Chicago World Fair Conspiracy: from Wabi Sabi to Osaka (4/29/25)

The 2025 Osaka Expo is being held in that city from April 13 to October 13 of the same year. Although construction of the facilities, including the now world’s largest wooden structure termed the “Grand Ring,” began in late 2021, planning for the event dates back to 2017 and 2018, when the city bid was submitted and later when it was approved. What’s really incredible is the site was built on Yumeshima, an artificial island in Osaka Bay. Like many world expos there is an emphasis on new technologies as well as cultural understanding. This particular expo features AI, “sustainable” technology, and new forms of cashless payment systems, things that would have been fantasy to people in 1890s. However, the electric lights, ferris wheel, and technology of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, although fantastic to the 27 million people who attended, are nothing but background noise in the 21st-century. The same will be said of technology at the Osaka Expo in one hundred years. 

The Chicago version was larger by almost double the size of square miles - 0.6 vs 1.07. But the size of the Osaka fair is limited not only because of its location, but due to the fact that it was designed by Japanese architects and is intended to emphasize sustainability and smaller more simpler designs - things that are very Japanese to begin with. Yet there are few things about the expo that are different from the 1893 Chicago World Fair.

In context, the Osaka Expo might help one to understand the Chicago version, or the various other similar fairs held around the world in that time period. Despite conspiracy theorists saying that the Chicago expo was built in 2 years and then destroyed, the facts are contrary to this. Preparation and some limited construction began within the decade previous, even before the bid was approved in 1890 and the fair opened in 1893. The surface level construction took between two and three years, about the same timeframe Osakas’s fair was built, and the modern Museum of Science is a remnant of one of those Chicago buildings. Even if all buildings were destroyed or repurposed there is still an assumption about the reasoning for such a thing to happen. Consider the immense amount of money and time spent on the bid and construction of an Olympic coliseum for a two week event in a major city. Then there is the eastern philosophy of Wabi Sabi, which talks about the beauty of impermanence or certain perceived flaws. In Japan this is part of the reason that the Ise Jingu Grand Shrine of the Sun Goddess, with its beautiful wooden designs, is torn down every 20 years and rebuilt.  

The idea that the Chicago World’s Fair was part of some lost empire is based on assumptions about technology and history and time periods, uncontrolled speculation, and a basic lack of historical and modern context, not to mention click-bait, clout-chasing, and cash-grabbing fantasy. 

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