Expo Dream Spheres and Tech Utopias: Imagining the Future at the Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan
Florian Schneider
May 2025
A looming amorphous blue blob greets me as I enter the Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan. Crouching on its pedestal, it looks down on me and the other expo visitors with its five rolling eyeballs and a beatific – if somewhat uncanny – white smile.
This is MYAKU-MYAKU, the official expo mascot. It is a bizarre creature that is meant to represent cells ‘which divide and multiply’ as well as ‘pure water’ that ‘can flow and change shape’.[1] In the Japanese tradition of amateurish ‘yuru’-style mascots, the figure is supposed to capture the essence of the Kansai region, in a tongue-in-cheek, awkward but loveable manner. When I first saw images of this walking eye-ball amoebae, months before encountering it in its natural habitat, it reminded me less of Japan’s famously cute icons like Hello Kitty, Pikachu, or Totoro, and more of some Lovecraftian eldritch horror. I would not have expected this strange design-choice to generate much love.
I could not have been more wrong. The design, created by children’s book illustrator Yamashita Kōhei,[2] has turned out to be a runaway success. As I walk across the expo park, I am surrounded by people sporting MYAKU-MYAKU merchandize. Some wear miniature MYAKU-MYAKU in their hair, others don red headbands with eyeballs. Kids run about in eyeball-covered sneakers. Eldritch plush toys are everywhere.
The quirky expo mascot’s success is in many ways illustrative of the event itself. Marred by controversies, the expo has been derided by its critics as a waste of public funding, as an outdated mass event, even as a health and safety risk: the landfill on which the expo territory was built turned out to release potentially explosive levels of methane.[3] Matters were not helped by inter-party vitriol, especially between Osaka’s governor, the populist reformer Yoshimura Hirofumi, and his detractors in the status-quo oriented Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Over-ambitious estimates of early visitor numbers and delays in construction added fuel to the fire, leaving the impression that the event would flop.[4]
And yet, the expo I visited was packed. Pavilions that required reservations had been booked out weeks in advance. Other venues saw the crowds lining up for hours, often in the punishing spring sun. Much like my initial doubts about MYAKU-MYAKU, skepticism of the Expo 2025 may have been misguided. In fact, it seems to have missed an important point: even in a hyperconnected world in which people can travel the globe, such mega-events remain attractive. They may be enmeshed, in complicated ways, with colonialist history, with corporate interests, and with state propaganda efforts,[5] but as it turns out world fairs still have something to offer to 21st-century visitors.
THE WORLD FAIR PLATFORM
As I ascend the walkway of the Dutch pavilion, carrying a sphere that represents my dreams for the future, I arrive at an installation that depicts the waterways and canals of The Netherlands. Together with other visitors, I touch my dream-sphere to the wall, and the digital mural lights up with the rays of a rising sun. ‘The expo is not a theme park,’ says my guide to the pavilion, Dutch Consul General Marc Kuipers, as we move to the central observatory. The roof of the hall comes to life with footage of lowland landscapes, windmills, and waterworks. ‘It’s not an event’, explains Kuipers as the miniature spheres we carry shine with light, and we see their digital equivalents rise into the sky on the gigantic screen above us. ‘It is a platform’. We step into the next room, and into a circle, where we bring together these orbs with other visitors. The spheres start to pulse in unison, capturing the pavilion’s theme of ‘creating a new dawn on common ground’.
The Dutch pavilion is a master class in public diplomacy. Each corner brims with symbolism. Whether it is references to the Tower of the Sun that formed the centre-piece of the 1970 Osaka Expo, or the explanations for children that feature the cute Dutch comic bunny Miffy (a core inspiration for Hello Kitty), every element stresses commonalities between The Netherlands and Japan. And it does all this while promoting a distinctly Dutch vision for the future. That future is shaped by a circular economy, by transnational science cooperation, and by high-tech achievements. It is a vision in which humans live in harmony with nature, but also one in which they have mastered nature – much like Dutch engineers have mastered the power of water.
