Nature at Aichi World's Expo 2005
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPI have good memories of Expo '67. My family drove to Montreal from the suburbs of Chicago, pitched a tent in a field with thousands of other visitors, and spent several days wandering the fairgrounds marveling at it all—the great cinematic 3-D effects, the enormous Bucky Fuller dome, Moshe Safdie's Habitat. Canada's paper industry fed us propaganda that I happily swallowed (I'll never forget that hornets' nests are a miraculous form of paper found in nature, but I can't quite remember the song). When I got home I told my fellow fourth graders of the wonders I had seen.
Today, no one needs to drive hundreds of miles to glimpse a global high-tech future, which leads to a question: Is there still any point to world's fairs? Clearly the formula has become strained. As the collapse of colonialism has been followed by the slower collapse of a colonialist attitude toward nature, heavy-handed displays of technological might, industrial abundance, and national ingenuity have given way to the less dramatic themes of environmentalism and global cooperation.
I paid a brief visit to Aichi World Expo in Japan in June 2005 to see how nations and corporations would shape the new message of environmental unity. I brought along my then eight-year-old son, hoping he would be as dazzled as I had been as a child in Montreal. I came away mildly impressed. My son enjoyed himself but afterward told me he preferred water parks.
Forest Grandfather and Forest Child Will Guide Us
A world's fair theme or slogan must please multiple users, corporate and otherwise. Aichi Expo chose "nature's wisdom" as its main theme, with "nature's matrix," "the art of life," and "development for ecocommunities" as subthemes. This cluster allowed exhibitors to ignore ecology if they [End Page 575] wished and to offer up instead national culture, vague ideas of progress, and celebrations of breakthrough technologies.
The malleability of Aichi's slogans makes them difficult to assess. Alan Bryman, in his study of Disneyland as a sourcebook for global consum-erism, points out that theming involves "clothing institutions or objects in a narrative that is largely unrelated to the institution or object to which it is applied, such as a casino or restaurant with a Wild West narrative."1 Determining to what extent world's fairs as institutions relate to such unifying themes as "progress and modernity" or "environmentalism," a newer favorite on Bryman's lists—that is, distinguishing them from mere theme parks—requires murky moral calculations. It is not easy to isolate monolithic intention in a production with myriad authors—including the fairgoers.
As Aichi was being planned for the hillsides outside Nagoya, near Toyota headquarters, environmentalism may have been at first a theme of convenience, a form of camouflage. But in 1999 local environmentalists noted that the construction plans for one large wooded hill—the Seto area of the expo—would disrupt goshawk nesting sites and destroy much of the woodland and old farm plots. Protests followed, and in response new plans were drawn up that minimized development in Seto and transferred the bulk of the fair to the adjoining Nagakute site, which had already been lightly developed as a "youth park." The protected Seto site would feature crafts and outdoor activities such as guided tree-climbing. Far from the goshawk nests, Nagakute would be dedicated to corporate and national pavilions.
To its credit, this was not a development that erased the landscape. The Aichi Expo grounds were written lightly onto the hills, although not organically interwoven with them. Nagakute mixed humble nature vistas with fairly humble architecture. To borrow Robert Venturi's binomial scheme for classifying architectural forms—the "decorated shed," a functionalist building with embellishments, and the "duck," a structure of highly symbolic outer form—Aichi was loaded with sheds but featured only a few scattered ducks.2 Aichi's decorated sheds, it...
