From trade fairs to the “age of expositions”

Both the Olympics and the Expo are events originating from the “Old Continent” and are brainchildren of 19th-century industrialization. They both represent the intensifying processes of globalization made possible by easier travel and increased global exchange. Trade fairs in some form stretch back into antiquity, as a means for rulers to spur economic activity in their lands. Art fairs for promoting specific artists and their paintings and sculptures can be traced to the 1700s under Louis XIV in France. Industrial fairs date back to at least 1756 or 1760 in London, where prize-winning industrial models were first put on display for the public (Kusumoto Reference Kusumoto2016: 139; Mandell Reference Mandell1967: 4).

The first prototype of a “world’s fair” took place in 1851 in London and was known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition. It took place in Hyde Park, and attracted over six million visitors from around the world (Mandell Reference Mandell1967: 8–9). It leaned toward industry rather than the arts. Thereafter, similar attempts at recreating England’s exposition were made in New York City and in Dublin. The French then redoubled their efforts and put on a similarly international exposition in 1855, with more of a balanced focus on both industry and the arts, while also introducing admission fees and price tags for displayed goods (Mandell Reference Mandell1967: 10–11). The British followed suit with their own London International Exhibition on Industry and Art, or Expo 1862. While it was larger in scale than the 1851 exposition, it did not attract a significantly greater number of participants and brought only a marginal profit (Bureau International des Expositions [BIE] 2025).

The closest ancestor to today’s World Expos is probably the 1867 exposition in Paris. As Mandell describes, “This was also the first exposition to have national pavilions for the headquarters of the foreign participants. Besides, there were exotic restaurants with ethnic music, spicy dishes, and waitresses in national costumes. The wider embrace of this exposition also took in gardens, an amusement park, and, for the first time, sideshows of a type familiar to carnival goers” (Mandell Reference Mandell1967: 13).

Importantly, a combination of “international idealism” and nationalism marked both the 1855 and 1867 French expositions, which were held under the reign of Napoleon III. In 1878, coming on the heels of increasing geopolitical tensions from the 1860s to the 1870s and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, France staged the largest exposition yet, attracting over 16 million visitors (and featuring the first café lit by electric lights). In the subsequent years, “world’s fairs” and “universal expositions” (the terms were used interchangeably by American or European nations, respectively) were held every few years in continental Europe or the United States, and became arenas for what Mandell (Reference Mandell1967: xiii) calls “peaceful idealism and selfish nationalism.” As Hinsley and Wilcox (Reference Hinsley and Wilcox2016: 388) note, “The seventy years between 1870 and 1940 can be properly labeled the Age of Expositions: each decade saw an average of thirty-four regional, national, or international industrial and imperial fairs […]. At the height of the phenomenon, between 1890 and 1910, no fewer than seventy-eight celebrations of commerce, industry, science, and art occurred—twenty-two of them in American cities.” Meanwhile, the modern Olympics were also organized during this period, with the first Summer Olympics inaugurated in 1896 in Athens, Greece, to represent the rebirth of the Olympics in its original homeland. The second Summer Olympics were then held, as suggested by Pierre de Coubertin, alongside the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris. Thus, at the turn of the century in 1900 the world’s two largest mega-events were held concurrently in Paris, ushering in an era of modern international mega-events on a truly global scale.

One of the preeminent scholars on modern mega-events, Maurice Roche, suggests that mega-events such as the World Expo and the Olympics are a kind of “cultural theatre” (Reference Roche2000: 185) that have contributed to the construction of nation, nationality, and citizenship in the modern age (Reference Roche2000: 189). Roche argues that these events function as “social spatio-temporal ‘hubs’ and ‘switches’” that channel, mix, and reroute global flows (Reference Roche2000: 199) and, in the process, assist in “institution-building at the global level and in the building […] of systems of ‘global governance’ and ‘global citizenship’” (Reference Roche2000: 218). Notwithstanding the various metaphorical ways of characterizing mega-events, Roche takes a strongly optimistic view toward mega-events as ultimately “social and cultural order-creating” phenomena. He emphasizes that mega-events enable individuals to recognize each other and themselves in a reflexive way and allow modern citizens to regain agency and recreate order in the chaotic (unstructured) time of modernity, where previous frames of identity and community (religion, ethnicity, locale, etc.) are no longer stable (Roche Reference Roche2000: 225). With this framing in mind, it was within this context of the late 19th century’s emergent global modernity that the newly formed modern nation-state of Japan joined the global flow of mega-events.

Japan and international exhibitions

The expositions of the 1860s and 1870s marked the ascendence of Japan in the Western imaginary and on the global geopolitical stage. Japan’s first encounter with international mega-events dates back to 1862, during the first Japanese embassy’s visit to London, which coincided with the London Expo. The 40 members of this embassy, including Fukuzawa Yukichi, were in London during the opening of the event, and it is reported that there Fukuzawa first encountered the steam engine, electric machines, and the telegraph (Kusumoto Reference Kusumoto2017: 30).