The Kingdom of the Netherlands is not the only country presenting its vision for a high-tech future at the Expo 2025. Over in the Spanish pavilion, I am likewise treated to a story of ocean and sun. Here, the organisers stress how Spain is connected to Japan through the Kuroshio Ocean Current, and they showcase Spanish innovations, ranging from offshore wind energy to algae-based biofuels and anti-aging pharmaceuticals. Similarly, just next door, the Thai pavilion offers visitors a glimpse into its wellness and health industry. Ancient architectures and hypermodern laboratories, tranquil massage parlors and AI-driven surgical robots, spicy foods and colourful pharmaceuticals… all align here as part of Thailand’s famous hospitality of ‘smiles’.
Meanwhile, at the China pavilion, visitors are invited into an intriguing juxtaposition of past and future, of ancient wisdom and modern advances in science, culture, and technology. The building resembles a gigantic scroll of bamboo strips, each featuring a famous quote from the Chinese classics: ‘In a crowd of three, there must be one who can teach me’, proclaims a Confucian saying; ‘planting trees makes the country rich’, informs a Daoist quote. Once inside, contemporary luminaries of Chinese success greet the visitor: astronauts, aquanauts, and Olympic medalists issue their welcomes alongside a new class of Chinese cultural producers: animators, influencers, videogame designers. Cute pandas are never far away, softening the at times heavy-handed message about a 5000-year continuous Chinese civilisation and its many advances in the present day.
The result is an odd jumble of ideas and messages: in one moment, audiences are shown gorgeous animations and impressive video installations that cycle through both serene and hypermodern impressions of China, in rotating patterns of days, seasons, and years. The next moment, visitors are assured of the gratitude that China’s ethnic minorities hold towards the paternalistic party-state for having lifted them out of poverty. One moment, visitors walk past woodcuts of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, the next they are funneled through rows of plush pandas at the gift shop. It is a vertiginous experience, caught somewhere between tradition and modernity, entertainment and propaganda, collective aspirations and state-sponsored fantasies.
ENVISIONING THE FUTURE THROUGH TECH
Scholars call these collective fantasies ‘imaginaries’,[6] and they stress the role that technology plays as societies imagine their futures.[7] World Fairs like the Expo 2025 provide ideal spaces for studying these ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’, considering how many different actors are explicitly and unapologetically putting their visions on display here. When Thai pavilion curators showcase the future of pharmaceutical innovations or Chinese animation videos present visions of ‘smart cities’, then they are engaged in precisely such sociotechnical imaginations.
A particularly evocative example is currently on display at the expo’s most popular venue: the signature pavilion ‘The Future of Life’, designed by roboticist Ishiguro Hiroshi. Here, visitors are treated to a journey through Ishiguro’s vision for a post-human future: we learn of pre-modern statues and constructs that illustrate early dreams of human-shaped automata. Then, we follow the story of a grandmother who decides to transcend death and remain in the lives of her family by uploading herself into an android. Finally, we witness an android ballet in which humanoid robots from the deep future dance to an almost ecclesiastic hymn, raising their arms high as they are engulfed in beams of light.
I asked Ishiguro about this vision. ‘In the future, the human is going to be a kind of spiritual existence, not a physical one. We’ll want to be free of the constraints of our bodies. And we can play with that’, he explains. Inspired by science fiction series like Star Trek and movies such as Bicentennial Man, Ishiguro envisions a world in which organic and mechanical beings coexist, even merge. Grounded in this understanding, he and his team have been working on household AI assistants, smart urban transportation systems, robotic health and mobility augmentations, and more. To Ishiguro, Japan is an ideal home for these projects. ‘Japan is a small island. It’s not very hierarchical, it’s quite homogenous. It’s like a family. And in our family we don’t distinguish between pets and humans… so we can easily accept robots as well’.
Exhibits such as this illustrate how ambiguous the expo’s sociotechnical imaginaries can be. Radical utopian visions rub shoulders with commercial applications and national tech strategies. In this, they speak back to academic controversies about how to make sense of sociotechnical imaginaries, and of the mega-events that showcase them.
