I was inside a Tokyo train station when the earthquake arrived on 11 March 2011. It was terrible (8.9 Richter) and I wasn’t so brave to take my camera and shoot the scene. After the two scariest minutes of my life, I went out of the station trying to take a taxi. I was standing in a small square, together with other people evacuated from buildings when the second shake arrived (7.8 Richter). I took my camera and realized this footage. The peaky building moving is clearly visible at sec 0.27-0.32. It was not a lucky time for the 10^th edition of the Tokyo International Lighting Fair as it took place from 8 to 11 March 2011, when the greatest earthquake and tsunami on earth within the last 100 years occurred.

Just allow me to say, that I am proud to have shared those awful hours with the people in Tokyo, and incredibly admired of the cool reaction of Japanese people to the adversity.The fair closed down for security reasons half a day before the scheduled time. May be nowadays the Japanese market is a declining one in terms of value, but we can expect that it will see a dramatic change in market shares within a very few years, due to the development of new technologies. And Japanese companies at the forefront of the technological change have all the atouts to play in the European market as well.Japan is the forefront of high quality LED based products.

This is the place where the development LED technology in the TV screens and lighting fixtures walked in a common path. At this purpose is interesting to notice that leading LED manufacturers like Sharp successfully entered the lighting fixtures market since two years and is already competing with Panasonic and Toshiba in the consumer stores like Yodobashi or BIC Camera. At the fair Panasonic (the leader in the country) showed its lighting fixtures innovations through a 450 inches screen in the front wall of its booth (see picture) just to make a difference with 42 inches TV screens used by other companies for customers demonstrations.

Toshiba proudly presented its recent overseas project at the Louvre Museum in Paris (installation of LED architectural lighting at the Pyramid area and facades). Main focus of the Mitsubishi booth was the JV Mitsubishi/OSRAM. NEC presented the prototype of a OLED lighting suspension to be introduced in 2012. Another interesting OLED lamp prototype was presented by Kaneka (big group in the chemical industry).According to the Japan Luminaires Association the LED and OLED based lighting fixtures covering in 2009 just 5%-6% slice of the market, might reach the most significant portion by 2020 when the production cost for this kind of technology will be 80% less than today.