Less than two years from the opening of the Osaka World Expo on April 13, 2025, the organizers are concerned about the delays in national pavilion projects. The schedule is “now very tight”alarmed the governor of the city of western Japan, Hirofumi Yoshimura.
At the heart of the problem is the construction of the fifty-six “type A” pavilions, designed according to the design submitted by some of the 153 participating countries, including France and China. It comes up against a misunderstanding between Japanese construction companies reluctant to take an interest in initiatives that do not take into account local legal, regulatory, financial and even linguistic realities and States braced on their ambitious projects.
Faced with this blockage, the secretary general of the exhibition, Hiroyuki Ishige, called on the countries concerned to simplify the designs and increase the budgets so as to finalize the calls for tenders and launch the procedures for obtaining them as quickly as possible. building permits. The association responsible for the event has urgently drawn up a catalog of feasible constructions and offered to take charge of all the procedures with the construction companies. The government should intervene to speed up the procedures.
To meet the deadlines, Mr. Ishige expects work to start before the end of 2023. He excludes the postponement of an event which should attract 28.2 million visitors and generate 2,000 billion yen (12.7 billion euros). euros) of economic benefits. In 2022, the organizing association had requested that all tenders be completed by June 30, 2023, as obtaining the building permit takes on average two and a half months. Only about ten countries, such as Ireland, Canada or Belgium, are on schedule.
Inability to communicate
Conciliating, Shingo Torii, director of the Osaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry, invoked the Covid-19 pandemic to justify the delays. The health crisis had forced Dubai to postpone its exhibition, originally scheduled for 2020, for a year, which reduced the time to prepare for that of Osaka.
Unofficially, the process is stalling due to the inability of countries and construction companies to communicate. According to a document consulted by The world, several European nations are said to have expressed their “concern about the limited availability of the Japanese construction sector to meet the demand for the pavilions”while deploring “lack of interest in calls for tenders”. “Where there is interest, price levels exceed available budgets. »
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