One school of thought stresses how such imaginaries are dominated by powerful actors like nation-states and transnational corporations, and they make the case that the result entrenches the status-quo and normalises all manner of injustices: neo-authoritarian governance, corporate resource extraction, casual exploitation of precarious labour… all are recast in euphoric, celebratory terms and sold back to those who must suffer their consequences. The dark underbelly of our modernity is imagined as an inevitable but ultimately solvable byproduct of human progress. This kind of ‘solutionism’ is popular in Silicon Valley, but it has found ready disciplines across Asia, in everything from tech development to infrastructure planning and digital governance, and in diverse places like Shenzhen, Bangalore, Singapore, or Songdo.[8] In that context, world fairs are merely theme parks that sell visitors a harmful version of capitalist globalisation. Worse, some scholars go as far as to compare events such as these with the ‘simulacrum’: the idea, provocatively advocated by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard,[9] that we live in a perfect simulation of our real world in which extravagant spectacles like Wold Fairs powerfully divorce us from any actual sense of reality.[10] In a world of ‘post-truth’, in which influential politicians and billionaires are able to manipulate reality with abandon, it is hard to argue with such pessimism.
EXPO UTOPIAS
However, as bleak as such assessments may be, matters are not necessarily this straight-forward. Another school of thought stresses that even seemingly monolithic attempts to imagine the future contain spaces for subversion and change. In this view, the oppressive power of social imaginaries are offset by human creativity and our impulse to envision better worlds. Philosopher Paul Ricoeur, for instance, came to the conclusion that while ‘all ideology repeats what exists by justifying it’, utopian imagination offers ‘the fictional power of redescribing life’.[11] The influential cultural-studies scholar Fredric Jameson went as far as to call the spaces in which we imagine alternative futures ‘utopian enclaves’, and he argued that this was where ‘new wish images of the social can be elaborated and experimented on’.[12]
These are no mere abstract, philosophical arguments. When I explored such spaces at a previous World Fair, the Shanghai World Exposition of 2010, I found that all manner of designers, artists, and performers unsettled the often blatantly corporatist and state-led messaging of that mega-event to provide intriguing interventions into what an equitable future might hold.[13] It would be jaded to dismiss such activities as mere window-dressing to domineering modernist ideologies. They can have very real implications, often powerfully so. As anarchist thinker Cornelius Castoriadis pointed out, the radical innovation of direct democracy grew out of ancient Athenian fantasies of a chaotic cosmos, which the political thinkers of Greek antiquity creatively extended to answer the practical questions of how their social world should be governed.[14] As my colleague Yu Haiqing and I have recently stressed, in an introduction to scholarship about how Asian societies imagine artificial intelligence, sociotechnical imaginations can offer ‘valuable guidance for researchers, policymakers, tech developers and entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and community activists worldwide as they envision, design, and implement tech for development or tech for good initiatives’.[15]
Indeed, the Expo 2025 leaves plenty of room for the imagination. A moment that drove this home for me, was the official opening of Singapore’s pavilion. Granted, the Singaporean exhibits are steeped in official rhetoric about the ‘smart nation’. The animation videos and art installations showcase solutionist visions of success, in which state and corporate initiatives realize everything from green living to AI-optimized social governance. But these visions also invite visitors to write down their own dreams for the future. Echoing the floating dreams of the Dutch pavilion, these visitor comments then float to the ceiling of the pavilion’s gigantic red ‘dream sphere’, where they mingle with cute animations of utopian cityscapes. Calls for world peace float alongside someone’s hopes for environmental sustainability and an impromptu sketch of a happy family. There is space for creativity here, and visitors take this creativity in all manner of idiosyncratic directions.
