Tokyo: Day 6: World Expo 2005, Aichi

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Dad found out about World Expo by chance when reading his Reader’s Digest so all credit goes to him for suggesting this wonderful day out. At first the cost seemed to be exorbitant but JTB Sunrise came to the rescue again with an excellent one day package that included transport to and from the Expo plus one-day tickets.

Getting to Expo was relatively straight-forward (once we worked out what our tickets meant!) Firstly a shinkansen (bullet train) from Tokyo to Nagoya. From Nagoya we had the option of a a relatively tame bus transfer to the Expo, or a train to connect to another station which takes you on a new technology: the maglev which uses magnetic levitation to move the train. Kind of reminds me of the technology portrayed in Astroboy – you know where cars are floating in air. Bullet trains are a heap of fun and I’m not sure if it’s the speed at which they travel (up to 300km/hour) but the ride was so smooth that I kept nodding off to sleep.

One day at the Expo wasn’t nearly enough time to fully explore all the exhibitions, especially when you spend a lot of time either queuing in line or queuing in line for the privilege of queuing in line at a later stage! Welcome to Expo. I think the timing of our visit was fairly good with only about 80,000 visitors a day at that stage. Now (about three weeks later) numbers are up to about 145,000 visitors a day.

The theme of this expo was “Nature’s Theme” therefore many of the exhibits and pavilions were about the environment and related technologies.

We visited many of the Corporate Pavilions including the:

  • Wonder Circus-Electric Power Pavilion. Highlight was a relatively sedate electric-car ride through scenes that express “Earth, Humanity, and Dreams—What a Wonderful World,” the final scene being a photolog of our photos taken as we sat in the car.
  • JR Central Pavilion where we experienced a test run on the Yamanashi Linear Test Line (a superconducting linear motor car, that is, a train moved by superconducting magnets) via a 3-D film. Good for a little while but very repetitive.
  • Mitsubishi Pavilion @Earth. Here we were guided by a robot attendant, Wakamaru, though the question of “What If the Moon Didn’t Exist?” before we sat down to the world’s first infinite video space – which basically means a technology which gives the impression that the theatre is limitless.
  • Gas Pavilion. Live entertainment with fire and finally the
  • Toyota Group Pavilion. We weren’t actually sure what this pavilion was offering and when we saw the line for entry we didn’t think we would get through it in time (that is, by the time the park closed) so we had almost given up. What we didn’t realise was that the line we were looking at was the line for entry to the show at a particular time – you would line up for tickets and then return at a specified time to line up again. Exactly where Dad and Mum were waiting for us to work out what was going on a new line was started for the following show so we thought we might as well sit and wait it out. Two hours later we had tickets in our hand to come back at a specified time to line up again for another hour to get in. Was it worth it? Well, it was a performance that showcased the latest in their robot and concept car technology, It was okay but with a lot performances we’d seen up to this point seemingly repetitive.

    • Its blushingOne of the more interesting, and interactive, areas was the Robot Station in the aptly named Interactive Fun Zone. A number of robots were showcased here including one very life-like female robot that followed your movement, cleaning robots, security robots and Papero a prototype of a personal robot that communicates with humans. The one on display was the Papero Childcare Robot.

    Because we were so busy lining up for the corporate pavilions we nearly missed the country pavilions but managed to squeeze in a visit to the Philippine pavilion and the rather impressive Australian pavilion.