2025 Expo Osaka: Japan Pavilion Security Guard Headset Goes Viral on Social Media; Fans Delight at Similarity to Dragon Ball 'Scouter'
The Yomiuri Shimbun
A security guard at the Osaka-Kansai Expo's Japan Pavilion is on duty, wearing a head-mounted display over his right eye.
OSAKA — Security guards for dignitaries at the Osaka-Kansai Expo's Japan Pavilion are going viral on social media for the state-of-the-art head-mounted displays (HMD) worn over one eye, looking like a headset in the popular anime and manga 'Dragon Ball.'
The HMD shows visual and textual information sent from the pavilion's disaster prevention center. When on duty, security guards look at the display to check information such as who will arrive and when, in addition to the face photos of dignitaries they are to guard or anyone seeming suspicious.
Videos taken with a camera attached on guards' chests are sent to the disaster prevention center in real-time.
Many social media users have been amazed, saying the HMD looks like a 'scouter,' a gadget in 'Dragon Ball' that measures an opponent's combat skills. They have posted such comments as 'It looks cool,' and 'I'm obsessed.'
The Japan Pavilion will host honored guests from foreign countries and regions. Based in Tokyo, the company in charge of security, Teikei Co., developed the HMD to be first used at the Expo.
'We'll share information with the disaster prevention center and work to prevent any issues in advance,' said a deputy director of the company's West Japan operations department.
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The Mainichi
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Okamoto Tarō: Creating New Human Values for a Troubled Age
The artist Okamoto Tarō (1911–96) is best known for Tower of the Sun , a 70-meter structure at the heart of the 1970 Osaka Expo site. Both sculpture and building, complete with interior space, the tower was an almost mystical presence, looming over the exposition like a great masked figure or sacred idol. Tower of the Sun , symbol of the 1970 Osaka Expo. (© Jiji) The tower's interior depicted the evolution of life from ancient times in ways that resist narrow categorization. Following multiple rounds of restoration, it is open today to the public. Widely recognized to this day as a symbol of the age in which the 1970 Expo was held, the tower remains significant for a variety of reasons. The Osaka Prefectural Government, which manages the tower, released a comprehensive assessment of the structure in November 2024, hoping to secure its recognition as an Important Cultural Property. The gigantic Face of the Sun , which was attached to the front of Tower of the Sun . 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He transcends the now—and challenges us to join him. Following the 1970 Osaka Expo, he appeared in television commercials and on variety programs and was featured in news magazines and other media, constantly remolding existing values and reiterating his popular catchphrase: 'Art is an explosion.' These words were often understood as referring to uncomplicated art that ruptures the world with visceral directness, but in fact they were a broader call to arms reflecting Okamoto's belief that only art can change reality. Despite passing away in 1996 at the age of 84, Okamoto still attracts legions of fans. Why is this? Capturing the Antithetical in Artistic 1930s Paris Okamoto Tarō was born in 1911 to the successful cartoonist Okamoto Ippei and poet and author Okamoto Kanoko. Novelist and Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari once referred to this unusually artistic household as the 'Holy Family.' At school, Tarō argued with teachers as an adult might, causing friction that forced him to change schools multiple times. After graduating from Keiō Futsūbu School in 1929, he entered the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (now Tokyo University of the Arts). He left the school later that year, however, after the Asahi Shimbun newspaper assigned his father to cover the London Naval Treaty of 1930. The Okamoto family set out from Kobe together, but while his parents went on to London, Tarō disembarked at Paris, resolving to live like a local to realize his artistic goals. Instead of joining the Japanese expat artistic community in Paris, Okamoto studied at a suburban lycée, learning the French language, culture, and way of life. He frequented local art galleries and eventually studied philosophy and art at the Sorbonne. During his time in France, Okamoto would mingle with avant-garde artists like Picasso, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Ernst, Giacometti, and Man Ray, as well as thinkers like André Breton, prophet of surrealism, and Georges Bataille, who contemplated human existence through the lenses of death, violence, and eroticism. He experienced the cutting edge of abstract art and surrealism, concepts at the core of twentieth century art, in a milieu where debate raged over how to truly live, deeply influencing the subsequent course of modern French philosophy. As an artist, Okamoto endeavored to produce paintings where real and abstract elements coexisted in contradiction. After World War II, he became a proponent of 'Polarism,' a movement that sought to express rationality and irrationality in antithesis on a single canvas. Many of his works from this period place extremes in opposition, defying rational dissection much as human beings do. Ethnology as a Handle on Human Existence Visiting the Musée de l'Homme, opened at the former site of the 1937 World's Fair in Paris, 26-year-old Okamoto was deeply moved by the masks and idols on display, which had a vivid sense of presence rooted in the fundamentals of human life and belief. He began studying under the anthropologist Marcel Mauss at the Sorbonne to deepen his understanding of ethnography. Decades later, at the 1970 Osaka Expo, Okamoto created and used a subterranean exhibition space beneath Tower of the Sun to display his work Underground Sun , surrounded by countless statues and masks collected by scholars from around the world under Okamoto's guidance. These were later transferred to the National Museum of Ethnology, established seven years after the Expo. Okamoto Tarō on September 4, 1969, surrounded by masks and other folk art gathered for display at the 1970 Osaka Expo. (© Kyōdō) The interior of Tower of the Sun , symbol of Expo '70, has been open to the public again since 2018. Also on display is a re-creation of Underground Sun , which has been missing since the Expo. (© Jiji) After leaving for Paris at the age of 19, Okamoto made the occasional brief visit home and was conscripted into military service during the war, but did not permanently resettle in Japan until 1946, when he was 35. An un-Japanese life—a childhood in a home environment that celebrated artistic excellence and years lived amid the flourishing art scene of Paris in the 1930s—set him on a unique postwar path to transcend reality in Japan. The Meaning of the Avant-Garde in Japan Okamoto's philosophical and ethnographic pursuit of the meaning of human existence eventually led him to conclude that he would always be a foreigner in Europe, and would never produce art of substance unless he accepted Japan, where his roots lay, as his battleground. In 1940, as the war approached Paris, he boarded a ship for Japan for the last time. After arriving in Japan, Okamoto won awards for works produced in Europe, some shown at the 1941 Nika Exhibition and others exhibited independently. But the following year, at 31, he was drafted into the army and sent to China, where he spent over four years on the battlefield. When Okamoto finally returned to Japan in June 1946, he learned that his entire oeuvre to date had been destroyed, along with his family home, in the firebombing of Tokyo. He was thus free to reinvent himself as a fiercely independent Japanese artist, and he began charting a postwar course that sought to connect art with society and life amid the complex contradictions faced by modern Japan. Okamoto challenged Japan's conservative art establishment. He formed an avant-garde artistic movement called the Yoru no Kai (Night Society) with literary scholar Hanada Kiyoteru and others in 1948. Eventually, however, Okamoto shifted his focus from searching for a new art to developing a new art within society. In 1954, he established the Gendai Geijutsu Kenkyūjo (Institute of Esthetic Research) at his home and studio (now the Tarō Okamoto Memorial Museum), inviting artists, designers, architects, and others there to collaborate. The same year, he published the book Konnichi no geijutsu (Art Today), in which he asserted the need for artists to create new values relevant to people facing the many issues of modern society, including pollution, the Cold War, and the contempt for humanity accompanying economic growth. He expanded his activities to include public art, design, architecture, film, performance, and criticism, eventually coming to describe his occupation simply as 'Human.' New Traditions Linking Ethnology and Art The pursuit of Japanese tradition was Okamoto's driving force in the postwar period. In his 'Essay on Jōmon Earthenware: A Dialogue with a Fourth Dimension,' published in 1952, he reconsidered earthenware from the Jōmon period (ca. 10,000 BC–300 BC) discovered across the Japanese archipelago, claiming it had a beauty with no counterpart elsewhere in the world. Conventional accounts of Japanese art saw value in elements introduced alongside Buddhism, such as wabi-sabi and an emphasis on harmony, or modern Western aesthetics. But Okamoto believed that Japanese art was founded on dynamic Jōmon beauty, which destroyed balance with its fourth-dimensional irrationality. It was a startling discovery in the deep past of innovation that overturned old values, just as the art of prewar Paris did. Okamoto believed that Jōmon tendencies could still be seen in Japanese areas such as Tōhoku, Hokkaidō, and Okinawa. Armed with his knowledge of ethnology, he traveled the country studying, photographing, and writing about folk customs from his artist's perspective. For many years, he continued to publish his findings to share these 'new traditions' with wider society. He believed that the power of creativity is omnipresent in our lives: anyone can lead a more fulfilling life by adopting an artist's perspective or behavior into their everyday routines and resolving to express themselves and champion their personal values. 'Art is an Explosion' and 'Eyes Flying Through Space' This is the line of thought that led Okamoto to create Tower of the Sun and Myth of Tomorrow . In describing the essence of art, he used the phrase 'eyes flying through space'—in short, a perspective outside the reality-defining frameworks of human beings and our world that escapes into space. Artists work with an 'other,' be it paint and canvas, stone, or clay. But as they become absorbed in creation, they irrationally become one with that other. This is the true sense in which 'Art is an explosion!' When a work is completed, however, it rationally becomes an other again. Through art, comprising self and other, we have the potential to move beyond humanity and the world, shatter those frameworks, and change values at their foundations. Here is revealed the enduring, universal postmortem appeal, in our cramped and claustrophobic modern age, of Okamoto Tarō's art. Tower of the Sun . (© Jiji) (Originally written in Japanese and published on April 8, 2025. Banner image: Portrait of Okamoto Tarō. © Jiji.)
