We made it to @expo2025japan on the second day of being in Osaka, and it was capital H-O-T hot. Waiting in line to get through the gates was one of those existential moments of wondering about our sanity.
Thankfully, they’d set up the place with outdoor fans and misters that made the grounds slightly less oppressive than the outside, but only by a fraction of a degree or two.
The irony of it all was that this Expo was all about imagining healthier and more sustainable futures, so there was something eerily dystopian about exploring the space as a breathy, disembodied ASMR voice repeatedly issued heat stroke advisories over the PA. We laughed about that voice issuing radiation warnings in the cities of the future, urging us to take shelter underground and remain calm, assuring us that our techno-fascist masters love us, but in all seriousness, that experience was probably the most honest picture of our collective tomorrow in the whole mega-event, with 2025, the hottest year ever recorded, as year zero.
I was telling people yesterday about the heat of that first week in Japan, saying how it was the hottest heat I’ve ever experienced, and someone blurted out, almost disbelievingly: “hotter than Lebanon??”
YES! Hotter than Lebanon. It was the intense one-two punch of high temperature and high humidity that I’ve never felt before. It’s always been either/or – I’d visited Japan in July, over a decade ago, so I thought I knew what to expect of their summers. But this combination was on another level completely.
The humidity was so intense that it apparently fogged up my lens at times. Here are two shots that paint the picture.
Given how much of a catalyst the Osaka Expo was for our whole trip to this country, you’d think that I tried hard to get us reservations to see the inside of the crown jewels of mega-events like these, i.e. the national or “Type A” pavilions. But I didn’t. My interest in Expos since obsessing about Montreal’s Expo 67 has always been in the event space itself, so I just wanted to see what it would feel like to simply show up and explore. And I was certainly not going to stand in line to earn the privilege of being subjected to governmental propaganda. Not in that heat.
This approach ended up being quite generative. We found ourselves going into any pavilion that had no lines. That’s how we learned a little about Mozambique, for example, and how we ended up exploring two of the common halls where the smaller nations had booths.
Here are two examples of the kinds of booths for nations in the “Type C” pavilions: Saint Lucia and Kyrgyzstan. Even more obscurely, for me: Eswatini (formerly Swaziland, and featuring their absolute monarch Mswati III), North Macedonia (featuring Mother Teresa)—both of which are landlocked, apparently—and Tonga, featuring the very idea of Christianity, for some reason.
We ended up having lunch in the PANAF diner, where we tasted both West African and North African flavors and were treated to polyrhythmic beats. The African marketing game was strong throughout the Expo, which is how we got enticed into leaving with a bag of Burundian coffee as well.