On a rainy day in June, the exhibition halls inside Tokyo Big Sight were brightly lit, accentuating the metallic gleam of the high-tech equipment on display at the Japan Food Machinery Manufacturers' Association expo.

The atmosphere was slightly disorienting, a cross between a county science fair and a car show — complete with young women in brightly colored skimpy costumes who demonstrated the products with rehearsed enthusiasm. I made my way through clusters of black-suited businessmen, past fast-and-furious mechanized slicers, mammoth mixers, and giant defrosters built by companies with masculine-sounding names ending in "x": Dremax, Mondomix and Radix.

FOOMA is quite possibly the nerdiest trade show I've ever experienced — and I am no stranger to the nerdy side of food and beverage production. Despite the event's seemingly narrow appeal, nearly 100,000 people braved the stormy weather to attend this year. My editor, when proposing the assignment, had made a jokey comparison with Comiket, the massive manga market that attracts half a million visitors to each session. Perhaps for this reason, I had arrived expecting to see robots and instant-meal preparation contraptions — real-life manifestations of the futuristic visions conjured by the avant-garde architecture group Archigram or artist Kenji Yanobe.