What happened to J-messe
JETRO discontinued J-messe on 31 March 2026. The database is gone, no replacement was published, and the URLs no longer resolve. This site was built to carry the part of it that was worth keeping.
What J-messe was
J-messe was the trade fair database run by JETRO, the Japan External Trade Organization — a Japanese government agency whose job is helping Japanese firms export. It catalogued trade fairs and exhibitions worldwide, in Japanese and English, and for each fair it recorded the things an exporter actually needs: the dates, the venue, the organizer, what gets exhibited, the attendance the last edition drew, and — unusually — the Japanese representative to contact about taking a stand.
It was free, it was unusually careful for its category, and because it was funded as public infrastructure rather than by advertising, nobody could buy a better position in it. That last property is rarer than it sounds, and it is most of why the database was trusted.
Why it closing mattered
The commercial directories that remain are largely advertising businesses. Listing position is for sale, attendance figures are reprinted from organizer marketing without qualification, and the same scraped records circulate between them — several of them scraped J-messe itself. When J-messe closed, the one non-commercial reference point in the category disappeared, and what was left had no particular reason to be accurate.
What was preserved
Working from public web archives of the site, this database currently holds:
- 2 024
- Fairs
- 2 086
- Editions
- 84
- Countries
- 177
- Audited figures
Alongside them: the organizer records, the Japanese representative contacts, the exhibit-item lists, and J-messe's own industry classifications, kept verbatim rather than rewritten.
What is different here
Three things, and they are the reason this is a rebuild rather than a mirror.
A fair and one of its editions are separate records. Nearly every competing directory conflates them, which is why they cannot reliably answer "when is the next one" or "is this fair growing". Here the recurring fair keeps a stable identity across renames and years, and each dated instance hangs off it.
Every field records where it came from. Not the page — the field. A date, a venue and an attendance figure on the same fair can come from three different sources verified on three different days, and the page says so instead of asking you to trust an undated aggregate.
Attendance figures are labelled by who counted them. A number audited by UFI or AUMA is evidence. A number the organizer published about its own event is marketing. Both appear here; they are never presented as the same thing.
What this site does not claim
J-messe stopped updating in March 2026, so every date inherited from it is a date that was correct at snapshot time and may since have moved. None of it is marked confirmed, and no amount of tidy presentation would make it so. Re-verifying those dates against organizers, and replacing archive records with current ones, is the ongoing work of this project rather than a finished state.
Of the attendance figures held, 177 carry an independent audit. The rest are organizer-reported and are shown as such wherever they appear.
Listing position is not for sale here, and will not be. That was the property that made J-messe worth using, and it is the one thing that cannot be added later.
Where to start
211 editions are still to come.