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SoraNews24
28-05-2025
- SoraNews24
Traveling to the the World Expo in Osaka with a baby? We've got survival tips for your family
Here's our parent-to-parent advice for anyone visiting the Expo with small children in tow. Our Japanese-language correspondent Haruka Takagi recently went to the 2025 World Expo in Osaka with her husband and five-month-old baby. While they had a great time, there were certain challenges involved in taking a tiny human with them. She'd like to share her advice to try to make the trip as smooth as possible for other visiting parents. ● Transportation Traveling there, Haruka strongly recommends going by bus, taxi, or car for two reasons. The first reason is that you can use the Expo's relatively uncrowded West Gate. While the East Gate mainly serves visitors arriving via the Osaka Metro, the West one serves those arriving via automobile. An official report on May 20 determined that the West Gate welcomes only one-third the number of visitors as that of the East one. Anyone arriving via car must park in the reservation-based Park & Ride lots in nearby Maishima, Amagasaki, or Sakai and then board a shuttle bus that takes about 15 minutes to get to the Expo. On the day of her visit, Haruka and her husband had purchased a 10 a.m. entry ticket, arriving at their parking lot (Maishima E) around 9 a.m., waiting for a short time, and then taking the shuttle to arrive at the Expo around 9:30 a.m. Even though they still needed to wait a little bit before entering, there was plenty of space to walk around and calm down a potentially fussy child. ▼ The below photo of the West Gate was taken at 9:30 a.m. on a weekday. The second reason is that taking a car greatly reduced her and her husband's overall stress when coming and leaving. They didn't have to worry about the inevitable crowds that they would have encountered on the metro or when transferring lines while carting a baby stroller around, especially during peak commuting times in the morning and evening. Plus, the Park & Ride shuttle requires a reservation, so they had peace of mind knowing that they'd find seats without a hassle. Finally, having a car is great for all of the baby gear they carry around these days as well as souvenirs they expected to buy. Their overall parking fee was 6,000 yen (US$42), which included the round-trip shuttle service, plus a 500-yen early morning fee. During busy periods and weekends at the Expo, please note that additional fees will likely apply–so consider carpooling with more friends to reduce the overall cost per person. At 9 a.m., the parking lot was only about 20-percent full, so they were able to find a spot very close to the shuttle stop and walk over without rushing. All of the staff stationed nearby were very helpful and immediately lowered the incline for their stroller to easily get onto the shuttle. ● Liquid Formula There's a relatively small number of 'baby care rooms' at the Expo relative to the total number of visitors (more on that later). On top of that, not all of the rooms have water heaters for preparing baby formula. In any case, Haruka knew that it would take a while to prepare a bottle and cool it down enough for her baby to drink. That's where ready-to-drink liquid formula comes in. Haruka recommends two brands, both of which you can purchase easily on Amazon Japan: Hohoemi's Raku Raku Milk, which comes in either 120 or 200-milliliter (4.1 or 6.8-ounce) bottles, or Icreo's Akachan Milk, which comes in 125-milliliter (4.2-ounce) bottles. ▼ Hohoemi's Raku Raku Milk It's super easy being able to stash one of these in your bag as opposed to lugging around bulky baby bottles and formula mix ingredients. All you have to do is pop the bottle open and it's ready to be drunk anytime, anywhere. Haruka strongly recommends bringing a couple of these bottles to minimize your stress and hassle. This might also be a good time to share that drinks (of the canned or bottled variety) are not allowed to be brought into the Expo and won't be confiscated at security. This rule doesn't apply to baby milk or baby food, however, so you and your baby can rest easy. ● Baby strollers The Expo grounds are vast and a stroller is a must. Thankfully, strollers can be rented for free if you're not able to bring one yourself. Haruka would like to share some tips for preventing overheating in your baby in a stroller, especially now that temperatures are beginning to soar. For starters, she and her husband installed a cooling seat liner and an electric fan on their stroller. They also made a point of staying out of direct sunlight as much as possible by traversing the grounds under the Expo's giant wooden outer ring structure. Luckily the venue is right next to the sea so there's plenty of air circulation, but once midsummer comes, you might need to take even more drastic measures such as attaching ice packs in front of the electric fan. Certain pavilions might be hard to navigate with a stroller, so wearing some kind of baby sling or pack is ideal for these areas. In particular, Haruka didn't expect the Expo Commons area, a space developed in collaboration with several countries and regions, to be quite as crowded as it was on the day of her visit. Unlike inside of the individual country pavilions, which typically have designated flows of traffic, this space was basically a free-for-all with people moving in all different directions. It was much easier to weave in and out of passerby with her baby tucked closely against her chest in this landscape. ● Baby care rooms Lastly, the number one thing that vexed Haruka and her husband was the relative lack of baby care rooms. There are only 18 of them in the entire venue, as well as only 33 total diaper-changing stations and 35 nursing rooms ('baby feeding rooms'). Some areas have only one private baby care room or separate diaper-changing station (e.g., it's only inside a nursing room). That meant that she and her husband