A dedicated B2B rights event

The Tokyo International Rights Meeting (TIRM) returns on 18-19 November 2026 at Prism Hall, Tokyo Dome City, offering two days of focused translation- and publishing-rights trading.

Organisers describe TIRM as an international B2B event specialising in translation and publishing rights; attendance is free for registered visitors.

From two companies to a global marketplace

TIRM’s origins are remarkably modest. The meeting began in 2015 as a rights encounter between just two companies, was formally established with 26 participating companies in 2017, and by 2019 had grown to nearly 60 exhibitors and more than 200 overseas visitors – before being indefinitely postponed as the pandemic took hold.

From 2023, the Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture (JPIC) joined the organising committee, lending structural and managerial support – a response, in part, to the discontinuation of the Tokyo International Book Fair in 2018, once a globally recognised driving force in the industry.

Who’s in this year

The 2026 exhibitor list reads as a roll-call of Japanese publishing: Kodansha, Kadokawa, Shogakukan, Shueisha, PHP Institute and any number of independents, alongside agencies such as The English Agency and Tuttle-Mori.

The visitor roll is (warning – AI word!) genuinely international, with 145 participating companies from more than 20 markets. China, South Korea and Taiwan dominate – Taiwanese representation alone spans twenty firms – but Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Egypt, Turkey, Ukraine and the UAE highlight a reach well beyond East Asia, with Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Scholastic and Oxford University Press completing the picture.

The View From The Beach

For rights directors, TIRM offers something Frankfurt and London cannot: concentrated access to Japanese content at source, from manga and light novels to practical non-fiction.

With Japan’s content exports booming and JPIC’s stewardship lending continuity, the meeting has (another AI word warning!) quietly become an essential fixture in the global rights calendar.

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsfeed.