2025 Expo Osaka: Opening Ceremony Held; Imperial Couple Attend Event

The Yomiuri Shimbun

15:54 JST, April 12, 2025

OSAKA — The opening ceremony of the 2025 Osaka-Kansai Expo was held Saturday at its venue on the artificial island of Yumeshima in Osaka Bay. The Expo is scheduled to run for six months from Sunday through Oct. 13.

The Emperor and Empress, as well as Crown Prince Akishino, who serves as honorary president of the event, and Crown Princess Kiko attended the ceremony, joined by Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and about 1,500 people, including representatives of participating countries and regions.

“We will offer a platform where people from around the world can engage in dialogue and communication, and from here, we will show the world a vision of a new Japan,” Ishiba said at the ceremony.

The Expo, with the theme “Designing Future Society for Our Lives,” will have 158 countries and regions, and seven international organizations, including the United Nations, taking part. This is the third large-scale World Expo held in Japan, following the 1970 Osaka Expo and the 2005 Aichi Expo.

The ceremony held at the Shining Hat, a large hall with a golden roof, featured various shows, including a kabuki act by Onoe Kikunosuke and a performance by the Japan Century Symphony Orchestra and other orchestras with conductor Yutaka Sado. Japanese pop duo Kobukuro sang the event’s official theme song “Kono Hoshi no Tsuzuki wo.”

700 trees from 1970 Expo site

About 700 of the about 1,500 trees in the Forest of Tranquility Zone were transplanted from the Expo ’70 Commemorative Park, the former site of the 1970 Expo, in Suita, Osaka Prefecture.

The zone is in the central part of the Yumeshima venue in Osaka City.

The about 2.3-hectare forest was designed to be a place where visitors can rest or walk around to get away from the hustle and bustle of the busy areas of the venue.

The 1970 venue was built on a plot of land that had previously been a bamboo grove, which was cleared to house 116 pavilions for the event. The commemorative association for the 1970 Expo drew up a basic plan to turn the site into a cultural park surrounded by greenery after the event ended in October 1972.

Funded by the central and Osaka prefectural governments, the organization hoped to help curb the destruction of nature caused by urbanization amid worsening pollution at that time.

With about 260 species of plants and about 600,000 trees planted, the park had grown into a thick forest by around 2000. More than 100 species of wild birds, insects and freshwater fish inhabit the park. Foxes can often be spotted in the park as well, a rare sighting in an urban area.

The Osaka prefectural and Osaka city governments hope to preserve the transplanted trees and plan to utilize them on the site after the event ends