Mark Byrnes

Crowds queue up for events at various pavilions at the 2025 Osaka Expo. The number of foreign visitors to Japan soared 28.5% in April year on year to a record 3.91 million, official figures show.

Do world fairs still matter?

Like its predecessors in Paris and New York, Osaka’s World Expo is supposed to be a showcase of global progress. An expo historian explains how it stacks up