Japan’s first appearance on the international exposition circuit was at the 1867 Paris exposition. In fact, this predates Japan’s first participation in the Olympics by 45 years. While Japanese delegates from the Tokugawa Shogunate were sent to the 1867 Paris expositions at the invitation of Napoleon III (and alongside exhibits from the Satsuma and Nabeshima domains), there was no independent Japanese section, and instead Japan was grouped together with China and Thailand (Kusumoto Reference Kusumoto2016: 141). The 1873 Vienna World’s Fair was the first exposition to be held after the Meiji Restoration, and it hosted the first Japanese Pavilion (Tokyo National Museum 2025). At the Vienna World’s Fair, 66 Japanese officials, craftspeople, and gardeners contributed to the first world showcase of Japanese arts and crafts, including a Japanese garden. This was followed by the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876, where Japanese tea, pottery, and bonsai were displayed, and an Arita-yaki three-footed vase with handles won a gold medal award. At the 1878 Paris exhibition, an “Eastern Arts Gallery” was presented with pieces on display from India, China, and Japan. Yet, the most noteworthy exhibit was a reconstructed Japanese farm with a wet rice paddy and a teahouse, surrounded by a bamboo grove, as well as a Japanese pottery kiln, tea ceremony performance, and bonsai, all constructed of imported Japanese lumber and agricultural products. This helped spawn a boom for “oriental” goods in Europe (Higuchi Reference Higuchi2009: 175; Mandell Reference Mandell1967: 14). Interestingly, the farm portion was created by Mitsui Bussan, marking the first Japanese corporate engagement in a world mega-event (Higuchi Reference Higuchi2009: 175).

Following the 1878 Paris exposition, the newly modernizing Meiji state continued to send delegations and showcase its traditional crafts as well as its achievements in art and literature in subsequent expositions. Most importantly, the expositions became a site of contest between the Japanese state and Western hosts over Japan’s place within the rapidly changing world order, played out in the spatial arrangement of exhibits at each exposition (Hinsley and Wilcox Reference Hinsley and Wilcox2016: 14). This flexing of Euro-American power was complicated by the rise of a modernizing and increasingly imperialistic Japan. At the exhibitions, the Japanese delegates argued for a more central position alongside the nations of Europe and North America, but they were often relegated to spaces halfway between the “primitive world” and “civilization,” as in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, or alongside European colonial possessions, as in the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle (Kusumoto Reference Kusumoto2016: 142), thereby literally exhibiting the spatial logic of the Euro-American world order and Japan’s ambiguous place within it. At the same time, the newly expanding Japanese state strived to demonstrate its own imperial power by including exhibits from its recently acquired colony of Taiwan at the 1900 exposition (Kusumoto Reference Kusumoto2016: 142).

Kusumoto (Reference Kusumoto2016: 148) suggests that, beginning with the 1900 Paris exposition, the Japanese state attempted to use the expositions as a venue for projecting its own image of the world with Japan at the center of Asia, representing its progress beyond that of other Asian nations, particularly China and Europe’s Asian colonies. For example, the 1904 St. Louis World Fair was Japan’s first attempt at standing shoulder to shoulder with other colonial powers, where they prominently displayed their colonial dominance over Taiwan through displays in the Agricultural Pavilion and a “Taiwanese café” in the grounds of the Japan Pavilion (Kusumoto Reference Kusumoto2012: 113–115).

Similarly, Japan’s participation in the growing Olympic movement in the early 1900s also served to showcase how Japanese athletes could compete against Western nations, starting with two marathon runners participating in the 1912 Stockholm Summer Games, growing to 15 athletes at the 1920 Antwerp Summer Games, where Japanese athletes won two silver medals in the very Western sport of tennis. Like the World Expos, the Olympics were also a venue for Japan to flex its growing imperialist power, although not without controversy. This includes the famous case of the Korean gold medalist Sohn Kee-chung, who ran under the banner of the Empire of Japan as Kitei Son at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and set an Olympic world record in the marathon, but who refused to acknowledge the Japanese anthem when it was played at the medal ceremony (Terashima Reference Terashima2019). Japan has participated in every summer Olympics since 1936, except for the 1948 London Olympics (Japan and Germany were banned, following their defeat in World War II) and the 1980 Moscow Olympics (following the American-led boycott).

As imperial Japan became increasingly visible, vocal, and violent on the world stage in the 1930s, Japan also applied for hosting the 1940 World Expo, which was to be held in the same year as the first Tokyo Olympics. This would have cemented Japan’s ascent as a modern nation-state, staging the two largest international modern mega-events in Asia for the first time. Yet, World War II and Japan’s aggressor role in China eventually led to international pressure on Japan to step back from hosting both events. Ultimately, it took until 1964 for Japan to host the Olympic Games in Tokyo and until 1970 for the country to host the World Expo in Osaka. Both events were the first of their kind in Japan, and in Asia altogether. They mattered greatly for Japan’s self-perception in the global order by symbolizing Japan having overcome the postwar period and its push to an equal footing alongside advanced Western countries.

Mega-events 101 for Japan

Both the World Expo and the Summer Olympics are considered the “classic” as well as the world’s largest mega-events, with the Summer Olympics being the biggest sports mega-event and the Expo the biggest cultural mega-event. Mega-events are considered markers of social change and are “complex social processes” (Roche Reference Roche2017: 118), as Roche argues. He writes, “The theoretical perspective on mega-events […] is an inquiring sociological one, namely that they may be most usefully interpreted and understood as being potentially socially influential reflections, refractions, and symbolic markers of these underlying social conditions” (Roche Reference Roche2017: 49). These conditions continuously change, be it the media environment, urban, ecological, and geopolitical conditions. Roche argues that mega-events “need to be seen as products of their times and places” (Roche Reference Roche2017: 6), that they are “testimonies to social agency (at least the agency of political, economic and professional elites and also in various ways of mass publics),” and that they “act as catalysts helping to change some elements particularly of the urban contexts in which they were staged” (Roche Reference Roche2017: 20). Indeed, even the cancellation or postponement of mega-events are windows into the complex social conditions of specific times and places—e.g., the cancellation of Japan’s 1940 World Expo and Tokyo Olympics due to its domestic financial crisis and its expanding regional war and the postponement of Dubai’s World Expo in 2020 and Tokyo’s Olympics in 2020 due to the global coronavirus pandemic are paradigmatic examples of how mega-events are intricately grounded in both local conditions and global events.

