 700 exhibitors and 31,000 visitors across 18 co-located expos under four shows. Admission is free with a printed visitor badge (checked 2026-08-24, japan-it.jp). Three expos now carry AI in the name. Osaka, Tokyo Big Sight, and Nagoya editions follow through July 2027.

I track AI conferences on StackVerdict mostly to answer one question for readers: is the ticket worth the flight? Japan IT Week inverts the question. The ticket costs nothing, so the whole cost of attending is the flight, the hotel, and three days of your time.

The organizer, RX Japan, gives away admission with a registration form and prints an English site for international attendees. What it does not print is a speaker roster or a seminar programme, and the show floor is a predominantly Japanese-language environment. Both of those matter more than the price does.

I run StackVerdict’s AI events hub by pulling numbers straight from the organizer and stating where the picture is thin. For Japan IT Week 2026 the dates, venues, expo lineup, and attendance projections are all specific and confirmed. Language and the missing English seminar programme are the two things a Western attendee needs to price into the decision.

Japan IT Week is four shows and 18 expos on one free badge

Japan IT Week is Japan’s largest IT trade exhibition. RX Japan Ltd. runs it as an umbrella under which four shows run at the same time: Japan IT Week itself, Japan DX & AX Week, Sales & Digital Marketing Week, and E-commerce & Store Week. One free badge covers all four.

The naming detail worth catching before you go: RX Japan renamed two established expos this cycle. The Embedded & Edge AI Expo was previously the IoT & Edge Computing Expo, and the AI Infrastructure & Data Center Expo was previously just the Data Center Expo. Adding “AI” to two existing expos is a clean signal for what RX Japan expects exhibitors to be selling. It is also a signal to read carefully, because the underlying products often predate the framing.

Dates, venue, and the Chiba logistics

The Tokyo Autumn Show runs October 21-23, 2026 (Wednesday to Friday) at Makuhari Messe, 2-1 Nakase, Mihama-ku, Chiba City 261-8550. Floor hours are 10:00 to 17:00 all three days.

Makuhari Messe is in Chiba, not central Tokyo. The venue is roughly 30 to 40 minutes by train from Tokyo Station on the Keiyo Line to Kaihimmakuhari, and it is a shorter hop from Narita Airport than most international attendees expect. Booking a hotel in Shinjuku or Shibuya out of habit will land you with a longer daily commute than the Makuhari-side hotels next to the venue.

Japanese attendees mostly show up for one day, sometimes a half day, with a target booth list. If you have flown in, working all three days properly is the unusual advantage, and it makes a 700-exhibitor floor tractable rather than overwhelming.

Detail	Value
Event	Japan IT Week 2026 (Tokyo Autumn Show)
Dates	October 21-23, 2026 (Wed-Fri)
Hours	10:00 to 17:00 daily
Venue	Makuhari Messe, Chiba City 261-8550
Exhibitors (planned)	700
Visitors (planned)	31,000
Admission	Free with visitor registration
Organizer	RX Japan Ltd.

Scale figures verified against RX Japan’s own visitor page, checked 2026-08-24 at japan-it.jp.

The four editions are not equivalent, and Osaka is the softest entry

Japan IT Week runs four times a year across three cities. The editions are not the same size. The Tokyo Spring show at Tokyo Big Sight is the flagship and is materially larger than the rest. Osaka is the smallest of the three published so far, at roughly a third of Chiba’s exhibitor count.

Edition	Dates	Venue	City	Exhibitors	Visitors
Tokyo Autumn	Oct 21-23, 2026	Makuhari Messe	Chiba	700	31,000
Osaka	Nov 18-20, 2026	INTEX Osaka	Osaka	250	12,000
Tokyo Spring	Apr 7-9, 2027	Tokyo Big Sight	Tokyo	TBA	TBA
Nagoya	Jul 21-23, 2027	Port Messe Nagoya	Nagoya	TBA	TBA

Osaka drops the SysAdmin Empowerment Expo from the Japan IT Week lineup but otherwise mirrors Chiba, including all five DX & AX Week expos.

If your goal is maximum exhibitor coverage in one trip, wait for the Tokyo Spring show in April 2027. Third-party trade-show databases put recent Spring editions well into four figures for exhibitors, though RX Japan has not published its own 2027 projection yet, so treat those listings as indicative. If your goal is a lower-friction floor where you can actually get a conversation on a booth, Osaka’s 250 exhibitors and 12,000 visitors is the softer entry point.

Three expos actually cover AI, and one of them is a rename

The October show fields 18 expos across the four shows. Three carry AI explicitly.

• Embedded & Edge AI Expo (Japan IT Week Autumn). Hardware and on-device inference. Japanese manufacturing depth shows up here more than at Western equivalents.
• AI Infrastructure & Data Center Expo (Japan IT Week Autumn). Compute and facilities.
• AI and Business Automation Expo (Japan DX & AX Week). Software and workflow. The “AX” in the show name stands for AI transformation, a category RX Japan added alongside DX.

The other 15 expos cover software development, IoT, information security, IT staffing, office-work DX, e-commerce, and store operations. AI framing bleeds across the DX & AX Week floor too, including the renamed Management Transformation Expo in the AI Era. Expect the AI-labelled floor area to be materially larger than the AI-native exhibitor count, because renamed expos carry booths that predate the rename.

Free registration is not the same as walk-up

Admission is free with the visitor registration form, and there is no paid general-admission tier. RX Japan publishes a three-step flow: register on the show site, print your badge in colour, bring it to the venue. Turning up without a printed badge means the on-site queue, and on a 31,000-visitor show that queue is exactly what you want to skip.

There are two registration types. Standard visitor registration is open to anyone attending in a business capacity. VIP registration is also free and adds priority handling, but is restricted to manager level and above. If you qualify for VIP there is no reason to take the standard badge.

RX Japan states visitor badge registration for the Tokyo Autumn Show opens in August 2026, with pre-registration available before that. Pre-register now and come back for the printed badge closer to the dates.

My go-or-skip framing

Two caveats before the framing, and neither is about quality.

The first is language. RX Japan runs full English pages for visitors, and international attendance is welcome, but the floor is Japanese-first. Larger exhibitors will have English-capable staff. Many smaller ones will not. Assume seminar content is Japanese unless a session says otherwise. If you plan substantive technical conversations across many booths, budget for an interpreter or a Japan-based colleague. Going in expecting English-first is the mistake I most expect from a first-time international attendee here.

The second is that there is no published English speaker roster or session programme. At the paid conferences on the StackVerdict events hub, the keynote lineup is the product. At Japan IT Week the floor is the product. If your reason for attending is to hear specific people speak, this is the wrong event.

Here is the same go-or-skip framing I apply to the AI tools I have tested. Go to Chiba in October if you are already travelling to Japan in Q4 or your work touches Japanese IT procurement, embedded AI hardware, or enterprise automation vendors. Go to Osaka in November if you want a calmer floor and easier booth access over raw exhibitor count. Wait for Tokyo Big Sight in April 2027 if you can only make one trip and want the largest edition. Skip it if you need an English-language conference programme, since free entry does not fix that.

The next window to book is the October Chiba show. Pre-register on the official site, print your badge in colour before you fly, and treat the exhibitor list, not the seminar list, as the thing to read before booking travel.