OSAKA – The jubilant scenes that greeted Osaka six years ago when it won the right to host the 2025 World Expo have since given way to blithe nonchalance, with less than a year to go to the hoped-for tourism bonanza.
A poll conducted from April 19 to 21 by the Yomiuri newspaper showed that two in three Japanese have no interest in the event, which will be held from April 13 to Oct 13, 2025, on the man-made Osaka Bay island of Yumeshima, or Dream Island. The site will also host Japan’s first integrated resort come 2030.
Another poll, by Kyodo news agency on April 7, showed that 82 per cent of Japanese companies, sponsors and others involved found the lukewarm response to the expo worrying.
The tepid interest towards the World Expo comes in tandem with a spate of bad news – massive cost overruns and construction delays, compounded by measures that have been taken to keep the land from sinking due to liquefaction and soil contamination.
“People have also complained about other major events like the Olympics. But when the event opens and what we are conceptualising becomes reality, we believe the excitement will come,” Osaka World Expo chief Hiroyuki Ishige told The Straits Times in an exclusive interview.
“This is not to dismiss the feelings of the public, and we are not insensitive to this,” he said.
“There are reasons why we are in this situation now. But these reasons will disappear as problems are resolved, and we can focus on the true meaning of the expo.”
The organisers hope to impress upon a world stricken by conflict the need for unity to resolve common challenges, Mr Ishige added.
Japan is hosting the event, which takes place once every five years, for the third time. The event is returning to Osaka 55 years after it played host in 1970 – when the World Expo was held in Asia for the first time – with Aichi hosting in 2005.
Some 161 countries and regions are participating in Expo 2025, themed Designing Future Society For Our Lives. This includes Singapore, which was the first country to break ground for its bespoke pavilion, a 17m-tall giant red sphere inspired by the “Little Red Dot” moniker.
Mr Ishige, the 74-year-old former chairman of the Japan External Trade Organisation, admitted that Japan was overly strict with its timelines and had neglected to price in the vagaries of global inflation and currency fluctuations.
Construction has been delayed by at least half a year from its initial plans, while construction costs have swelled to 235 billion yen (S$2.07 billion), or nearly twice the initial budget of 125 billion yen.
Mr Ishige said the construction industry has been under great strain due to labour shortage.
He added that the World Expo in Dubai was only recently held from October 2021 to March 2022, delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic and to avoid the brutal summer heat. This gave participating countries just three years to prepare for Expo 2025, instead of a 4½-year runway like earlier editions.
On criticism that the World Expo was taking up resources that could be diverted to the reconstruction of the Noto Peninsula in central Japan after a deadly 7.6-magnitude New Year’s Day quake, Mr Ishige noted that experts have said there was no overlap between the civil engineering works in Noto and the construction works in Osaka.
The World Expo, also known as the World’s Fair and first held in London in 1851 to celebrate cultural and industrial progress, has long enjoyed top billing on a par with the Olympics and the Fifa World Cup as one of the “Big Three” global events. Paris built the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 event, and Seattle, the Space Needle observation tower for the expo in 1962.
Interest in today’s expo is night-and-day compared with the fanfare that greeted the exposition in 1970, which triggered the economic boom of western Japan’s Kansai region and was billed as a chance for Japanese to “see the world without a passport”.
A whopping 64 million visitors showed up in 1970 Osaka. There, the United States exhibited a rock from the moon, brought by the Apollo 12 mission in 1969. Japan showcased its early mobile phones and magnetic levitation technology, which it is now using to build the world’s fastest train service.
Mr Ishige said he missed out on the 1970 fair, as “I was a student in Tokyo and shinkansen (bullet train) tickets were too expensive”.
Osaka World Expo’s attendance record was broken only by Shanghai’s 73 million visitors in 2010, which Mr Ishige partially attributed to China’s large domestic population.
Expo organisers are targeting 28.2 million visitors to Osaka in 2025, including 3.5 million foreigners – modest numbers compared with 1970 but higher than the estimated 24 million at the last World Fair in Dubai.
Advance ticket sales began on Nov 30, costing between 4,000 yen and 6,700 yen for an adult. But as at April 17, just over 1.5 million have been sold.
The emergence of mass tourism and travel, and exposure to information and ideas with increased interconnectivity may have lessened the lustre of the World’s Fair in recent years. But Mr Ishige believes there are still attractions worth the visit to Osaka in 2025.
As it is, the event’s grand, circular showpiece is already 80 per cent done and is on track for completion by September, he said.
The latticed “Grand Ring”, which is topped by a sloping wooden canopy with a circumference of 2km, will be among the world’s largest wooden structures when completed. Expo participants will show off and offer up trade opportunities and cultural attractions in their respective pavilions within the vast centrepiece.
“We want to send a message at the expo of the world as one, that human lives matter, that we live on one earth,” Mr Ishige said.