In his longitudinal study of Expos, contextualizing mega-events within macro techno-social-political-economic development, Roche identifies two phases of development: the “primary phase” from 1850 to 1970 and the “secondary phase” from 1970 to today. Interestingly, the Osaka Expo 1970 is just on the cusp of the second phase but can be clearly considered a brainchild of the first phase, while the Osaka Expo 2025 is representative of the second phase. Holding the first Asian Expo in 1970 in Osaka also signifies this shift between the two phases of development. As Roche notes, “first-order mega-event genres tended to be staged almost exclusively in nations of the West” (Roche Reference Roche2017: 9). He continues, “There has been what appears to be a permanent global shift in mega-event locations in which the ‘Global South’ (particularly Africa and South America) and the East (particularly the Middle East and the Far East) now share the hosting of mega-events with the West” (Roche Reference Roche2017: 13).

Next to this global shift of the locations of mega-events in the second phase, the other major shifts Roche identifies for this period are growing mediatization, growing securitization (in particular since 2001, Roche uses the term “security spectacles” [Roche Reference Roche2017: 129]), and the need for legacy making. Legacy making can be achieved on various fronts. Legacy making helps in lodging the mega-events into the public or collective memory and aids in nation-building and identity creation. The most visible legacy-making trend is that of the need for “starchitecture” (Roche Reference Roche2017: 124)—some iconic, outstanding physical space or building for the event site. The most famous of these would be the Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 Paris Exposition. For the Summer Olympics, the iconic building is often the main sports stadium, which also features prominently in the media reporting on the event for almost every Olympics. That was the case for the newly built Olympic stadium for Tokyo 2020, and it was also the case for Expo 1970, namely the Tower of the Sun, an art work by Okamoto Tarō at the entrance to the Expo site—and the only physical structure that has remained from that Expo. For Expo 2025, the “starchitecture” was the Grand Ring, the Guinness World Record-sized wooden structure that was built around the Expo pavilions. This ring, however, did not survive; it was originally slated to be completely dismantled; however, since the Expo opened, there were increasing calls from the public to preserve the ring—or at least parts of it, and a small portion (200 meters) is planned to be preserved at the site (Asahi Shimbun 2025). Beyond the uncertain legacy of the ring, the Expo 2025 site itself may become part of a completely different legacy. While the Expo 1970 site was turned into a large public park and the area surrounding it became newly developed housing areas (Senri New Town, etc.), a casino and integrated resort is planned for the post-Expo 2025 site of Yumeshima, an artificial “trash” island in Osaka Bay. This will be groundbreaking, as there had been until now strong opposition to legal gambling in Japan. The difference between the two post-uses of the Expo sites from 1970 and 2025 could not be more exemplary of the shift in priorities of governments vis-à-vis growing urban development.

Sustainability is an important imperative for the Olympics and Expos alike. Tokyo 2020/2021 made it a huge marketing pitch that their Olympic medals were created out of discarded electronic devices such as cell phones, and there was a push for people from across the country to donate their old phones for this. Moreover, the torches were made out of recycled kasetsu jūtaku, the temporary housing for displaced people after the 3.11 triple disaster (the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown on March 11, 2011). This was intended to be an acknowledgement of the people displaced after the triple disaster, as well as a symbol of the progress in resettlement and moving past the disaster. This symbolic gesture helped with marketing the slogan of Tokyo 2020/2021 as the “Recovery Olympics,” a willful manifestation of overcoming the tragedy of 3.11, including the nuclear meltdown—despite the fact that the nuclear meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant will take many more decades to fix, and despite the fact that some areas around the plant remain uninhabitable and off limits due to their high radioactivity (Holthus et al. Reference Holthus, Gagné, Manzenreiter and Waldenberger2020).

While sustainability and environmental consciousness were folded into the larger discourse surrounding Tokyo 2020/2021, sustainability, innovation around sustainability, modeling pro-environmental practices, and communication of these through the event are by now arguably the main goal of the World Expo. Without sustainability, there is no future—this is one of the implications inherent in the Expo 2025’s main theme, “Designing Future Society for Our Lives,” plus its two subthemes, “How to Lead a Healthy Life in a Diverse Manner” and “Sustainable Socioeconomic Systems.” Overall, both legacy requirements and the growing trend for sustainability are reflective of the present-day Olympic Games as well as World Expos but mark a significant shift from the Olympic Games and World Expos of the 20th century.

Expos and Olympics are usually solely focused on one single location, one city, which was also the case in Tokyo 1964 and Expo 1970 in Osaka. However, Expo 2025 is purposefully called “Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai Japan,” giving it the air of being focused on more than just the city of Osaka—rather as being inclusive of the entire Kansai region, of which Osaka is a part, and by extension, (potentially) being inclusive of the entire country of Japan. As for the potential reasons for this inclusivity, we look at the news media discourse for the Expo since winning the bid in a later section.

