Death Stranding and Metal Gear series creator Hideo Kojima recently revealed how repeated visits to the 1970 World Expo (Expo ‘70) as a child had a “life-changing” impact on him, profoundly shaping his outlook as a game developer. In a separate piece, the legendary video game auteur shared how he had a very different experience of the current Expo 2025.
As spotted by Automaton, the 62-year-old Kojima wrote an essay for An-An magazine detailing how Expo ’70 shaped his worldview: “Without that Expo, I wouldn’t have developed my future-oriented and globalized outlook. Metal Gear and Death Stranding would not have come into being.”
Osaka hosted the Expo ’70, with 76 countries and 32 organizations participating (source: Expo ’70 Commemorative Park official website). Kojima said that at the time he had just started elementary school and lived near the event site. This gave him the opportunity to visit the Expo many times.
“I could even go after school on weekdays,” he recalled, borrowing his dad’s brand new camera (the Ricoh Auto Half Expo ’70 Model) and snapping loads of photos. “Whenever you entered a pavilion, you received a badge,” he remembered, adding that children proudly showed off their collections to each other.
The main theme of Expo ’70 was ‘Progress and Harmony for Mankind.’ It even had its own theme song — Haruo Minami’s ‘Sekai no kuni kara konnichiwa’ (Hello from the countries of the world), which Kojima quoted in his essay — with lyrics that focus on saying “hello” and “holding hands” across countries and borders (the song is on YouTube with English subtitles).
“At the Expo, I experienced ‘Progress and Harmony for Mankind’ up close. I said ‘hello’ and ‘shook hands’ with (avant-garde artist) Taro Okamoto, (sci-fi novelist) Sakyo Komatsu, (architects) Kenzo Tange and Kisho Kurokawa, and (fashion designers) Junko Koshino and Hanae Mori. It was all a shocking ‘close encounter of the third kind,'” Kojima remembered. “Technology, science, design, fashion, history, the world, culture, society. You could say that that ‘hello’ back then shaped who I became. ‘Shaking hands’ with the Expo changed my life and my vision of the future.”
Kojima explained that “the Expo’s greatness wasn’t just in the glimpses it offered of cutting-edge technology and the daily life of the future. It showed me the global diversity of nations, ethnicities, races, religions, customs, and histories. It embodied the essence of ‘past and future’ and ‘the world and harmony.’ Without that Expo, I wouldn’t have developed my future-oriented and globalized outlook. Metal Gear and Death Stranding would not have come into being.”
One of the major attractions of Expo ’70 was the Moon Rock at the U.S. pavilion, which had been brought back from the Moon by Apollo 12 astronauts the previous year. Despite his many visits, Kojima said that “unfortunately, the U.S. pavilion, where I’d hoped to see the Moon Rock, was too crowded, so I never got to see it with my own eyes.” He also recalled waiting over two hours to get into the U.S.S.R pavilion.
But what does Kojima feel about the current Expo 2025 that is being held in Osaka, and how did his experience compare? In a follow-up essay published in An-An, Kojima wrote about visiting Expo 2025 on a very rainy day, camera in tow again: “I wanted to see for myself how ‘globalism’ and ‘visions of the future’ have changed over the past 55 years, and how the baton will be passed on (to future generations).” However, the experience gave Kojima a “strange feeling.”
The developer explained: “I didn’t get that sense of a tremendous future like I did as a child (at Expo ’70). It wasn’t thrilling or exciting. Just a ceaseless, predictable tomorrow stretching on and on. It wasn’t that there was no ‘future’ — rather that I couldn’t ascertain the next ‘tomorrow’ for myself. The ‘future’ I dreamed of at that (1970) Expo — I’ve already experienced most of it. Robots, videophones and moving walkways have become commonplace. The tomorrow that this (2025) Expo promotes is one that children will witness.
Kojima gave the opinion that World Expos are primarily for children, as they are the ones who will take mankind into the future. Whether the futuristic designs at the 2025 Expo will be representative of what the real future will be is “something old people can never know.” However, Kojima added that he enjoyed the Expo: “Although I will not be able to experience this future firsthand, I plan to go again.”
Any player of Metal Gear Solid or Death Stranding doesn’t have to look far to see how both series feature diverse casts of characters, with stories often set in the near future that grapple with both the tremendous possibilities and dangers of technology. MGS1 explored genetic engineering and the concept of gene-therapy enhanced soldiers, MGS2 delved into the dangers of internet censorship and human-sounding AI chatbots (making it an interesting revisit in 2025), while MGS4 showed a mech-filled future in which paramilitary conglomerates wage endless wars for profit.
With its Chiral Network, Death Stranding holds up a mirror to the benefits and dangers of the internet and digital society, and the struggle to reconnect a fragmented, post-apocalyptic world. Legacy and passing on the future to subsequent generations are also big Kojima themes, and it seems they were shaped by his childhood experiences of Expo ’70.
As a side note, the Expo ’70 site is still open to the public today, although all the pavilions that awed the young Kojima have since been demolished. Now called the Expo’70 Commemorative Park, it still features the event’s symbolic Tower of the Sun, a sculpture by Taro Okamoto.
Photo by Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Kojima Productions.
Verity Townsend is a Japan-based freelance writer who previously served as editor, contributor and translator for the game news site Automaton West. She has also written about Japanese culture and movies for various publications.
