The Expo 2025 World Fair is being held in Osaka this year, and since that isn’t too far from Tokyo, we bought tickets a few months back. We don’t do a lot of domestic travel, and certainly not road trips, so we thought it would be fun to drive from Tokyo to Osaka and visit the World’s Fair. It’s about a six hour drive from Tokyo to Osaka, so not too bad.

Lisa thought it would be fun to take the Isewan Ferry from Irigao to Toba, and then go to the Toba Aquarium, which is the only place in Japan that has a particular type of Sea Otter from America.

The first leg of the trip is to drive down to Irigo Ferry Terminal. We left early on Wednesday morning to avoid traffic. We actually were in the car and on the road at 5am. By about 10am we reached the ferry terminal.

After getting on the Ferry we settled in for the hour or so ferry trip. It was a bit rough for me, but I took some dramamine so managed to get through it.

We got off on the other side in Mie prefecture, and had lunch before heading to the aquarium. Once there, we waited in a long line (about an hour?) to see the Sea Otter, and then walked around checking out the various fish. We ended with the Walrus show, where Surara the Walrus did some tricks and entertained people. It was fun, and Momo got to pet her. She was huge.

After spending a few hours at the Aquarium we got back in the car and drove on all the way to Osaka. We stayed at the Hiyori Hotel at Suminoe Koen. It’s a nice hotel that has tatami-style rooms with two beds, and under each bed is a pull-out futon, so we had a bed for each person! That was great. It was a clean and spacious room, I liked it a lot. Lisa chose that hotel because the building it is in, Oscar Dream, a building opened 30 years ago, is connected to the New Tram line which can get us to the Osaka World Fair grounds in one transfer.

I was curious about the Oscar Dream building. It was opened in 1995 and is owned by the Osaka Municipal Transit Bureau as an urban development project. The New Tram is an automated elevated line built to get people to a Ferry and a housing complex. It’s a small driverless tram, and was pretty nice. We road it all the way to the end of the line, and then transfer at Cosmo Station for one stop on the Chuo line to get to Yumeshima, an artificial island where the fair will be held.

Once we checked into the hotel, we went to a local Okonomiyaki place for dinner, which was nice. I don’t know enough to be able to tell you the difference between what we ate there in Osaka, and what we would be able to eat in Tokyo, but Lisa assures me there are differences.

Thursday, August 7th at the Worlds Fair 2025 Expo

On Thursday morning it was raining. One thing I was worried about was the sun and the heat. It is hot, and it is humid. So I was prepared for things to be brutal. The rain provided nice cover from the sun, and kept things much cooler than they would have been otherwise.

We had tickets for 9am, and arrived at about 8:20am, so had a while to wait.

Lisa took the lead on planning for this trip, and did a great job. We had 9am entry into the Sumitomo Pavilion, which had a theme of “The Unknown Forest”.

You got a magic lantern, and we walked around a forest that you could use the lantern to interact with. It was really fun to find interactive spots, and see what would happen. After a set amount of time, you were led into a large theater and watched a video about the forest. It was quite nice!

Afterwards, we walked around and did not have concrete plans. I really like the Grand Ring, and took a lot of photos. Here we are walking under it, and the shade it provides was critical.

We saw that there was a short line at the Azerbaijan pavilion, so we went through there. I like that we can visit countries that I know nothing about, it’s a great opportunity to learn about new places!

There was a pavilion showing off a traditional Japanese lacquer process massive globe. They have a nice description of the exhibit here. I also liked the large gold-leaf maps they had of New York, Tokyo, Beijing, and London.

We took a bit of a walk up on the Grand Ring. I wish we had enough time to do a full circle, but we kept ourselves super busy, and I was sure that Momo would not be up for all that walking. Alan could have done it with me though.

We were able to get a reservation for the NTT “Parallel Travel” pavilion, so we headed there next. NTT always does amazing stuff – they have a large research center, similar to how AT&T has Bell Labs. This exhibit has some nice computational power behind it with everyone’s picture mapped onto dancing and singing models. There was also an amazing 3-d movie of Perfume performing a show that was recoded on the stage there, with their feet movements replicated under the floor so you could feel them moving around! It reminded me of Perfume’s 2017 performance where they used NTT’s communication technology to perform with each person in a different city, New York, London, and Tokyo called “Future Experiment”.

We also introduced our kids to the concept of “Pay Phones” from the ancient past.

There was lots of neat stuff around the NTT pavilion area, including some neat musical tones you could make by striking some cables that were around the area.

We went for a walk towards the Netherlands Pavilion since we had a reservation there next. On the way, we ran across an area that had large misters go off every fifteen minutes. It got super misty and you couldn’t see inside there at all. The kids got drenched and enjoyed it. If there hadn’t been cloud cover, I probably would have gone in myself. The rain had stopped at about 10am, so it was really starting to warm up.