Expo 2025 opened its doors on April 13 and ran until October 13. Initial plans for the Expo had called for the event to be held from May 3 to November 3, 2025, but this was eventually pushed almost a month ahead of schedule. This was done for the event to work better with event scheduling locally, in Japan, both in regard to other events happening in Japan as well as in regard to the Golden Week string of holidays, which would have collided with the opening. That it had been possible to actually make these changes early on showed much more flexibility and autonomy in setting the event dates on the part of the host nation than, for example, the Olympic schedule. The Olympic schedule is clearly dictated by the overall organizing body, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and the Olympics are to fit into the annual global sporting event calendar for, first and foremost, producing the best television revenue possible for US TV companies (Manzenreiter Reference Manzenreiter, Holthus, Gagné, Manzenreiter and Waldenberger2020). And while the IOC has considerable power as the international controlling body for the Olympic Games, the controlling body for World Expos, the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), is somewhat less hegemonic when it comes to the World Expos, representative of significant organizational differences between the two (Roche Reference Roche2017: 139).

In terms of expected scale and impact, Expo 2025 was aiming for 25 million attendees, which set the bar considerably lower than the Expo 1970’s record-breaking attendance of 64 million visitors. And with pre-event sales far below expectations, media reports in the early days of the Expo already questioned how successful this Expo eventually would become. A low turnout not only is a potential source of economic failure but can also lead to symbolic failure in the form of becoming a more-or-less “forgotten” event. In the year 2005, Japan hosted its second World Expo after Expo 1970, this time in the prefecture of Aichi. This Expo is barely talked about, was not considered to have matched the success of the prior Expo in Japan, and thus did not make it into the collective memory of the people of Japan. Whether Expo 2025 will be remembered on an equal footing with Expo 1970 or relegated to a corner of national memory as Expo 2005 remains to be seen.

Roche describes “a mega-event’s main site as analogous both to a theatre and also to a touristic theme park, albeit a temporary version of each. The ‘theme park’ analogy is particularly relevant for the main site of a World Expo” (Roche Reference Roche2017: 115). From this perspective, oversaturation of the public with theme parks such as Disneyland, DisneySea, the Harry Potter Studio tour, and Universal Studios Japan (which is just around the corner in Osaka), as well as dozens of other amusement and theme parks throughout Japan, means that this “Expo 2025 theme park” faced a lot of competition—something that contrasts greatly with the time of Expo 1970. People in 1970 (in Japan and elsewhere) had fewer alternatives for such large-scale entertainment and had less global exposure experience, and certainly average citizens did not yet have the world at their fingertips in the form of smartphones and laptops.

And yet, arguably, Expo 2025 might be ringing in a third phase of mega-events by being the first mega-event of this scale to offer a whole new dimension of participation. Expo 2025 created a customized Virtual Expo experience for anyone from anywhere in the world—without entrance fees, without travel—a seemingly inclusive, sustainable, and climate friendly option of experiencing the Expo.Footnote ² While it was marketed heavily, this dimension however was not talked about at all in the first news reports during the first few weeks after the opening of the Expo in mid-April. It remains to be seen how successful this innovation will turn out to be, and if this really marks the start of a new era. And it is in this spirit of offering tentative perspectives on this potentially new inflection point of global mega-events such as the Olympics and World Expo in Japan that we offer our views on the discourses surrounding Expo 2025 in Japan.

If you build it, they will come; if you host it, they will support it (?)

One of the most distinctive aspects of Expo 2025 is the ongoing discussion about the future of the Expo site. As with many cases of mega-event planning (e.g., Faure Reference Faure2023), the development of the site for Expo 2025 was folded into a longer-term development project that predates Osaka’s bidding for the Expo. The Expo was located on Yumeshima, an artificial island of reclaimed land that has been selected as the site of Japan’s first (controversial) “integrated resort” (IR), which would have a casino as its central attraction, along with multipurpose event halls, conference facilities, and hotels. The idea of creating an IR in Japan traces back to former mayor of Tokyo Ishihara Shintaro, who in the 1990s unsuccessfully pushed for an IR on Odaiba in Tokyo Bay. Following this, a non-partisan lobby group was launched in 2002 to push for legislation supporting an IR (Saito and Hasegawa Reference Saito and Hasegawa2019). Ultimately, a new law enabling the construction of casinos was passed in 2018, and in August 2023 Osaka was officially granted the right to build a casino on Yumeshima, perhaps not coincidentally at the same time that the site was already being developed for Expo 2025 (Nikkei Business Online August 17, 2023).

The IR and Expo 2025 are thus best seen as being part of a longer-term development plan for the city of Osaka, and indeed, Expo 2025 and the IR are as intrinsically interconnected as the development of the Tokyo Bay area has been with Tokyo 2020/2021. And yet, for both the IR and Expo 2025, public support among the residents of Osaka has been limited. In April 2023, four months before Osaka was awarded IR hosting rights, a poll by Asahi Shimbun (Asahi Shimbun 2023b) revealed that only 37% of the city and prefectural residents supported the plan, with 43% of prefectural residents and 47% of city residents opposing it. Initially, Expo 2025 was comparatively more popular: A 2020 poll of Osaka residents by Asahi Shimbun found that 72% were in favor of hosting the World Expo, with only 17% opposing (Asahi Shimbun 2020). However, by November 2023, a year and a half before the scheduled opening of Expo 2025, an Asahi Shimbun (Asahi Shimbun 2023a) survey found that support had fallen to 60% in the Kinki region (encompassing Mie, Shiga, Kyoto, Osaka, Hyogo, Nara, and Wakayama prefectures), while opposition more than doubled to 36% (national support stood at 45%, with national opposition at 46%) (Withnews 2023). Nonetheless, both plans rolled through, and with the completion of Expo 2025, the IR is slated to be operational around 2030 (Osaka Prefecture website n.d).

