Every five years, leaders, inventors, and innovators converge at the World Expo, an international gathering pursuing progress across culture and technology. On April 13, the Expo’s newest iteration will take place on Yumeshima (lit. Island of Dreams), an artificial island located in Osaka Bay. An array of pavilions and displays from Japanese firms, foreign nations, and international organizations, each its own elaborate work of architectural mastery, will reveal cutting-edge tech of all colors and stripes.  

Osaka Expo’s theme, “Designing Future Society for Our Lives”, is mirrored in its construction. For the 184 days of the Expo, the entire event will transpire inside the Grand Ring, a gigantic wooden circle offering a 360°, panoramic pathway around the bay, replete with green spaces and rest areas. Paths between pavilions will be conjoined like the organelles of a living cell, circulating a projected 28 million visitors between the installations. Personifying this flow is Myaku-Myaku, Osaka Expo’s amorphous, watery mascot, whose head is maned by a lumpy, red ring of eyes. Its name means, “Pulse, Pulse,” and its head—like an outwards burst of red atop a drop of water—resembles the interacting particles of a single cell, pulsing in unison.

Breakthrough invention has been the subject of the World Expos for as long as they’ve existed, and Osaka Expo 2025 will be no exception. 161 countries and nine organizations—including Red Cross and the UN—are set to participate alongside the pavilions of Japanese artists creating living, breathing exhibitions of light, water, and sound. Orchestras, light shows, and constant events unfurling all over the ring are set to underscore the reveal of advances in green tech, sustainability, space, mobility, and countless other technological fields that mark our global path to progress, hand in hand, fingers on the pulse.