It's a well-known fact that you can't sell to the Japanese unless you make luxury cars or high-octane whisky. In all other products they'll flood your own domestic markets and keep their own tightly protected.

This well-known fact is much resented in boardrooms throughout Tokyo, but somehow the occasional pictures of earnest Japanese busijness executives listening to would-be exporters never dispel the first impression. Can it be something to do with inscrutability? They listen attentively but their thoughts seem to be their own - unlike their western counterparts (eastern from our point of view, of course) who listen noisily and clap their visitors on the back.

Two events are taking place in Japan at the moment that should help to persuade the Americans and Europeans that our doors aren't so firmly closed after all.

One of these is the first appearance of Comdex. From humble beginnings Comdex has grown into a series of shows at various points on the globe. With a suitable diary management program you could probably arrange to be at a Comdex show every working day of the year. There are Comdex shows winter, spring and fall, Comdex/Europe and now Comdex/Japan.

Not such a big deal? Well, advance registrations reached a peak of 4,000 a day - even the US original only draws 1,000 a day. The organiser, the Interface Group, expected 10,000 and has steadily revised that upwards to 40 or 50K. Most of the registrants are Japanese but there are also Koreans, Taiwanese, and people from Hong Kong and Singapore.

It isn't that Tokyo is starved of trade shows. They are as frequent and as bustling here as anywhere else - Hannover in the spring, Paris in September, Las Vegas all year round. The difference seems to be that the regular events are being seen as parochial by the show-going public. Comdex has an international flavour that has tempted the jaded palates of the local gourmets. That in itself should hold a lesson for importers.

Japan Inc is not likely to be overwhelmed by US exhibitors at Comdex/Japan. The American exhibition contingent will number 30 companies, joining 170 from Japan and Asia. At the concurrent conference Atsuyoshi Ouchi of NEC will talk about "Japan and Asia - New Horizons for Small Computers". It will be surprising if concurrency isn't a prominent thread running through the conference, but it will be in a distinctly Asian context. But the common denominator could be ordinary currency, as in the prospects for making large amounts of yen.

Already assured of substantial yen earnings is the Dutch multinational Philips, which has succeeded in convincing at least one Japanese giant that European know-how is ahead of the local variety. Philips has set out on a joint venture with Kyocera to sell its office communications products in Japan.

Kyocera is the outfit that supplied NEC, Tandy and Olivetti with their first lapheld micros. It also finds innovative uses for ceramics - in internal combustion engines, for example - but it hasn't, before sought to challenge the likes of NEC, the motto of which is "computers and communications", at this level.

The particular Philips products concerned will be from the Sopho-Net range. Known elsewhere as Sophomation, this sleepy-sounding line of kit runs from typewriters to communicating micros with all sorts of intermediate stations - remote controlled dictation systems, self-service banking systems, telephones and other items.

The joint venture's name will lack originality - they plan to call the company Kyocera and Philips Communication Network. Sopho-Net will probably make the trip intact as well, but on its way it will lose the European connotation of wisdom (sophos, a Greek word for wise) and pick up an altogether unwanted nuance - sophy, an ancient word for the Shah of Persia.

The main point is that it should succeed. This should spur other western suppliers on; it must eventually be discovered that Japan, technology-driven, is as prone as anybody to look for the best, wherever it comes from. The lesson of successful importers in Japan is that they supply goods or services of a quality that the Japanese can't do for themselves. There's no reason on earth why that shouldn't apply to computer equipment.

Or to computer trade shows, for that matter.