The forgotten people of the Osaka ghetto: The dark side of the World Expo

LeMonde

3 days ago

When Marlene Dietrich took the stage at the Osaka World Expo on September 8, 1970, and began singing "Lili Marleen" in her silk dress, Jōtarō Shōji was in the crowd. He was moved, starstruck at his first music hall show, a kid from a poor background who had made it to the big city. Yet that day, he was not just there for Dietrich: "I had worked on the Expo site, at the Czech pavilion. It was behind schedule and we took big risks to finish on time. Friends of mine died there." Shōji was also there to say goodbye to his companions.
After the concert, he returned to the world behind the stage, to Kamagasaki, the grimy ghetto of the Nishinari neighborhood, where he lived with his fellow workers, the builders of the Expo, 25,000 young workers crammed into seedy dormitories. There, he slipped into a box measuring 50 centimeters by 170 centimeters. His room was like a coffin. With "Lili Marleen" running through his head, he thought of his comrades who had died on the construction site. "Since they had neither money nor insurance," the now-septuagenarian recalled, "we pooled our money together to buy them funeral urns."
Glamorous and futuristic, the Osaka World Expo, held from March 15 to September 13, 1970, remains a source of great pride for Japan, which presented a modern and optimistic face to the world. But 30 kilometers south of the site, Kamagasaki, the major market for day labor, remained a taboo subject, the hidden dark side of the event.
Fifty-five years later, on April 13, the 2025 Expo opened in the same city, on an artificial island named Yumeshima ("Dream Island"). And Kamagasaki is still there, clinging to the southern edge of Osaka, one of the wealthiest cities in Japan.