CONCLUSION
The grand opening of Singapore’s pavilion culminates in a performance: the a capella group The Island Voices launch into renditions of popular songs about acceptance and belonging, including an almost tearful take on Christina Aguilera’s self-help anthem Beautiful. Their message about confidence and friendship would not be out of place in a Disney movie. Indeed, cynics might call the performance perfect PR: the group arguably embodies everything the Singaporean government wants the world to associate with the city nation: ethnically diverse, young and dynamic, harmonious and enthusiastic. This is the perfect promise of neoliberal globalization.
And yet, there is more on display here than rhetoric: the choice of entertainment ties in with one particular vision of Singapore, and it spells out a commitment to the values that this vision implies, including ideas about cross-cultural understanding, racial and sexual diversity, and transnational cooperation. Those values are also on display at other pavilions, from Europe to Asia. They are visible across the expo themes and the event’s many activities, including those that ask how we might ‘realize a world where discrimination is eliminated and people respect each other’.[16] They are even visible in the way the US pavilion prompts visitors to imagine ‘what we can create together’, through exchanges in art, culture, and science – a message that was clearly composed before the Trump administration did away with commitments to diversity and inclusion, not to mention scientific fact.
This, then, is where the Expo 2025 unfolds its greatest potential: in a commitment to a cosmopolitan, international society that stands for cooperation and mutual respect. This is a commitment that has come increasingly under attack. Some at the expo allude to this tectonic shift and its devastating consequences. Japan’s prime minister, Ishiba Shigeru, stressed in his expo opening address how our world ‘now finds itself facing a crisis of various kinds of division’.[17] Singapore’s ambassador Ong Eng Chuan opened his pavilion with a similar warning about the risk of division in the world. Others are even more explicit. Dutch Consul General Kuipers does not mince words as he explains the importance of the expo. In a world gone made, so Kuipers, this Disneyland-like fantasy place has by comparison become a veritable haven of normalcy.
No doubt, world fairs have always been an amalgamation of public relations efforts that involve governments, corporations, marketing teams, and tech visionaries. It is understandable that the results have provoked no small amount of criticism, not just because of the costs that these extravagant events pose. And yet, amidst the corporate PR and state propaganda, world fairs provide space for creative reimagining that do not easily collapse into a single, overarching story of hyper-capitalist modernity. They are utopian enclaves that showcase diverse dreams about the future. In this, such mega-events are also a provocation: what should our future look like? Maybe the designers of Expo 2025 mascot MYAKU-MYAKU have it right after all. The blue-and-red blob is meant to be a fluid amalgamation of cells and water, ‘transforming into various forms in search of who it wants to be’. That is its promise, and it is also the promise that this mega-event makes about our future. And in times such as these, which can leave anyone despondent about humanity’s future, creating spaces for such imaginations is no mean feat.
NOTES
[1] Expo (2025a), Official Character. https://www.expo2025.or.jp/en/overview/character/
[2] This article follows the naming convention of listing Japanese surnames first.
[3] Yomiuri Shimbun (2025, April 8), ‘Dangerously High Level of Methane Detected at Osaka-Kansai Expo’. https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/society/general-news/20250408-247637/
[4] Ryall, Julian (2025, Feb 7), ‘Osaka Expo’s ticket sales flop: will Japan’s futuristic fair be a financial failure?’ South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3297701/osaka-expos-ticket-sales-flop-will-japans-futuristic-fair-be-financial-failure
[5] Roche, Maurice (2003), Mega-Events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture. Routledge.
[6] Adams, Suzi, Blokker, Doyle, Natalie J., Krummel, John W.M., & Smith, Jeremy C.A. (2009), ‘Social Imaginaries in Debate’. Social Imaginaries, 1(1), 15–52. Retrieved 20 May 2025 from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277681248_Social_Imaginaries_in_Debate.
[7] Jasanoff, Sheila (2015), ‘Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity’. In Jasanoff, Sheila & Kim, Sang-Hyun (Eds.), Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press (pp. 1–33).
