World Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai

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 is set to take place in Yumeshima, an artificial island in Osaka Bay. The organizers predict that around 170 participants will take part in the exhibition, including 160 countries and regions and 9 international organizations. They expect over 28 million visitors, including 3.5 million guests from overseas.

The Osaka Expo 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.

The Expo’s theme, “Designing Future Society for Our Lives”, 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.

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.

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.