Interestingly, the opposite movement of public support could be seen in the case of Tokyo 2020/2021. From the outset, public support for the Summer Olympics was low, and a concerted campaign led by the advertising giant Dentsu was necessary to boost support, from 47% in May 2012 to 70% by March 2013 (Tokyo 2020 Olympic Paralympic Bidding Committee 2012; Nikkei Shimbun 2013). This enabled Japan to finally clinch the bid as host city, although oppositional voices remained strong (Ganseforth Reference Ganseforth, Holthus, Gagné, Manzenreiter and Waldenberger2020). The rising support for Tokyo 2020/2021 and the declining support for Expo 2025 may be related to Dentsu-led media campaigning: the existence of it for Tokyo 2020/2021, and its lack for the Expo—a point we will return to later.

Scandals galore

No mega-event is complete without a healthy side dish of scandals. In the Japanese media, scandals seem particularly prevalent both at the Olympics as well as at the Expo. While we will avoid creating a catalog of all of the scandals related to Expo 2025, a few representative examples, and their telling analogues with Tokyo 2020/2021 scandals, will suffice to highlight the ways that Japan’s recent mega-events evince more than just coincidental similarities, but rather shed light on more endemic issues.

One of the first scandals connected with the Expo emerged in November 2023 when Shūkan Kinyōbi blamed newspapers and TV stations for not adequately reporting on the various problems related to the Expo, including ballooning costs and corruption among officials. Similarly, in 2023 Shūkan Bunshun called out suspected corruption and illegality in the way that Governor Yoshimura and the Ishin no Kai political party handed out contracts to friendly businesses, calling the Expo the “Ishin Party Expo.” Later that year, Shūkan Bunshun also reported that Jimi Hanako, the minister in charge of Expo 2025, was accused of power harassment, further casting shadows on the Expo. These critiques echoed the criticisms of the Tokyo 2020/2021 Olympics in regard to bid-rigging and cozy relationships among politicians, the Japan Olympic Organization Committee, and contractors (including Dentsu and Hakuhodo).

However, the harshest critiques emerged when the January 1, 2024 Noto earthquake struck Ishikawa Prefecture. It did not take long for magazines to call for the cancellation of the Expo to use the money for the Noto reconstruction (Shūkan Jitsuwa Reference Jitsuwa2024). The parallels are stark with the exact same calls for canceling Tokyo 2020/2021 due to the ongoing need for reconstruction of the Tohoku region after the March 11, 2011, disaster (as well as once COVID-19 took hold globally, not to just delay but rather to cancel the Olympics altogether). In both cases, construction workers and materials that were desperately needed to rebuild the disaster-stricken areas were stretched thin between recovery construction and mega-event infrastructure construction, which also contributed to massive cost inflation for both events.

Amid the themes of inclusivity and equality that both mega-events are said to champion, accusations of sexual harassment and sexism have dogged both the Olympics and the Expo as well. In January 2021, then-Chairman of the Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (and former Prime Minister) Mori Yoshiro made comments about women that were deemed sexist, and after trying to backpedal for about a month, he was pressured to resign as chairman on February 21, 2021, replaced by then Minister for the Olympics Hashimoto Seiko. Expo 2025 was also dragged into a scandal involving sexual harassment when one of its the highest profile official ambassadors, popular comedian Matsumoto Hitoshi, was accused of sexual assault in a Shūkan Bunshun story in December 2023. Matsumoto vehemently denied the accusations and initially pursued a defamation lawsuit against Shūkan Bunshun, but eventually dropped the lawsuit. It was not until March 31, 2025, two weeks before the opening of the Expo, that Matsumoto and his “Downtown” comedy duo partner Hamada Satoshi officially resigned as Expo ambassadors.

Reliving Shōwa dreams?

One of the most notable and fascinating parallels of Tokyo 2020/2021 and Expo 2025 is how they fit so neatly into the narrative arc of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 1970 Osaka Expo. Of course, this is not coincidence; rather, these two pairs of mega-events represent the fervent desires of Japanese politicians to make claims about what Japan has overcome and what contemporary Japan represents. In other words, these mega-events are riddled with agendas of political meaning and national memory-making that reflect a resilient—or to some, perhaps obnoxious—Shōwa-era obsession with making some kind of global statement about Japan’s capacity to overcome national hardship and emerge triumphant on the global stage. As did their fathers before them—literally, because the majority of the influential ruling party politicians today are the sons or grandsons of those in power during the 1960s and 1970s—today’s politicians want to prove to the world, and to themselves, that Japan is still “great.” Not least among these was Abe Shinzō, the prime minister under whom the bids for both the Olympics and the Expo were won. Abe’s maternal grandfather, Kishi Nobusuke, was the prime minister when Tokyo’s bid for the 1964 Olympics was won, and his maternal uncle, Satō Eisaku (Kishi’s younger brother) served as prime minister when the bid for the 1970 Osaka Expo was won (and ruled during the Expo itself). One could almost say that the Olympics and World Expo were family affairs for the Sato–Kishi–Abe family-cum-political dynasty.

Narrating the Expo

Public discourse about mega-events exists on several levels, mainstream media coverage and yellow press sensationalist scoops being just two of them. Marketing and public relations (PR) by the managing organizations and their sponsors are another important discursive level to examine. Both the Olympics and the World Expos are key sites of “global public culture” creation (Roche Reference Roche1998; Roche Reference Roche2000) whereby international organizations—the IOC and the BIE—and host nations cultivate and disseminate dominant narratives of the meanings of these modern mega-events.

