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Mexico and Estonia have pulled out but Denmark, Cameroon and Jamaica still want in. Construction costs are spiralling so fast that Brazil, Argentina and Poland are said to be considering moving their showcases into a glorified warehouse. A European nation was told by one of Japan’s biggest contractors that, yes, they will certainly complete the desired pavilion — a month after the event is finished.
The preparations for the Osaka 2025 World Expo, in the era of binge-watchable docudrama, are going perfectly. If organisers really put in the effort, they may even get a two-season box set out of it.
From many angles, even officials directly involved admit, the scene on the artificial island of Yumeshima in Osaka bay less than 18 months before the world expo is due to open looks less than ideal. Work has finally started on the wooden ring that will encircle the national pavilions, but visitors to the site are still standing in what feels like an empty, 155-hectare car park.
A vast summit this week bringing together organisers and the more than 150 countries involved has gone somewhat better than expected, say participants, but those expectations were remarkably and grumpily low.
This month, the government approved the projected $1.6bn cost for building the main venue — a figure running at almost twice the original estimate and inviting speculation that it could go higher still. This approval, justified by the soaring costs of labour and materials, represented an act of fiscal largesse, which prompted local TV stations to provide yen-by-yen breakdowns of the enlarged burden on already grumbling, inflation-battered taxpayers.
An increasing number of diplomats, griping in private about the task that lies ahead, are even more scathing and hint that, if they felt they could get away with doing so, they would withdraw or downgrade. Quoted costs for pavilion construction are in some cases significantly higher than first envisaged and half of the countries booked to build the premier pavilions have not yet submitted plans. Many, confronting byzantine Japanese building regulations, are struggling to secure the local contractors and approvals they need to build pavilions. The prospect of building something “practical but pointless”, says one Asian diplomat, is very real.
Swirling around all this is the question of what the purpose of the whole expo enterprise really is, and how best to generate the sort of enthusiasm that, in the case of wildly over-budget sports events such as world cups or Olympics, is ultimately provided by the sport itself. The fact that, after its six-month run, the entire expo will be completely demolished presents additional communications challenges around sustainability.
World expos, dating back to London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, once had a much clearer purpose: they were truly thrilling international showcases for inhabitants of a world that travelled less and had limited exposure to the food, technology and culture of “abroad”. The Osaka expo, along with many of the participating countries, are doubtless earnest in the desire to provide a modernised version of that thrill. The difficulty lies in defining “global reach” in an era when a single YouTube video of how to bake a Minecraft cake village, or how to cook chicken biryani, receives more views than the 28mn visitors the expo organisers are expecting.
But, whether disastrous or delightful, this will all be extraordinarily watchable. And perhaps that is how expos must evolve: as spectacles of preparation, rather than completion.
Many of the problems confronting the Osaka expo are, fascinatingly, Japan’s in microcosm: the acuteness of the labour shortage, regulatory intransigence and budgetary slippage prominent among them. But the faith in the meaning of the event itself is exquisitely Japanese too. World expos are emotionally anchored in an old global order from which Japan has benefited enormously; the looming replacement of that order — both technological and geopolitical — is likely to be far less kind. Japan’s nostalgic passion for this sort of project is a driving force which should not be underestimated, and which will be a white-knuckle pleasure to watch.
The manifest chaos and public backlash around the expo put us, the viewers, exactly where we should be at this point for the story arc to work. If expos are to remain relevant, they must do so in an era where the world, its viewing tastes shaped by emotion-churning documentaries on catastrophic music festivals or celebrity-owned underdog football teams, wants to see these things framed as a crisis or a crisis overcome. A multibillion-dollar world expo, in a world that doesn’t really need them, guarantees at least one of the two.
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