I got up just after 6am on Tuesday morning, inserted the SIM I had bought the day before into my phone, and while reading the instructions that came with the package, I set up the APN and checked that it was working. After that, I had some bread and a drink that I bought at a small grocery under the overpass a little ways from the hotel. After that, I got on the train from Chiba Station. On the way, I changed trains at Soga Station and arrived at Kaihin Makuhari Station at around 7:40, and headed to Makuhari Messe, the venue of the Computing and Information Technology Expo, as instructed on the notice. I received an exhibitor's badge from Nagisa, who was waiting for me on a bench near the entrance, and I put it around my neck and went inside together.

When I arrived in front of the Nozomi Systems booth in the venue, a professional was skillfully assembling the booth. Inside, I opened the cardboard box containing the handouts that had arrived at the venue and inspected the contents. After that, I packed up a set of brochures and flyers advertising the company profile and solution products, and a novelty ballpoint pen into a bag at the table for business meetings. By the time that was done, the booth was set up, and I set up the large monitor and demo laptop for introducing our software solutions. I plugged the cord into the outlet under the cover on the concrete floor, set it up so that I could use the exhibitor Wi-Fi provided in the venue, logged in with my demo ID, and checked that it was working.

All work was finished around 3:00 p.m., and after that, I walked with several employees of Nozomi Systems, including Nagisa, and left the venue and had dinner at a restaurant in front of Kaihin Makuhari Station. I briefly talked about the situation at my workplace. Our company produces and manages websites and image management apps, and Nozomi mainly manages the operation of mail-order sites and apps. We are also overseas distributors that sell our respective apps and solutions. When I said something, Nagisa translated the main points into Japanese for the Nozomi employees who didn't understand English, and when the employee spoke in Japanese, she translated it for me. I returned to the hotel in the evening and went to bed early for the three-day event starting the next day.

The next morning, I left the hotel with my exhibitor's pass and headed directly to the Nozomi Systems booth at the venue. After a brief discussion with Nagisa, I did a final check on the demo model of the system developed by my company so that it was ready for visitors to see. Since the exhibit was a Japanese version of the app, I asked her to look over it for me since I can't read the text. She told me, "Please treat it like a festival, not like work. If the atmosphere is gloomy, no one will come." When the doors opened, several Nozomi Systems employees stood outside, calling out to people passing by in the aisles, handing out bags containing brochures, scanning the barcodes on the visitor's pass front of the booth, and taking their business cards. When I asked Nagisa, who was standing next to me, what kind of things were they calling out to people? He said something like, "Are you having trouble registering your products or managing your sales? But don't worry. Our mail order platform can solve that problem!" The employee who was explaining the exhibits was interested, and when he showed them the exhibits inside, he answered the questions that the visitors didn't understand. As they were leaving, they were given some novelties such as stickers and multi-charging cables. Among them were a small number of pouches and T-shirts with the logo of my company that I had brought with me. Since I couldn't speak Japanese at a business level, I was mainly doing business with and answering inquiries from foreign visitors, rather than being in the public eye.

On a relatively relaxed Thursday, Nagisa told me, "Shirley, go and look around the venue. I'm sure you'll find something interesting," so I decided to go and look around the venue. In addition to the booths of system development companies in the same industry, there were also exhibits of the latest technology from major Japanese electronics manufacturers, especially IoT home appliances that can be operated via the Internet from smartphones and computers. If home appliances are actually commercialized and purchased, they will be used for a long time, some for more than ten years, so how long will they keep updating the communication standards to improve security? I wondered. To be specific, for example, if there was a refrigerator that reads the barcodes of purchased food and manages the contents, it would need to receive product code data once or twice a month and automatically update it, and the question arises as to whether it could continue to do so for more than ten years. Then, at the booth of a company that recycles information devices such as computers and smartphones, I received a pamphlet about the collection, sale, and lease of used devices, and then saw a demonstration of a hard disk crushing device and a sample of crushed waste being handed over to a scrap dealer. In the VR experience corner, I put on a headset, sat in a chair, drove a car, and used a smartphone app to take photos with anime characters. Since I was alone, I could only ask in broken Japanese about things that interested me or that I didn't understand, so unfortunately I wasn't able to have a very in-depth conversation.

After walking around for about two hours, I returned to the booth and showed Nagisa the novelties from other companies that I had received. They ranged from standard items like ballpoint pens with the company's name on them, stickers with logos, webcam covers, paper towels, mask cases, and clear files, to snacks, chocolate bars, gummy candies, mineral water, regular coffee packs, sticky notes, stainless steel thermos bottles, folding umbrellas, simple screwdrivers, small compressed towels, smartphone stands, USB memory sticks, and mobile batteries. I was surprised to see that some of the snacks and chocolate bars had the company name printed directly on the packaging. Among them was a small soap-like thing in an aluminum bag. I didn't know how to use it, so I asked her, "What is this?" and she said, "This is a bath bomb. Fill the bathtub with hot water and throw it in, and bubbles will come out. If you have some at home, try it. It feels really good." On Friday, the last day, it was relatively crowded, so I stuck to the booth with Nagisa at the reception desk and helped set up and bag the additional pamphlets that arrived from Nozomi Systems' headquarters during the event. And so the three days of the event ended without a hitch. The booth itself was quite successful in attracting customers, and we scanned the barcodes of visitors' visitor IDs and received a fair number of business cards. I heard that other companies' booths had quotas for the number of business cards they collected, and that the people in charge of attracting customers competed with each other to see who could collect the most, but that didn't happen at our booth. I'm also looking forward to hearing directly from Japanese users about the usability of our products, which are not many in number due to insufficient PR and name recognition, in other words, what they thought was good about them, what they found difficult to use, and what features they wanted. I'd like to talk about this with my colleagues when I get home. We also distributed pamphlets about our products, so I hope they will become more well-known.

As soon as the event ended, the dismantling work began, and in parallel with the dismantling of the booth, we put the demo laptops and wiring cords into folding containers, put the large monitors into cardboard boxes, put the explanatory panels into large bags and bundled them up, and gathered up the chairs and tables for the business meeting space, loaded them onto carts, and carried them to the Nozomi Systems car parked in the parking lot. There were some leftover novelties, so they were provided for our future exhibitions in our hometown.

On the last day, I had dinner with the Nozomi Systems employees who participated at a restaurant in a building in front of Kaihin Makuhari Station. We exchanged email addresses and business cards along the way and were sad to say goodbye.

After returning to the hotel, I wrote about the events and memories of the exhibition on a postcard of Mt. Fuji and a train of Shinkansen that I had bought for my sister at a convenience store in Narita Airport, and attached the 70 yen stamp I had bought with it. I then left the hotel and go a nearby convenience store to buy some snacks, and dropped it the mailbox front of cashier.