Expo 2025 Osaka

Japan’s Registration Dossier concerning Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan was approved by the General Assembly of the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic was raging worldwide, forcing humankind to face an unprecedented crisis.

As a result of this pandemic, the world is faced with new challenges, such as the fragmentation of interactions among nations and people, the need to reconstruct environments and various social systems, and changes in values and lifestyles. These circumstances require bringing together the wisdom of the world and lead the way to swift solutions.

Reflecting on the theme of Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai, Designing Future Society for Our Lives, and taking necessary action has become a mission for this age. The international community has devoted serious efforts to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, and these efforts are consistent with the significance of holding the Expo.

The SDGs are essentially an intertwinement of various challenges centred around lives. Any endeavour to achieve these intertwined goals should be made through collaboration, bringing together those who aim to create a brighter future with better lives and a sustainable natural and human world.

Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai will provide the world with an opportunity to come together in one place to explore the theme of “life.” This Expo will facilitate interactions between people with diverse values from around the world, resulting in new human networks and creative endeavours. Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai will share hopes for a brighter future with the world by overcoming the current global crisis, protecting people’s lives, and reflecting on life and lifestyles.

Designing Future Society for Our Lives

The theme, "Designing Future Society for Our Lives", makes individuals think how they want to live and how they can maximise their potential. This theme also aims to drive co-creation by the international community in designing a sustainable society that supports individuals’ ideas of how they want to live.

In other words, the Expo will ask a straightforward question for the first time: “What is the happy way of life?”. The Expo is taking place at a time when new social challenges, including expanding economic gaps and heightened conflicts, are emerging, while science technologies are evolving, including AI and biotechnology, that will present changes to humankinds, for example, extended life spans.

Saving Lives, Empowering Lives, and Connecting Lives are the three subthemes of the Expo. Japanese culture has long been based on the belief that any material, from all living creatures to even a pebble along the road, has an inherent life. With this in mind, the Expo welcomes the consideration of ‘life’ not just for human beings but also in a broader sense of diverse creations and nature that surround humans.

Saving Lives focuses on protecting lives. This subtheme may be associated for example with countermeasures against infectious diseases through improvement in public health, ensuring safety through disaster readiness and disaster risk reduction initiatives, and harmonious coexistence with nature.

Empowering Lives focuses on enriching the lives of individuals and expanding their potential. Topics related to this may include, for example, high quality remote education through the use of ICT; the extension of a healthy life span through appropriate exercise and diet; and the maximisation of human potential through the use of AI and robotics.

Connecting Lives focuses on getting everyone engaged, building communities and enriching society. This subtheme may relate to subjects including, for example, the power of partnership and co-creation, advanced communications enabled by ICT, and the design of a data-driven society.

The concept of Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai is “People's Living Lab.” This concept represents the Expo’s approach toward putting its theme into practice and serves as a guideline for the practical implementation of projects. The most distinctive characteristic of the Expo will be the endeavour to give a realistic picture of a future society not just through thought, but also through action. This endeavour is being launched before the Expo, by inviting diverse participants to come together with various initiatives to tackle challenges with solutions that will help achieve the SDGs, either on or off the Expo site

The Expo site is located in Yumeshima, an artificial island located on the waterfront in Osaka that offers visitors a view of the Seto Inland Sea. The Expo will be promoted as being connected to the world through the surrounding sea and sky, with programmes taking advantage of the venue’s location.
With an area of 1.55 km2, the venue will have a pavilion area in its centre, with waters in its southern part and greenery in its western part.

Unity in diversity - If the Expo venue, as a place of union between diverse cultures and lifestyles, can not only celebrate rich diversity but also provide visitors with experience of connection beyond the divide, the Expo will succeed in sharing hopes for a brighter future. For this purpose, the venue will be designed to advocate diversity based on the principles of ‘decentralisation’ and ‘dispersion’, embraced by the Organiser since the candidature. This will be combined with ‘connection’ between diverse beings so that visitors will be able to experience unity in diversity and one world shared by innumerable diverse beings.

One Sky - ‘One Sky’ is a symbol of ‘connection’ between diverse beings. Everyone around the world is looking up at the same sky. The ‘One Sky’ connects all parts of the world. It is what people all over the world share. The one sky thus represents unity in diversity.

Expo of the sea, sky and earth - The site for the Expo is surrounded by the sea and includes an enclosed part of the sea. Mirroring the sky, the enclosed sea will cut a portion out of the ‘One Sky’, towards which visitors will raise their eyes. On the ground, the venue will be dotted with diverse pavilions and various natural features in a decentralised and dispersed manner.

Clear line of flow and diverse areas arranged in a decentralised and dispersed manner - The main line of flow, through which all parts of the venue are accessible, is designed to form a loop to provide both clarity and a variety of views. The venue will be dotted with plazas of various sizes along the main line of flow, adding different tones to the visitor experiences. The plazas will be used for various events filled with liveliness.

The design of the official mascot of Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai, Myaku-Myaku, is inspired by the Expo logo combined with water – the symbol of Osaka. With no fixed form, Myaku–Myaku is fluid; its red parts are able to be split apart, and its watery body can change shape freely with endless variations.

Designed by mountain mountain/Yamashita Kohei, the mascot was selected following a call for proposals that received 1,898 design proposals. A total of 33,197 name suggestions were then submitted to the Expo Organiser. The chosen name - Myaku-Myaku – meaning something passed down from generation to generation – was announced on the occasion of the 1,000-day countdown to the opening of the Expo.

The Osaka-Kansai region was home to the foundation of the ancient Japanese state and therefore has many resources for historical tourism, including World Heritage sites, national treasures, historical buildings, and important cultural resources.

Additionally, the region boasts various traditional performing arts, including the Ningyo Joruri Bunraku puppet theatre, Kamigata kabuki, and Noh, and has also long enjoyed a nationwide reputation as home to various styles of comedy, including Kamigata rakugo and manzai.

Called the “kitchen for the entire nation” since the Edo Period (17th to 19th century), Osaka has developed such various forms of cuisine that it is known as the city of people extravagant in food. Sports including baseball and football also characterise the Osaka-Kansai region.

In industrial terms, the Kansai region is characterised by the concentration of businesses and research institutes in a wide range of fields, including the environment, life sciences, and manufacturing, as well as being home to traditional crafts and artisanship. The region leads Japan with its mastery of the most advanced technologies, including the latest technologies which will help achieve Society 5.0. Kansai also embraces the culture of eagerly creating new, unprecedented things, as seen in the fact that the region was the world’s first to introduce futures contracts.

In terms of its relationships with the rest of the world and Asia, Osaka-Kansai serves as an Asian hub for international trade and transportation. The region boasts a wide variety of geographic features, from mountains to plains, blessed with rich natural environments that enable people to enjoy seasonal changes in scenery unique to Japan. These natural, cultural, and historical features have made the Osaka-Kansai region a “golden route” or a popular destination for both domestic and international tourists, together with Tokyo.