Osaka Expo organizers reflect on legacy of 1970, with 1 year to go

With less than one year to go until the opening of the 2025 World Exposition in Osaka, organizers are reflecting on the legacy of the event hosted by Osaka in 1970 and looking forward to the potential legacy left this time around. 

The Japan World Exposition, Osaka, 1970 was held under the theme of "Progress and Harmony for Mankind.” Over the course of 183 days between March and September that year more than 64 million people attended the event. Expo ‘70 held on to a status of being the largest among all world fairs by total attendance until it was surpassed by the Shanghai World Expo in 2010.

Back in the 70s the expo had an enormous impact on the Japanese people,” Jun Takashina, deputy secretary general of the Japan Association for the 2025 World Exposition, told reporters in Tokyo on Wednesday. 

“Some Japanese people met foreigners for the first time and they would even chase them and try to get their autographs,” he said.

(Screenshot of a livestreamed news conference in Tokyo on April 10 shows Jun Takashina, deputy secretary general of the 2025 Expo association, and Hiroshi Osaki, co-chair of the Expo 2025 event planning committee, standing to the left and right respectively of the event's official character MYAKU-MYAKU.) 

It’s hard to imagine Japanese people getting excited about the presence of foreigners in the country today, certainly not enough to chase them down for an autograph at any rate.  

Japan in the 1970s must have been a very different place though, so much so that it was at Osaka’s Expo ‘70 that KFC made its first appearance on these shores, according to Takashina. 

Today an order of KFC is a Christmas Day staple for households across Japan, a Christmas-dinner concept likely as foreign to many of the foreigners who find themselves in Japan over the festive season as foreigners might have appeared to the Japanese during the expo 1970.

KFC, mobile phones, “everything was new,” Takashina said. “In that sense it was exciting. And the technology introduced at that event has progressed and since been augmented so it had a tremendous impact on Japan and the Japanese people.”

“Today though we have the Internet. You can do anything online. So how do you try to create the same kind of excitement that the children experienced in the 1970s? That will be a topic which we need to consider.”

The prospect of riding in a flying car might be one way. As part of efforts to promote advanced modes of mobility at the expo, organizers are still working toward the introduction of manned “flying cars” during the 2025 event with a number of makers currently involved in tests to this end.  

While all parties concerned, including the government and regulators, are working toward making the cars ready for the expo, organizers are not yet able to make a definitive announcement on when that will be realized. 

Another of the expo’s eye-catching projects is the Grand Ring which promises to be a symbol of the event, encircling much of the site on the artificial island of Yumeshima in Osaka Bay. With a circumference of around 2 km, the ring is set to be one of the largest wooden structures in the world. Construction has reached 80 percent completion and is due to be finished in September, according to Takashina.  

With the Grand Ring only intended as a temporary structure however, expo organizers in late January began soliciting proposals on how it could be repurposed after the event wraps on October 13.

The Taro Okamoto-designed Tower of the Sun Museum (more commonly known as the Tower of the Sun), part of one of the pavilions for Osaka’s Expo ‘70, remains standing today despite also having been intended as a temporary structure. It’s perhaps the most recognizable infrastructure legacy of that expo.

Organizers of Osaka Expo 2025 have hopes of their event creating a legacy that goes beyond the bricks and mortar, or wood in this case, and that the closing of the expo will mark the beginning of something rather than the end.

“The previous expo (in Osaka) was about welcoming international visitors to Japan. The 2025 expo is about Japan reaching out to the rest of the world - what can Japan convey to the rest of the world?” Hiroshi Osaki, co-chair of the Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan Event Planning Committee said.

Beyond the symbols of cool Japan such as manga and anime, Osaki believes one of the main things that should be communicated through the up-coming expo is about the unique social issues Japan is facing and trying to solve.

“Through the expo we can highlight these issues and draw from the wisdom of people around the world to find solutions,” Osaki said.

“I hope that the expo in 2025 will kick off a legacy in which people around the world will address with care the issues that the earth faces and work to solve them one-by-one. This is a big challenge but it’s something that all of us must persevere with, one-by-one, so let's have fun while we do so.”

Expo 2025 will be held under the theme Designing Future Society for Our Lives.   

161 countries and territories have applied to participate in the event with construction of 100 organizer-built pavilions due for completion in July. Remaining countries have applied to build their own pavilions. Among these 36 countries have decided on the contractor and 14 had begun construction work as of April 12. 

Advance admission tickets for Expo 2025 went on sale at the end of last November. Over 1.3 million tickets, of various types, have been sold as of April 10. Organizers are expecting approximately 28.2 million visitors to attend the event.