[8] e.g. Shin, Hyun Bang (2017), ‘Envisioned by the State: Entrepreneurial Urbanism and the Making of Songdo City, South Korea’. In Ayona Datta & Abdul Shaban (Eds.), Mega-Urbanization in the Global South: Fast Cities and New Urban Utopias of the Postcolonial State. Routledge. Retrieved 20 May 2025 from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267155807_Envisioned_by_the_state_Entrepreneurial_urbanism_and_the_making_of_Songdo_City_South_Korea
[9] Baudrillard, Jean (1983), Simulations. Semiotext(e).
[10] Nordin, Astrid H.M. (2012b), ‘Taking Baudrillard to the Fair: Exhibiting China in the World at the Shanghai Expo’. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 37, 106-120.
[11] Ricoeur, Paul (1986), Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. Columbia University Press (pp.309-310).
[12] Jameson, Frederic (2005), Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso (p.16).
[13] Schneider, Florian (2019), Staging China: The Politics of Mass Spectacle. Leiden University Press. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22493
[14] Castoriadis, Cornelius (1996/2007), ‘Imaginaries and Imagination at the Crossroads’. In: Figures of the Thinkable. Stanford University Press (pp.71–87).
[15] Schneider, Florian & Yu, Haiqing (2025), ‘AI Imaginaries in Asia – An Introduction’. Asiascape: Digital Asia, 12(1/2).
[16] Expo (2025b), Theme Weeks. https://www.expo2025.or.jp/en/sponsorship/theme-weeks/
[17] Prime Minister’s Office of Japan (2025, April 11), https://japan.kantei.go.jp/103/statement/202504/12aisatu.html
REFERENCES
Adams, Suzi, Blokker, Doyle, Natalie J., Krummel, John W.M., & Smith, Jeremy C.A. (2009), ‘Social Imaginaries in Debate’. Social Imaginaries, 1(1), 15–52. Retrieved 20 May 2025 from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277681248_Social_Imaginaries_in_Debate.
Baudrillard, Jean (1983), Simulations. Semiotext(e).
Castoriadis, Cornelius (1996/2007), ‘Imaginaries and Imagination at the Crossroads’. In: Figures of the Thinkable. Stanford University Press (pp.71–87).
Expo (2025a), Official Character. https://www.expo2025.or.jp/en/overview/character/
Expo (2025b), Theme Weeks. https://www.expo2025.or.jp/en/sponsorship/theme-weeks/
Jameson, Frederic (2005), Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso.
Jasanoff, Sheila (2015), ‘Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity’. In Jasanoff, Sheila & Kim, Sang-Hyun (Eds.), Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press (pp. 1–33).
Nordin, Astrid H.M. (2012b), ‘Taking Baudrillard to the Fair: Exhibiting China in the World at the Shanghai Expo’. Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 37, 106- 120.
Ricoeur, Paul (1986), Lectures on ideology and Utopia. Columbia University Press
Roche, Maurice (2003), Mega-Events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture. Routledge.
Ryall, Julian (2025, Feb 7), ‘Osaka Expo’s ticket sales flop: will Japan’s futuristic fair be a financial failure?’ South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3297701/osaka-expos-ticket-sales-flop-will-japans-futuristic-fair-be-financial-failure
Schneider, Florian (2019), Staging China: The Politics of Mass Spectacle. Leiden University Press. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22493
Schneider, Florian & Yu, Haiqing (2025), ‘AI Imaginaries in Asia – An Introduction’. Asiascape: Digital Asia, 12(1/2).
Shin, Hyun Bang (2017), ‘Envisioned by the State: Entrepreneurial Urbanism and the Making of Songdo City, South Korea’. In Ayona Datta & Abdul Shaban (Eds.), Mega-Urbanization in the Global South: Fast Cities and New Urban Utopias of the Postcolonial State. Routledge. Retrieved 20 May 2025 from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267155807_Envisioned_by_the_state_Entrepreneurial_urbanism_and_the_making_of_Songdo_City_South_Korea
Yomiuri Shimbun (2025, April 8), ‘Dangerously High Level of Methane Detected at Osaka-Kansai Expo’. https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/society/general-news/20250408-247637/
