A fresh wave of Japanese innovation is heading for the desert again, and the Japan Pavilion feels larger in spirit this year—almost like it’s grown its own gravity. JETRO is bringing 31 startups to Venetian Expo Hall G, all clustered under Booth 62801, and the texture of the lineup hints at how wide Japan’s tech horizon has become. Spatial computing teams are packing headsets and holographic layers; metamaterials researchers are stepping out of the lab; AI, HealthTech, and entertainment ventures are preparing their demos; and scattered between them you can already imagine the café-lounge hum that the pavilion has somehow turned into a tradition. It’s hard not to picture those accidental meetings at high tables, people nursing jetlag and matcha lattes while striking deals they didn’t expect to make.
Four of those companies are stepping into CES 2026 already decorated, with CTA designating them Innovation Awards® honorees. AMATELUS arrives with SwipeVideo, a deceptively simple idea—swipe to change camera angles—that feels obvious only after you see it, like the kind of thing streaming giants should have invented but didn’t. It’s built on a cloud engine that handles as many cameras as you care to throw at it and still behaves like a lightweight HTML5 widget. Broadcasters and sports leagues have begun threading it into live coverage, betting that letting audiences choose their POV isn’t just a gimmick but the new baseline for engagement.
SHOSABI goes in a completely different direction, almost philosophical: start with the brain–body connection, fix that, and performance follows. Its 3D sensing rig hoovers up more than a million data points per second, which still sounds a touch unreal, and hands the stream to proprietary AI that decides what coaching style your brain responds to best. Sometimes you get verbal cues, sometimes visual signals, sometimes rotational 3D feedback that feels almost like a teacher reaching into your movement. Underneath it all is more than a decade of research from the University of Tokyo and Mitsubishi Chemical Group. It’s equal parts sports tech, health tech, and longevity science—one of those category-blurring devices that seems destined to end up in training centers and rehab clinics alike.
UNTRACKED’s StA²BLE 2.0 takes on an issue that’s quietly colossal: fall risk. The system measures physical and sensory balance through a controlled vibration mechanism that triggers the so-called Virtual-Light-Touch-Effect while a user simply stands. One minute of data from a force plate and a vibration module goes into cloud software that produces an easy-read report, the kind a non-expert can use without panic. And instead of stopping at diagnostics, the system nudges users toward tailored exercises that actually improve the sensory component—something most existing methods ignore entirely. Hospitals and eldercare facilities have already taken it up, which says something about both usability and urgency.
A fourth honoree is still under wraps until CES Unveiled on January 4th, a little theatrical pause before the full pavilion comes into view. JETRO will run pitch sessions throughout the week, and the media circuits—Unveiled included—will give the startups a wider echo. If previous years are any indication, some of these companies will walk out of Las Vegas with partners they didn’t know they needed, and others will end up in headlines later in the year as their pilots turn into real deployments.
More updates will land as CES approaches, and JETRO is keeping the central hub freshly stocked at its site for anyone tracking the pavilion’s evolution.