The Olympics and the World Expos share many interesting parallels as modern mega-events, particularly in how they are the locus of international narratives, though each with their own distinct twist. The modern Olympics have been driven by inter-nation competitiveness, and alongside other international sporting events such as the football and rugby world cups, in the post-imperial world they are one of the few physical and discursive spaces of legitimized and even valorized nationalism on the global stage. However, the Olympics are also framed through a (apocryphal) narrative of peace and equality through sportsmanship. In other words, across the four-year cycles that roll endlessly around the world, there is a consistent and easily identifiable narrative. Moreover, the international organizations in charge of the Olympics (IOC) and World Expos (BIE) were both founded in Paris, France, in 1894 and 1931, respectively. When it comes to narrating international events, it turns out that Paris is a global leader.

However, we can say that, perhaps even more so than the Olympics, since their inception World Expos have been about narratives. The World Expos of the latter 1800s were mostly narratives of national achievement—showcasing the cultural and industrial innovations in a nationalist game of one-upmanship. Over the 20th century and into the 21st century, World Expos shifted from more nationalist-oriented expositions of industrialization and modernization to become more complexly layered narratives—national narratives overlaid with globally trending themes of the evolution of human society, of world peace, of environmentalism, and of inclusivity.

Another important point of distinction between narrative fields of the Olympics and World Expos is the potential for cacophony and indeed direct contradiction among the narratives pushed by the many national pavilions, in addition to the host nation and its own thematic Expo areas. Each national pavilion becomes a site for participating nations to promote their own agendas and narratives, especially in the 21st-century context of increased global presence of even smaller nations via social media. From this perspective, one of the tasks of Expo host nations is to try to contain and supersede these multiple (and potentially competing) national narrative presentations with their own overarching Expo themes.Footnote ⁴

Within this diversified and potentially conflicting context of global narrative creation in the 21st century, what themes are being communicated by World Expos, and who is communicating them? One way to answer this question is to follow the money. While nation-states continue to be the dominant storytellers in 21st-century Expos, corporations are playing increasingly important roles in weaving their own narratives into World Expos. As the late 20th century was the age of increasing globalized capitalism and expanding multinational corporations, World Expos are now, perhaps fittingly, dominated by global corporations, and the narratives they promote follow the plot of globally resonant acronyms such as corporate social responsibility (CSR); creating shared value (CSV); diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); environmental, social, and governance (ESGs); and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For their part, corporations stand to benefit greatly from World Expos. If, in the past, corporate narratives of innovation were subordinate to national narratives of modernity and progress, today corporate narratives dominate: breakthroughs in digital advances, eco-friendly technologies, and biomedical revolutions. Moreover, compared with other mega-events such as the Olympics, companies do not have to pander to unrelated themes such as sportsmanship and can instead more directly advertise their products with themes that better link with their actual product services through the domestic pavilions and supply of goods for the event. In fact, there were at least 20 official themes for Expo 2025 (the main theme, “Designing Future Society for Our Lives,” plus three subthemes, “Saving Lives,” “Empowering Lives,” and Connecting Lives,” along with eight thematic projects and eight “theme weeks”) and 13 themes related to domestic pavilions, plus various “concepts” and “goals” interspersed throughout the promotional and organizational materials, as well as “co-creation challenge” projects that companies could join. In other words, in the world of Expo advertising, there is something for everyone, and any company can link up with a theme without having to stretch their corporate identity, unlike the case with sports-related Olympic sponsorship.

On a broader level, for host countries, World Expos become venues for various domestic companies to advertise themselves to a global audience. In this sense, World Expos today are perhaps returning to their pre-nationalistic origins as trade shows. However, in another sense, for non-host countries, World Expos become a showcase for advertising specific national themes through corporate sponsorship of country-based pavilions (there were 158 countries and territories participating in Expo 2025). In other words, at World Expos, states and corporations cannot be so easily separated, even (and indeed especially) in this age of global capitalism and multinational corporations. And in some cases, the pavilions are entirely led by non-state actors; this was the case with the US pavilions between 1999 and 2020, which were entirely funded by corporations and local governments, without any national support (Chicago Tribune 2007). Expo 2025 was in fact the first time in a quarter century that the US pavilion was directly federally funded.

Mega-events such as the World Expo and the Olympics are powerful opportunities for states to advertise themselves to the world and to gain international prestige and domestic pride, but as they also continue to expand in size and cost, it is increasingly clear that an intimate relationship between corporations and hosting state governments is necessary for pulling off these events. It is perhaps partly for this reason that recent years have witnessed a growing interest in hosting World Expos from countries with more pronounced nationalistic and/or state-controlled corporate governance structures, such as China (Shanghai 2010 Expo), the United Arab Emirates (UAE; Dubai 2020 Expo), and Saudi Arabia (Riyadh 2030 Expo), as well as candidate bids by Turkey (Irzim 2020 Expo candidate) and Russia (Ekaterinburg 2020 Expo candidate, Moscow 2030 Expo candidate). As with sportswashing by such countries through international sporting events (Boykoff Reference Boykoff2022), World Expos can serve as a kind of “Expo-washing” to enhance national image while expanding global investment.