It was nice, they was a lot there about how the Netherlands collaborates with the water. On the way out from the cafe I got myself a decaf latte, and ice cream with Stroupewaffle. Momo got the same Stroupewaffle and Ice Cream, while Lisa and Alan each had a Stroupewaffle. It was nice! We keep getting little small samples of (expensive) food every time it seems reasonable to do so.

We waited for about an hour under the Grand Ring for the nearby Bulgaria Pavilion. They said we could come back at 6pm for their English tour that is usually pretty empty, but we figured it would be ok to sit for a while (we had small chairs for the kids, and there were benches we could use under the Grand Ring). They talked a lot about Yogurt there, which makes sense since that is the most famous yogurt in Japan!

We decided to go to the American pavilion for their English session, which was at I think 5pm, since we should be able to get there without waiting much. On the way we stopped at a couple of places, there was a building with a kind of “Play” convention, but the big draw for me is that it was air conditioned inside. We stopped at the restroom and wandered around a bit. They had speakers and chairs in one section which I was tempted to use, but we moved on to other pavilions. We stopped at the Senegal pavilion because of our Senegalese artist friend Amadou, and went through a Common building (air conditioned!) that had a whole bunch of countries as well.

In the common building (there are a bunch of common buildings) I stopped by the Dominican Republic, partly to see if they had something about MenaRD, the super strong Street Fighter player. They didn’t – mostly baseball and other sports – but it was nice to check out. I’d love to visit some day.

Continuing on our walk, we cut through the landscaped park in the middle of the venue. It was nice. Walking through trees really does a lot to cut the heat. I haven’t been writing about it much, but it was very hot. Not as brutal as I expected, but very hot.

We then lined up at the America Pavilion. The wait for the normal line was 120 minutes or so. We lined up for the 5pm English show at 4:40pm, and had no trouble getting in. That was a win. I think if you know English, you should check when each pavilion has an English show, and if they do, go for that. It could save you a lot of time on line.

The America Pavilion was nice, and had a lot of stuff about space and science. That is awesome, I love space and science. Kind of sucks that the current administration halved NASA’s budget just days before this, putting their entire existence at risk, and other parts of the government has been systematically dismantling other science programs. Ironic, really.

We listened to a nice jazz duo for a while, and then headed over to the Malaysia Pavilion cafe to get something to snack on. Pineapple juice, a Mango smoothie, and Roti. The Roti was very good, probably the best thing we ate.

We decided to finish off the day at the German Restaurant.

We had a variety of sausages and beer. It was nice.

On the way out we just barely caught the end of some fireworks over the top of the German Pavilion. If we had been a bit earlier we could have walked up around that building and caught the whole show. You have to really plan things!

What really shocked me is that on the way out I heard Yun and Yang’s theme from Street Fighter Three on harmonica and piano by the duo that was performing. Crazy.

I got a few nice shots of the moon, and we decided to use the restrooms that were up on the third floor of the Grand Ring.

Here I am with a friend of the family that works the NTT Pavilion. It was quite pretty at night!

We headed home after an exhausting day, and slept well. It was a fun day, even with the heat and waiting in line. We got a chance to see a bunch of different countries that we don’t know much about, and experienced some fun Pavilions. NTT and Sumitomo in particular stand out. I really liked the Grand Ring and some of the other interesting architecture in the area, I wish I had more time to walk around the ring and check out everything, but one day is definitely tiring enough that I’m glad we just did one.

Friday, August 8th

While we had planned to have a relaxing trip back, at the last minute we decided to visit the family grave at Konkai Koumyouji Temple （金戒光明寺） at the Kurodani temple complex. That’s over in Kyoto so we would have to drive there first.

We also wanted to get some Cheesecake at the recently popular りくろーおじいさん (Rikuro- Grandpa) shop. Of course, when I saw this name of the shop, all I could think about is this. We had to wait about 30 minutes for them to bake the cakes, but we did get them, and then headed out to Kyoto. We got stuck in some pretty heavy traffic going through Osaka, but made it to the temple at about noon.

I vaguely remembered where the grave was, and we did find them. We just washed the main grave off, and paid our respects before moving on.

A few more hours of driving, and we stopped at Hamamatsu for an Unagi dinner. They had rare Unagi Sashima, which was nice. The Unagi itself was very good. We got home at about 9:30 after hitting the inevitable traffic heading into Tokyo to close out our trip.

The trip was a lot of fun. We need to do more domestic travel, and a Japan-based road trip is fun every once in a while. We also do a lot of driving in America, but very little in Japan.

The Osaka Expo was nice, and I’m glad we had some rain to cool it down. You do need to be prepared for lines and heat though. Still, that’s a fairly accurate description of any popular attraction in Japan in the summer.