Of the diverse and evolving perspectives on the Expo, it is
perhaps unsurprising that the approach of the state is the one that
changes the least, and admitted the least flexibility in the face of
outright protest and even subtler challenges. At the same time that
Expo ’70 was part of a symbolic arc of representing the
prosperous postwar state that stretches from the 1960 World
Design Conference, to the 1964 Olympics, to the Expo itself, like
the Olympics before it the Osaka Expo was also written into an
aggressive project infrastructural development. These two sites of
state investment in the project simultaneously provided the
greatest allure for those who would complicate the official
recovery narrative, while also laying the groundwork for precisely
the kind of de-politicization and commercialization that would
overwhelm such dissenting voices. For example, leading artists
such as Okamoto and former members of the postwar
avant-garde group Jikken Kobo to see a potential for, who were
hardly the usual suspects at the time for falling in line with state
triumphalism, nonetheless saw potential in the very visibility of the
stage offered by the Expo, and the same can be said for any
number of protesters who attempted to seize the state’s own logic
of spectacle for the purpose of communicating an outsider
message. Meanwhile, the state itself as usual met such attempts
with little recognition and even less change in its policies.