Sponsoring the Expo

Another important dimension of mega-event narrative creation is corporate sponsorship. The Olympics, too, are a lucrative opportunity for both nations and companies to enhance their global image. However, unlike Olympic sponsorship, which is highly restrictive due to the power of the IOC, sponsorship rules for World Expos are much more flexible. In contrast to the four-tiered sponsorship system of the Olympics—The Olympic Partner (TOP) global sponsors and three tiers of domestic sponsorship—World Expos have no global-level sponsors and are exclusively handled at the domestic level. Sponsorship opportunities are spread out across multiple spheres of engagement, including different Expo-level organizational dimensions (e.g., PR sponsors, facilities sponsors, operational sponsors), Expo-level themes (e.g., “Smart Mobility Expo,” “Digital Expo,” “Virtual Expo,” “Art Expo,” “Green Expo,” and the ambitiously vague “Future Life Expo”). In addition to the Expo-level sponsorship options, there are more direct sponsorship opportunities for domestic pavilions, which for Expo 2025 included 4 thematic pavilions—the national pavilion, a Kansai regional tourism pavilion, a healthcare pavilion promoting Kansai-based companies, and a Cartier-sponsored “Women’s Pavilion”—along with 12 directly sponsored corporate and industry pavilions and 1 nonprofit organization (NPO)-sponsored environmental pavilion (by Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives [ZERI] Japan).

Unlike the Olympics, hosting World Expos does not require a vote of support by the host nation. In other words, lackluster popular support is not an issue, so long as there is enough government and corporate support to finance the event. Nonetheless, as with the Olympics, securing corporate support is not easy, and the drive to drum up sponsorship for Expo 2025 faced a similar uphill battle in Japan. For the Olympics, the strategy for courting companies relied on what Ebizuka calls “passive patriotism”: creating a slogan of “All Japan” that effectively guilts companies into supporting the Olympics by marking those who do not get on board as “anti-Japan” (Gagné Reference Gagné, Holthus, Gagné, Manzenreiter and Waldenberger2020: 29–30). Expo 2025 also invoked the slogan of “All Japan,” but an important difference was the absence of overt promotion from the advertising giants Dentsu and Hakuhodo. Due to Olympic bid-rigging and bribery scandals involving both companies, in March 2023 the Osaka prefectural and city governments suspended Dentsu and Hakuhodo from participating in bidding for Expo projects for one year, a ban which ended in March 2024. Thus, corporate and public promotion for the Expo was noticeably less visible than for Tokyo 2020/2021.

This was partly blamed for the lackluster pre-event ticket sales, with some five million tickets fewer than anticipated being sold. However, reducing the hurdle to purchasing tickets by offering them at convenience stores ended up being quite successful (Figure 4). Indeed, during the opening week, the press reported long entrance lines with the somewhat positive remark that they resembled the lines at Tokyo Disney Resort.

Figure 4:

Ticket purchase option at convenience store register.

Source: © Barbara Holthus. The cash register at a convenience store in Tokyo, February 27, 2025, that now advertises advance ticket sales for the Expo 2025.

Alongside the “All Japan” slogan, Expo organizers encouraged Japanese companies to become sponsors by suggesting that participating could benefit companies in four ways: as a means of increasing social engagement (CSR/CSV), as a form of internal development (e.g., increased employee motivation), as a way of enhancing managerial development (appealing to shareholders through SDGs and improving corporate branding), and as an avenue to expand marketing (greater advertising and new market development).

As of May 31, 2024, there were at least 324 sponsors across the various Expo pavilions and projects, plus 378 companies and organizations (including colleges and NPOs) listed as “co-creation partners,” meaning groups involved in one or more of the Expo’s “co-creation challenge” projects related to SDGs. All of these were institutions in Japan, which far exceeds the 82 official domestic sponsors for Tokyo 2020/2021. However, despite this impressive number of (seemingly) at least 700 domestic sponsors, many companies were counted as sponsors multiple times, for each project or service they provided across the Expo’s multiple categories, and thus the actual number of companies involved was likely a bit smaller. Regardless, from a sponsorship perspective, the Expo can be deemed a success. Calculating just the amount of sponsorship revenue from the 160 companies listed as sponsors for facilities and operations management, the Expo had secured between 1.5 billion and 3.3 billion yen by early 2025. Even more impressively, the 63 sponsor companies of the Osaka Healthcare Pavilion pledged between 14 and 37 billion yen. Adding up all of the different sponsorship categories, the total corporate sponsorship revenue for the Expo was at least 30–60 billion yen, although this is still small compared with the Tokyo 2020/2021 Olympics sponsorship haul of at least 433 billion yen (Olympics.com 2022). Nonetheless, one could say that the Expo’s lower threshold for sponsorship (a minimum of one million yen for some projects such as the Osaka Healthcare Pavilion, compared with the minimum of 315 million yen to be a “Tier 3 Supporter” for Tokyo 2020/2021) means that a broader range of companies and organizations were able to become sponsors, which made the Expo more broad-based and inclusive.

The many official sponsors and stakeholders (and their company employees) were frequently seen with the Expo mascot MyakuMyaku decorating their suit lapels (Figure 5, the Expo mascot shines on the suit collar of the director of the German Expo pavilion). Even Japanese Prime Minister Ishiba was seen at a press conference wearing it prior to the Expo, and after the beginning of the Expo he wore it almost continuously. Moreover, when the prime minister had his usual press contact, a large stuffed model of the Expo mascot could be seen sitting in the background. Minister of State for Economic and Fiscal Policy Akazawa Ryosei even gifted US President Donald Trump a golden MyakuMyaku statue during trade negotiations at the White House in mid-April, shortly after the opening of Expo 2025, which received a lot of attention in the Japanese media.

Figure 5:

Expo mascot and German pavilion logo.

Source: © Barbara Holthus. Expo 2025 mascot MyakuMyaku on the collar of the suit of the director of the German Expo pavilion. November 2024, Berlin.