often found themselves waiting for previous families to finish using a facility before it was their turn. Furthermore, the staff didn't always have a strong grasp of the situation and couldn't easily share where the nearest amenities were. Once, it even took someone over ten minutes to locate a place on the map for them. The lack of baby-care facilities at this world-class event was surprisingly inconvenient compared to the typical amenities found at regular shopping malls. At the moment, it doesn't appear that an English-language guide to baby-care facilities exists, but please see pages 4 and 5 of this document in Japanese for a full list of what to expect. The relevant Japanese text to look for is ベビーケアルーム (number of baby care rooms), おむつ交換台 (number of changing tables), 授乳ソファー/チェア (number of nursing sofas/chairs), 調乳器 (formula dispenser), and under 授乳室 (nursing rooms) the number available for woman only (女性専用) or for men and women (男女兼用). Regardless of the above challenges in navigating the Expo with a baby, Haruka and her husband were still quite pleased with their Expo experience. Some pavilions, particularly those of foreign countries or those with stairs at the top, even gave priority to families with babies. In general, the staff and other visitors were also extremely pleasant and tried their best to help in different ways (e.g., some people offered to push elevator buttons for her). A real trip overseas is probably still a far way off for Haruka's family, but for now, she felt like she was able to take a pseudo trip abroad thanks to the Expo. For more of our tips on navigating the Expo to find the best places to buy souvenirs and food, see this piece here. All images © SoraNews24 ● Want to hear about SoraNews24's latest articles as soon as they're published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter! [ Read in Japanese ]
National Geographic
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- National Geographic
How Hello Kitty helped post-WWII Japan conquer the world
(The U.S. forced them into internment camps. Here's how Japanese Americans started over.) Rebranding a nation is no easy feat, especially when the scars of war mar its reputation. Japan's reputational rebirth began partly at a shoe company in the 1970s when designer Yuko Shimizu's drawing of a white cat with a bow on her ear changed the course of Japanese history. Hello Kitty was created in 1974 by designers at Sanrio Inc., a Japanese company known then for cutesy, flower-adorned rubber sandals. The character rocketed toward meteoric success in the '70s and '80s–especially in the West, with crazed American fans, brick-and-mortar Sanrio stores opening in the United States, and thousands of products on the market. The beloved character ushered kawaii (which roughly translates to 'cute' or 'adorable') culture into global consciousness and opened the floodgates for a new Japanese identity. 'Kawaii is easy to use as an empty sign and inject it with your own views as a brand. Its mechanism is to affect emotion and inspire people to feel nurturing towards it–so it's a convenient stealth vehicle to soften the image of companies and brands,' says Hui-Ying Kerr, a senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, whose research has focused on Japanese consumer culture. Kawaii, with roots in Japanese 'girl culture,' is known for a visual aesthetic of simplicity, hyper-cuteness, and childlike innocence. It was originally a space of safety and empowerment for disenfranchised groups in Japan. Student activists in the 1960s and '80s female shōjo fans used the playful subculture to rebel against rigid, nationalist hierarchies of aggression, explains Clemson University Japanese language professor Kumiko Saito. This early version of kawaii was radical—an act of resistance wrapped in sweetness. But the emotional pull of kawaii didn't go unnoticed. Watching closely, Japanese business and government institutions discovered a lucrative opportunity. A grassroots aesthetic became a national strategy: a soft power mechanism that leveraged kawaii's inviting innocence to reframe Japan's global image. Hello Kitty—expressionless, apolitical, and endlessly adaptable—was the perfect ambassador. The global influence of kawaii culture A Hello Kitty–themed Haruka express train rolls between Kansai International Airport and Kyoto. Photograph by Leopold von Ungern, Stockimo/Alamy Stock Photo World War II solidified deep political and cultural tensions between the United States and Japan. Yet by 1983—less than four decades after the war's end—Hello Kitty had become UNICEF's official children's ambassador to the U.S. By the early 2000s, the Japanese government had fully embraced kawaii as a strategic tool of soft power. Its 'Cool Japan' initiative leveraged popular culture—including anime, fashion, and kawaii icons like Hello Kitty—to 'strengthen the ties between Japan and other countries.' Through this campaign, Hello Kitty was named Ambassador of Tourism to Taiwan and South Korea—two nations that had experienced brutal occupation under Japanese imperial rule just decades earlier. The kawaii aesthetic is so successful as a soft power tool because it provides a cloak of gentle innocence for Japan. 'It's about storytelling, flexibility, and the ability to tell adaptive stories about who you are as a people. Bureaucrats and politicians sought to recreate what Japan is,' says Dan White, a cultural anthropologist and research affiliate at the University of Cambridge, of Japan's unique transformative capabilities. Kawaii became not just an aesthetic, but Japan's global persona. From Sanrio's multibillion-dollar merchandise empire to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' 2008 appointment of 'Cute Ambassadors,' young women in kawaii fashion were deployed as cultural mascots at international expos. In an interview, ambassador Aoki Misako described her kawaii apparel as 'combative clothing…[that] can save one from images of a negative self.'
