Notes on Japan

This is a 5 part series. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out part 1.

Continuing our tour of Aichi Expo, we considered a stop at the Japanese pavilion. From the gourd shaped road looping the expo, you could look down on the Japanese pavilion. In fact, many people were doing just that. Maybe there were three or four hundred of them leaning up against the railing, watching the pavilion’s back entrance.

Lemming-like, I joined them, but noticed nothing interesting. Asking one of those already there revealed that Crown Prince Naruhito was expected to arrive soon.

I thought the Prince’s appearance might have contributed to the huge number of people who were attending the expo on a Monday. Checking the expo’s official site, I would later learn that my chosen Monday had seen 139,001 visitors. But for comparison, this weeks Monday had 129,835 visitors. I guess the expo was just getting more visitors than it was designed to handle, Prince or no Prince.

With the Prince about to visit the Japan pavilion, we bet on finding more tolerable lines at other countries, and went about seeing a bit of the Americas and Asia. We also fit in a detour down a forest path.

The forest path was a wonderful break from the crowds. There was barely anyone on it. There were several art displays along the path, some of which were so small or subtle as to be easily missed if you were walking too quickly. There were colorful mushroom sculptures, rocks painted like hamsters, all the way up to small fields of ping-pong ball like, man-made flowers.

The ball flowers weren’t really ping-pong balls, but were made of some fibrous, absorbent material. The balls sat atop thin stalks that were flexible enough to let the balls sway in the wind. A sign explained that when it rained, the balls would absorb water, become heavy, and bend their stalks down like drooping flowers.

The forest path brought us close to the Americas, where I was curious to see what my own country had put together for the expo. The US erected mere tents for the 1992 world’s fair in Seville. It had been a complete no-show at Hannover in 2000, after congress prohibited funding for participation in world’s fairs. Check out Fred Bernstein’s article on how the US is reentering the world’s fair scene. The short answer is sponsors.

Also worth a look is the official US pavilion site. Click over to the sponsors page, and you will find a few surprises. American corporations certainly contributed a lot, but many Japanese companies also helped us get there, as well as non-profit organizations. The Audubon Society was a big donor. Even the Chunichi Dragons, Nagoya’s baseball team, was a donor.

The US pavilion was a three room affair. The first two showed movies with an extra trick or two. You got a brief biography of Benjamin Franklin, and then Franklin time traveled to the present and shared his observations on present day society. Ok, maybe his observations were portrayed as a little more upbeat than my own, but he did deliver a straightforward endorsement of alternate energy sources. The third room showed off a few history making tech achievements and a couple new inventions. They even had a couple pavilion workers zipping around on Segways. On the whole, I was pretty happy with the pavilion.

To be continued.