Ireland day 1320. Saturday 10 May 2025- Osaka 2

Today’s summary	Woke early again and went for breakfast at 6:30am. After a leisurely meal, caught the underground train to the World Expo Osaka 2025 site. Lots of queuing but the elevated wooden Grand Ring was impressive. Looked round a couple of smaller pavilions but the queues were too long for the bigger ones. Left at about 3:30pm and returned on the Underground to go to the Museum of Modern Art. An impressive building but the display was limited and not very interesting. Left on foot, got take-away dinner from a Family Mart corner store en route then returned to the hotel and went for a swim
Today’s weather	Heavily overcast and quite windy in the morning, but dry. Sun came out later in the afternoon. South westerly wind. Appx 18c

Today’s overview location (The blue mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The blue line shows where we walked) [the circular Grand Ring shows clearly on the route] (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Expo 2025 Osaka

Commentary

Every now and then a World Expo is held, where countries come together to sell themselves to the world. As luck would have it, this year it’s in Osaka. So, of course, we decided to pay a visit while we were in Japan. And today was the day we chose to do it.

Jet lag once again secured an early awakening, so there we were, down at breakfast as soon as the restaurant opened at 6:30 am. We had booked tickets for the Expo last night, but the 9am entry slot was full so we were in the 10am cohort instead. That meant that we had plenty of time for breakfast.

Anyway, eventually we couldn’t spin breakfast out any longer, so we packed our things and made our way to the Expo site. It’s on an artificial island about half an hour away and we got there via the Yotsubashi and Chuo Underground lines. The first thing we noticed when we arrived at about 9am was the massive crowd. There was absolutely no chance we might be able to join the 9am entry, so we were directed to a large holding pen where we we waited for 75 minutes until we were finally admitted through security.

In fact crowds and queues were the theme of the day. There are dozens – if not hundreds – of country-pavilions and all of them had long queues waiting to pay a visit. The more popular ones were posting waits of up to 2 hours. So rather than spend yet more time in line, we opted to have quick look at come of the smaller ones (learning about lychee production in Mozambique was fascinating) and to have a good look at the communal areas of the site. The Forest of Tranquillity in the middle was particularly well done.

But by far the highlight of the visit was the Grand Ring – a huge elevated circular walkway, 2km around, which encircles the whole site. It’s very impressive and in fact is said to be the largest wooden structure in the world. We very much enjoyed circumnavigating it.

By about 3:30, we had seen as much as we could without investing most of the rest of the afternoon in queueing, so we decided to leave and head back downtown. Our destination was the National Museum of Art, which came highly recommended in our guide book. It actually turned out to be located on the same island in the river as the rose garden we visited yesterday. En route we found a western-style coffee shop where we dropped in for a very welcome cup of tea.

The Art museum is in a fabulous building – very spectacular and worth visiting just for the architecture. But the art itself was a bit disappointing – all obscure artists and a bit miserable. Also there weren’t many exhibits. We were glad we had only paid ¥400 (€3 / £2) to get in. Needless to say, we didn’t stay long at the gallery. From there back to our hotel (the Hilton Osaka) was only about a 15 minute walk, which left us with a good long evening, even after we had stopped off at a Family Mart corner store to pick up some sushi for dinner.

Once back in our room, we had a cup of tea then decided to make use of the hotel’s swimming pool and sauna. We had the whole facility pretty much to ourselves, so it was a delightful way to relax after our day sightseeing.

The rest of the evening was spent enjoying a beer, and finishing off our sushi. All in all, it was another great day, spent pushing the boundaries of our experience even further into new and unknown territory.

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Just arrived at the Expo, after a 75 minute queue to get in	High up on the Grand Ring. A superb lofty elevated walkway, with views over Osaka Port

The UK pavilion. It was quite tastefully done, and designed to be easily disassembled so it can be transported and re-used somewhere else	The Irish pavilion, as seen from the Grand Ring walkway

The National Museum of Art. The steel things sticking out of the top are supposed to represent the strength and flexibility of bamboo	Inside the Museum. An impressive installation though even after reading the description, neither of us was sure what it actually was. But most of the exhibits seemed to feature misery and suffering, so this was probably something on a similar theme

Underneath the Expo Grand Ring. It’s 2km round, and the largest wooden structure in the world