TOKYO, Sept. 1 (UPI) — Toy fans of all ages and industry professionals braved the searing heat of August’s final weekend to attend the 2025 International Tokyo Toy Show and see the latest trends in the marketplace.

The Japan Toy Association sponsored the event held at Tokyo’s gargantuan Big Sight exhibition center, with 200-plus vendor companies displaying more than 30,000 toys, some of them yet to be released. While this year’s attendance is still being tabulated, the 2024 event drew more than 80,000 attendees.

The four-day show, which ran Thursday through Sunday, was divided into two days for industry professionals and two days for the public.

Toys are still big business in Japan. Despite a declining national birthrate, the nation’s toymakers racked up a revenue increase in fiscal 2004 of roughly 8% over fiscal 2023, achieving record high earnings, according to JTA data.

Akihiro Sato of the Tokyo Japan Toy Association chapter said that fully grown spenders with bigger wallets are, in part, driving those earnings.

“For the past few years, we’ve been using the term ‘kidult,’ which is a combination of ‘kid’ and ‘adult.’ Simply put, this means that adults with a child’s heart collect toys that they can touch and play with,” Sato said.

High-tech interactive toys, robots and PC-related playthings accounted for an over-40% annual jump in revenue for this sector of Japan’s toy industry, leading all others by percentage, according to JTA statistics.

Among the toys aimed at “kidult” customers are so-called AI companion robot-pets, one of which is Sharp Corp’s “Poketomo, or pocket friend. The tiny robot can fit in a large jacket pocket or purse, and Sharp touts that it can talk with its owner and remember personal details.

To power its AI for customized conversations, it maintains chat records, location data and on-board camera images. The product won an innovation award at this year’s show, and is scheduled for release in Japan in November at 39,600 yen, or about $269.

“Kidult” customers also help drive revenues through demand for reissues of yesteryear’s hits. Global visitors to the 2025 International Tokyo Toy Show were able to encounter the latest versions of childhood favorites, and to recall what made them love Japan’s playtime products.

“It’s always focused on high quality. I got a toy from Takara Tomy when I was 5 years old, a little toy car, and it still works and can still be used just fine, even though the battery was corroded because it has been in my cellar for almost 20 years,” attendee Nadia Garson Wangberg of Oslo, Norway, recalled.

While plastic toys dominated the market at this year’s show, some vendors continued to offer traditional wooden wares.

One of them, Vladislav Krit, of EWA Eco-Wood-Art in Pinsk, Belarus, emphasized the essential nature of human touch to play.

“EWA Eco-Wood-Art produces wooden mechanical construction kits. Construction kits because you need to assemble them before you play. It’s about tactile feelings, it’s about how to touch it and how to assemble it. With wood or anything else, you need to touch it before you make a decision to start this thing.”

If trepidation over Trump administration import tariffs on Japanese products was present at the show, it was not obvious. After weeks of U.S.-Japan negotiations, the Trump administration settled on a 15% tariff rate, the nature of the supply chain could result in additional tariffs, potentially affecting Christmas sales.

Sato, of the Tokyo Japan Toy Association, explained how that could happen because of the global nature of production.

“For manufacturers that sell their products to the U.S. market, about 80% of Japanese toy manufacturers’ products are actually produced in China. When selling from China to the United States, Chinese tariffs are added on — something that wasn’t there before. This means that some manufacturers are likely to see their prices rise.”