Man admitted to Japan’s Expo 2025 with 85-year-old ticket

People visit the opening day of the Expo 2025 in Osaka, central Japan, Sunday, April 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Hiro Komae) (Hiro Komae/AP)

TOKYO, Japan -- A man was admitted to the World Expo in Japan with a ticket to a 1940 event that was called off as war escalated, organizers said.

Tickets for the “Grand International Exposition of Japan” in Tokyo were released in 1938 but the event was postponed indefinitely as Japan became embroiled in World War II.

Organizers of Expo 2025 in the western city of Osaka, which opened last month and runs until mid-October, said in a statement they had decided to admit holders of tickets to the 1940 event.

They exchanged one of the old tickets on Monday for two one-day Expo 2025 passes, the statement said.

Local media reported that the 1940 ticket-holder was 25-year-old Fumiya Takenawa, who lives in Tokyo but was visiting his parents’ home in Osaka.

Takenawa is a collector of expo-related memorabilia and in March he purchased the 1940 ticket online, the Mainichi Shimbun daily and other outlets reported.

They published a photograph of him smiling and holding up the old ticket, which features an elaborate red and black design.

The Expo or World’s Fair, which brought the Eiffel Tower to Paris, began with London’s 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition and is now held every five years in different locations.

Previous Expos in Japan -- in Osaka in 1970 and in Aichi region in 2005 -- have had similar policies of giving “invitation tickets” to people holding passes for the 1940 event, the Expo 2025 organizers said Monday.

Takenawa was reportedly a fan of the huge white and red “Tower of the Sun,” the symbol of the 1970 Osaka Expo that still stands in a park in the metropolis.

AFP