Japan’s Osaka World Expo plagued with cost overruns, delays as ‘fed-up’ locals demand answers
- Residents fear they will be left to shoulder the financial burden, with costs expected to eclipse even the revised budget of US$1.3 billion
- Work on infrastructure projects has fallen behind schedule due to soaring costs of materials, delays caused by the pandemic and a shortage of labourers
Osaka won the right to stage the event in November 2018, beating off challenges from the Azerbaijani city of Baku and Yekaterinburg, in Russia, after Paris withdrew its candidacy for financial reasons. Under the slogan “Designing future society for our lives”, event organisers estimated the total cost at 125 billion yen (US$896.3 million).
It soon emerged that figure was unrealistic, and was hiked nearly 50 per cent in late 2020 to 185 billion yen. Given the impact of the pandemic and the ongoing effects of the conflict in Ukraine, including sharp price rises for fuel and construction materials, that figure is also likely to be eclipsed once the final accounts are completed.
Residents of the Kansai region say they fear they will be left with the financial aftermath, just as Tokyo taxpayers were left to cover a large part of the bill when the Tokyo Olympic Games went well beyond its initial budget.
“The people of Osaka are pretty shrewd and they are thoroughly fed-up with this entire project,” said Noriko Hama, a professor of economics at Doshisha University in nearby Kyoto. “I see more people are demanding answers about the costs and the impact this is all going to have on them.
“The bottom line is that we do not know why the city was desperate to have the expo because there are some much better ways of spending all that money,” she said.
Considerable cost overruns are only part of the problem, however, for an event that will start its six-month run on April 13, 2025, and which organisers confidently predict will attract 28 million visitors.