8 - EXPO ’70 at Osaka: A British View

Summary

INTRODUCTORY NOTE BY HUGH CORTAZZI

I GAVE A brief account of British participation in EXPO ‘70 in my biographical portrait of Sir John Figgess, the British Commissioner for the Expo, in Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, Volume III, edited by J.E. Hoare, Japan Library, 1999. Some reminiscences of ladies, who helped in the British pavilion, (Lesley Connor, Lydia Gomersall, Janet Hunter and Anne Kaneko), and of Peter Martin, who was British Council representative in Kyoto at the time, were included in Japan Experiences, Fifty Years, One Hundred Views, Post- War Japan through British Eyes, edited and compiled by me, Japan Library, 2001. The account, which Sir John Pilcher sent to Michael Stewart, the Foreign Secretary, in a despatch of March 1970, is reproduced below. It is perceptive and amusing and deserves to be preserved for posterity.

Sir, 26 March 1970

OSAKA EXPO ‘70: A FIRST IMPRESSION

I have the honour to record that the International Exhibition at Osaka, known as ‘Expo ‘70’, duly opened its doors on the gusty, snowy morning of Saturday, the 14th of March, 1970.

• 2. Its motto is ‘progress’ and ‘harmony’. The sententious, of whom there are many in Japan, maintain that this means the marriage of occidental progress with the oriental concept of harmony and are deducing great principles therefrom. To treat it thus, I submit, is to fall into the Germanic error of reading transcendental truths into Mozart's ‘Magic Flute’ and of failing to recognize in it the inconsequential Viennese pantomime transformed by genius. This is basically a fun fair with touches of near genius.

• 3. From what I have so far been able to see, if there is progress to record at Expo ‘70, it may perhaps be in the happy direction of humour. It forces the question: can it be that the Japanese are at last beginning to be able to laugh at themselves? That would indeed be progress and at a timely moment when their economic might is about to burst upon the world.

• 4. If there is any harmony to be descried, it seems to me to be found, not in any Confucian sense, but in its very reverse: namely in the remarkably high level of insanity, shown by all the best exhibitors.