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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Picture a couple taking their truculent, bickering, late-teenage children on what no one wants to admit will probably be their last family holiday together.
The well-intentioned project is propelled by nostalgia for happier, younger and less cynical times. Substantial money is splashed and parental smiles fixed on the business of recapture and reassurance. The kids roll their eyes, grin for the selfies, but make it clear they would rather be anywhere else.
This, in essence, is the Osaka Expo 2025: a celebration of global greatness whose timing at the start of a global trade war makes Japan the embodiment of the phrase “the show must go on”, even as the world’s curtains catch fire, dry rot collapses the stage and the lead actors start ad-libbing.
Underpinning Japan’s doggedness is a yearning for the world to more closely resemble the friendly international cuddle of an expo than reality would ever allow. Osaka hosted a brilliant expo in 1970 when the country was on the way up; this iteration is about proving that neither Japan nor the world in general betrayed the promise of that time.
Evidence, though, is in diminishing supply. For an event more than eight years in the planning, it was unfortunate that Expo 2025 should have opened its doors to the media on the very day that US President Donald Trump’s tariffs descended on many of the countries represented there — including, very heavily, on the host.
Holding the smiles through rolling calamity is a grim business. Global recession is a real risk and Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba has declared a national crisis. Three hours after the expo opened, the finance ministry, Financial Services Agency and Bank of Japan held an emergency meeting to discuss the global crisis and vow co-operation with the IMF and other G7 countries to stabilise markets thrown into turmoil by Trump’s tariffs.
If negotiations with the Trump administration go the way many suspect they will, Japan — already heavily invested in the US — may end up pledging to move even more manufacturing there. That will come, inevitably, at the cost of Japanese jobs, many of them in the industrial region that encircles the expo.
Even Japan, seemingly unshakeable in its faith that big global jamborees confirm the existence of big global consensus, must have wondered whether it was still entirely fitting to name the quartier of the venue that includes the US, China, Vietnam and Canada pavilions the “Empowering Zone”.
Unlike a big sporting event, where the concept of competition is central, an expo demands a far greater pretence that all is well. The cognitive dissonance is overwhelming.
The US pavilion sits in a huddle of nations on whom it initially imposed import tariffs of 24 per cent (Malaysia), 17 per cent (Philippines), 20 per cent (France) and 16 per cent (Mozambique). Its star-shaped mascot Spark bounces merrily from exhibit to exhibit apparently unbothered that its president last week accused many of those in neighbouring pavilions of having “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered” America over five decades.
Still, in an era when no one is totally clear on the actual purpose of an expo, the earnestness of Japan’s role as host and cheermaker-in-chief is impressively intact. And, having flintily decided to play along, many of the inhabitants of the national and corporate pavilions clustered on a reclaimed island in Osaka Bay are actually inventive and fun. Once it is fully opened to the public this weekend, millions of people will doubtless visit and have a good time.
Some of the exhibits may be a little too earnest. One expansive pavilion, sponsored by dozens of Japanese companies, invites visitors on a tour through the Future of Life — a robot-strewn story in which popular TV chat-show hosts are kept functional after death and a dying grandmother weighs the choice between dying naturally or downloading her mind into an android and living on. Minor spoiler alert: granddaughter in tears.
But earnestness, by a very wide margin, beats despair. The genius of the Osaka Expo is that it encircles the entire site with a gigantic wooden ring — 20 metres high and with a circumference of 2km. A plaque on one of its pillars attests to its status as the world’s biggest wooden structure.
More to the point, it may be there to help deal with the dissonance, ringfencing the world as we would like it to protect it from the one we actually have. Inside the Grand Ring, the world is wholesome; outside it is denigratory. Expo 2025 is absurd but, at this very moment, it may be the hope we need.