News in Easy English: Man uses 85-year-old expo ticket to visit Expo Osaka
OSAKA -- A man had a very old ticket from an event 85 years ago. He used it to visit the new Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai, on May 5. The ticket was for an earlier expo planned for Tokyo in 1940. But that expo did not happen because of war.
The 1940 event was called the "2600 Japan International Exposition." People call it the "phantom expo" because it never really took place. Many tickets were not used. Later, people could use these tickets at other expos, like the 1970 Osaka Expo.
The man with the old ticket is Fumiya Takenawa, 25, from Tokyo. He was visiting his parents in Osaka Prefecture. He likes the "Tower of the Sun," the famous building from Osaka's 1970 Expo. He collects things from old expos. In March, he found and bought an old 1940 expo ticket online. He first put it in his home as a decoration. Then he wondered if he could use the old ticket for Expo 2025. He asked the expo organizers, and they said yes, he could use it if it was a real ticket.
Takenawa was happy. He said, "This is my first expo, and I feel part of history. Expos help people come together in peace. The person who had this ticket before me waited 85 years, and now their wish finally came true." He visited the Czech and Saudi Arabian pavilions. He said that he wants to visit the Expo again every time he comes to Osaka to see his family.
In 1938, people bought about 1 million ticket books for the 1940 expo. Each book had 12 tickets and cost 10 yen at that time. (That is around 17,000 yen today, or about $118.) For the 2025 Expo, one whole old ticket book can be exchanged for two adult one-day tickets, and visitors keep the old ticket book afterward. In the past, people exchanged around 3,000 tickets at the 1970 Osaka Expo and about 100 tickets at Aichi Expo 2005.
(Japanese original by Yukiko Hayashi, Osaka City News Department)
Vocabulary
phantom: a ghost, or something not real
war: Fighting between groups or countries.
organizer: A person or group who plans and runs an event.
pavilion: A special building at an expo where countries show interesting things to visitors.
exchange: To give one thing and receive another in return.
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