17 September 2025, a brief foray to Osaka from Kyoto

On Wednesday, since everyone I met was talking about it, I made the short hop by train to Osaka and to the World fair, EXPO 2025! And why not, since it is only there till October, and what are plans for, if not to be changed.

It reminded me of another Expo. Just to the North West of where I live back in London is a rather unremarkable strip of Hyde Park that runs from the west of the Barracks to Exhibition Road. Tree-lined but otherwise unlandscaped, it rather disappoints the visitor (at least this visitor), at odds with the rest of the park which is so beautiful, although because it is flat, open and uncluttered the area is popular with those wanting to play football. Back in 1851, though, this seemingly unpromising area was the very focus of Empire because on it stood the Crystal Palace, the setting for the world’s first Great Exhibition, great grandfather of this World Expo 2025 in Osaka. World Expos have been happening in between with fluctuating frequency and intensity, but 1851 set the tone and established a now well-established tradition. The next, in 2027, will be in Belgrade.

The Great Exhibition’s patron was Prince Albert. He intended it to present a confident and strong account of the United Kingdom to the rest of the Empire, to act as a showcase for other countries to demonstrate their own achievements, and (in Prince Albert’s words) to be “a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived, and to be a starting point for future exertions.” Quite a bold ambition.

The Exhibition back then seemed vast and was immensely popular. It covered 990,000 square feet, and they say that over six million people attended it (equivalent to more than a third of the UK population). Luminaries of the day who went included Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday and Karl Marx, not to mention Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Alfred Tennyson and Lewis Carroll. You get the idea? Oh, and it was sponsored by Schweppes! Yes, really! One of the great inventions on show (and in use) was the flush lavatory. People queued to ‘spend a penny’ (yes, that’s where the phrase comes from) and this, and other commercial endeavours plus the price of admission, saw the Exhibition generate a profit of £186,000 (said to be the equivalent of over £33M in modern terms). This profit ensured a legacy. The Trustees of the Royal Commission of 1851 (who still exist and who still function as Trustees, overseeing the legacy work of the event), then oversaw the creation of The Albertopolis, including the V&A, and the Natural History and the Science Museums. When I was Chaplain of Imperial College, nowadays an agglomeration of then-independent schools and colleges (and now one of the world’s great universities!), the sense of indebtedness to the events of 1851 was palpable.

Quite what the 1851 Commissioners would have made of EXPO 2025, I can’t imagine! Constructed on Yumeshima Island off Osaka, the site is absolutely vast; 383 hectares in size (which my basic maths suggests compares with a mere 92 hectares in 1851 – I’m not good on hectares) and whereas everything in 1851 was housed in one building (The Crystal Palace, subsequently relocated in south London), EXPO 2025 is spread over an array of buildings, elegant pavilions and more utilitarian temporary structures between which (wearily) we trekked, and then (lengthily) queued to get into. Yesterday, my taxi driver who returned me to Shin-Osaka to get the train back to Kyoto late in the evening, told me that they’d had a quarter of a million visitors that day. In one day! “A good time to be a taxi driver,” he said. I suggested he retire and come to London. They estimate that by the time it ends next month, over twenty two million people will have visited – BUT that attendance will guarantee that the endeavour only just breaks even. So, no endowment for the future, even if there will be an amazing show-ground which perhaps, like London’s Olympic Park, will be repurposed, but that might quietly disappoint the Commissioners.

So, beyond the experience of the day, what to make of this brief foray to Osaka? Well, three things, I think, that might inform design principles for events like this.

First, that we live in such a thoroughgoing entertainment culture these days that we risk everything becoming or needing to be – unconsciously – entertainment. This happens back at work in London where, when trying to think about ‘forming’ people or ‘teaching’ them as part of a community of faith, we drift into competing with ourselves and with other church communities to be entertaining… and at the same time people make judgements about whether to participate based not on whether a process might be useful or beneficial for them and for others, but on whether it is entertaining enough for them. On one level this is timeless human stuff, but I suspect that our current age, with its very short attention span and wide availability of other entertainment ‘just within reach’ (“I’ll just pick up my phone…”) makes this a problem. I wonder whether those planning Expos – however high-minded their first intent – are drawn unconsciously into thinking about entertaining people, which is fine, but which is only one of many possible considerations. What else do we need to think about?

Second, the question of legacy does matter. Our throw-away age crumples up experiences and discards them quickly. And if transient entertainment and distraction are all that matter this may be fine. But is it ethically justifiable to invest so much money and resource in an event for it simply to be a transient experience, and not also something with enduring legacy? I wonder if making break-even assumptions about such events at the planning stage is right. A design principle might have to be that it will make a profit, not for immediate return for backers but that will be reinvested. The idea that the legacy is carried sufficiently in people’s hearts and minds is a poor one.

And third, there is something about systemic integrity here. The stated aims of the two Exhibitions, 174 years apart, were not entirely different. Both aspired to shape future solutions. The Expo blurb says this of Osaka 2025: “it is designed as a global platform to promote sustainable prosperity, inclusive societies, and technological advancement, aiming to leave no one behind and [to] accelerate SDG progress.” SDGs are the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. But the very deep existential challenges we are facing as a society (overcrowding, inequality, disposability, superficiality, lack of life-balance, inability to stop and ask hard questions) are the very things that seem to be being exemplified in the staging of this Expo (crowded, exhausting, frenetic, superficially entertaining, expensive f&b, large pavilions for rich countries and small stands for poorer ones, recklessly extravagant investment without enduring legacy, and reportedly failure to make adequate provision for the elderly and disabled). How can an event that proposes a harmonious and transformed human future but that does the very things it is supposed to be raising questions about be part of the answer? If we begin to think systemically, we will see that this third critique is the most important – because our human future depends on our being more systemically aware and sensitive to the need for deep equilibrium, for balance or homeostasis, and for a commitment to ‘wholeness’ and therefore integrity.

But this is not to be shrilly critical of what has been an amazing feat of human endeavour, and on balance I enjoyed the day. Nobody gets out of bed in the morning wanting either to have a bad day or to do a bad job, and the organisers have done a great job. Doing an even better job next time might involve asking different questions. Belgrade 2027 anyone?