In terms of official domestic narratives, Expo 2025 was advertised to people as a hodgepodge of happy activities. In one of the official posters (Figure 6), the Expo mascot takes center stage, with its many eyes floating around the poster. The two main attractions are prominent to the right of the mascot: the Guinness World Records record-holding “Grand Ring” structure that encircles the Expo site (which is also repeated on the bottom of the poster), as well as the humanoid robot from the Japan Pavilion. In the middle of the poster are two humans, a woman and a child, both seemingly Japanese, and both smiling broadly. The woman is eating Japanese street food (representing the Kansai cuisine on offer at the Expo). Two other younger women, wearing clothing suggesting that they are school girls, are also visible. One foreign couple, a Caucasian woman and a Black man, walk arm in arm. Interestingly, no Japanese man is displayed. Incidentally, the sponsor mentioned on this poster is Keirin, the Japanese cycle racing federation—a very male-dominated sport and one of the few sports with officially sanctioned betting.

Figure 6:

Expo advertising poster.

Source: © Barbara Holthus. Poster advertisement on a Tokyo metro station platform, February 17, 2025.

Mega-events and narratives of sustainability

For both Tokyo 2020/2021 and Expo 2025, sustainability was a key term. The Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee promoted five main themes and goals: (1) mitigating climate change (carbon neutral games); (2) resource management (recycling 99% of procured items/goods); (3) protecting the natural environment and biodiversity (use of recycled rainwater and conserving flora at venues); (4) consideration of human rights, labor, and fair business practices (adhering to UN principles); and (5) involvement, cooperation, and communications (encouraging nationwide participation). The extent to which Tokyo 2020/2021 was actually sustainable is a topic of debate, and after the Olympics there was much criticism about whether and how these goals were achieved, such as how the Games’ “carbon neutrality” was achieved through massive purchasing of carbon credits, or how the “sustainable sourcing code” was full of loopholes (Smithson Reference Smithson2021).

Expo 2025 featured a similar show of sustainability in its promotional material, with pledges of carbon neutrality and its own “Code of Sustainable Procurement.” With the Expo, companies and products (rather than athletes and events) were in the forefront of promotional material, and thus companies’ SDG pledges and practices were highlighted. Ballester (Reference Ballester2023: 9) suggests that the BIE “relie[d] on sustainable development to justify and lead to a revival of exhibitions in the 1980s and 1990s” Reference Ballesterand asserts that “the SDGs become a means of legitimizing the expo and making it acceptable to local populations as well as international visitors and tourists” (Reference Ballester2023: 10).

Companies played a leading role in legitimation by combining their own CSR and SDG goals with the message of sustainability of the Expo. One case in point for Expo 2025 was the advertising giant Hakuhodo, second in size only to Dentsu in Japan’s advertising world. In August 2021, Hakuhodo was named a Team Expo 2025 Program Co-creation Partner with their sustainability-themed project “Earth Mall,” described as an “action platform for realizing SDGs” that seeks to connect companies, NPOs, academics, and government actors (Hakuhodo 2021). This was promoted as encouraging sustainable consumption among consumers. Hakuhodo even tried to create a new buzzword by coining the neologism “sasu-katsu,” a portmanteau of “sustainability” and “katsudō” (action/practice).

The Earth Mall project was advertised as part of the broader “Hakuhodo SDGs Project”; however, it was specifically tied to the Expo’s initiative “Team Expo 2025,” which also included advertising giant Dentsu. As with Tokyo 2020/2021, here again we see Dentsu and Hakuhodo joining forces to promote a mega-event. However, unlike the Olympics, Dentsu and Hakuhodo operated largely behind the scenes, most likely owing to their convictions for being involved in bid-rigging for the Olympics and the resulting one-year ban on bidding for new projects related to the Expo. Both companies remain influential and respected within the corporate world, but they suffered major public humiliation, and their names became globally known for the wrong reasons after the Olympics. As a result, the Expo 2025 committee probably wished to downplay their involvement. And Dentsu did not mention its involvement in the Expo in any news releases on its website after January 2022, although it was listed as a “Co-creation Partner” in Team Expo 2025 events on the Expo 2025 website.

After the Expo opening

Ten days into the six-month run of Expo 2025, an article was published by the Japan Times on the question of sustainability of the Expo pavilions (Ha Reference Ha2025). The article explained that many of the pavilions were designed by Kengo Kuma and Associates (e.g., the Portugal, Malaysia, and Qatar Pavilions) and criticized the short timelines for the construction and the paradoxical use of lumber and other materials that had to be transported from around the world. The article argued that “[…] at the heart of the expo […] is a paradox: This event is simply not sustainable. A six-month-long affair that requires fast, large-scale construction and globally sourced materials, and which aims to draw millions of visitors from around the world, cannot be good news for Earth.” Borja Martinez of Interplay Architects, disciples of Kengo Kuma, is quoted as stating: “Probably the most honest answer is to say that the most environmentally friendly pavilion is the one that doesn’t exist.” The article goes on to say that Martinez “suggests rethinking the design of the expo itself, and finding ways to have the structures last beyond six months” (Ha Reference Ha2025). Indeed, many of the Dubai 2020 Expo pavilions were left intact and repurposed, as the site is being transformed into a sustainable compact city; in the case of Expo 2025, advance material suggests that many pavilion spaces will be repurposed as flexible event venue spaces for the planned integrated resort (with casino) and meetings, international conferences, and events (MICE) facility (Japan MICE Expo 2025; Tan Reference Tan2025). As with Tokyo 2020/2021, the real assessment of Expo 2025’s sustainability will only emerge some time after the event is done, and the physical legacy of the Expo, including to what extent the existing Expo infrastructure will be maintained, remains to be seen.