World Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai will be held from 13 April to 13 October 2025. It will be the third time that Japan hosts the Expo. Previous expositions were organised in Osaka in 1970 and in Aichi in 2025.
The Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai theme, underlines the importance of bringing nations and people together through global cooperation, beyond all divisions, so that everyone has a chance to have a good life and a better future. It is also meant to motivate people to think about how they want to live, and how they may maximise their potential.
The theme comes to life through three sub-themes, relating to “Life”:
Protecting and maintaining life, improving healthcare, ensuring safety through preparedness for natural disasters, producing harmonious co-existence of human beings with the natural environment.
Enriching the lives of individuals and expanding their potential, providing education with ICT, prolonging healthy lives through adequate diet and exercise, maximising human potential through AI and robotics.
Engaging everyone, building communities and enriching society.
The official character for Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, is Myaku-Myaku. This red-and-blue mascot symbolises body cells and water – the source of life.
Its name derives from the Japanese word “myakumyaku”, which describes the situation in which something is passed down continuously. It was chosen to show hopes that wisdom, technology, history and culture of Japan will be passed on to future generations uninterruptedly.
Expo 2025 will be held on the artificial island of Yumeshima, situated in the waters of Osaka Bay, in western Japan. The name in Japanese means “The island of dreams”.
The Expo grounds will be surrounded by the so-called Ring – a footbridge reaching 20m, with a diameter of 600 m and length of 2,000m – the largest wooden structure in the world.
The Expo 2025 will be an opportunity to highlight cutting-edge Japanese achievements to the world, including in transport. Flying taxis and hydrogen-powered craft for transporting visitors to the venue will be the symbol of the Expo. All payment transactions during the Osaka Expo will be cashless, making it the first-ever cashless World Expo, through which Japan will seek to popularise electronic payments.
World Expositions are the largest and most prestigious global events, combining economic, promotional, cultural and tourist themes. They take place every five years, and their scale is comparable to that of the Olympic Games or the FIFA World Cup.v
Since the first one, the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, World Expositions have become the capital of the world for half a year, attracting crowds of visitors, from businessmen seeking new deals to tourists. It’s a place where the whole world meets. Expo visitors can visit national pavilions and their exhibitions, participate in numerous entertainment events – concerts, fashion shows, performances, and learn about inventions and cutting-edge technological solutions.
Initially, World Expositions were primarily a forum for sharing knowledge and scientific achievements, only to later become a place for collective debate on the challenges of the modern world, technology, and development. The expositions also allow a wider public to “discover” or “rediscover” a given country through direct contact with national pavilions and organised events. For countries, the opportunity to showcase their culture, values, traditions and tourist attractions is as important as economic promotion.
