Make Believe Bonus: Expo Music Essentials

Get Me Back To Expo Please

I’ve become completely obsessed with Japanese Expos. I attended the first two days of Osaka Expo 2025 this past week, and despite absolutely garbage weather on the initial Sunday open to the public, I kind of loved it and genuinely wish I was back there spending too much on mascot-adorned merchandise right now. It appears I’m not alone…the tone on Osaka Expo has shifted from “this is going to be a disaster that nobody wants to go to!” to like, obsessing about the UK Pavilion’s bad afternoon tea set because attendance numbers have been really good so far.

I’ve also been writing a lot about it, including this deep dive into the under-discussed world’s fairs of modern Japanese history for scrmbl. For that article, I ended up listening to a lot of expo-related original music…so much so my expo-drenched brain needs a place to share even more of the highlights dotting the assorted international events that popped up in the last 55 years.

Hideo Murata — “Bankokuhaku Ondo”

To truly jump into the deep waters of Expo music in Japan, start here and understand that every single subsequent global-minded event in the country basically tries to follow a similar blueprint. “Bankokuhaku Ondo” wasn’t breaking new ground in combining the traditional with then current events — go back to a similar sounding number made for the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 — but it does set the pace for all music associated expos in the years after. Every single one has multiple “ondo” focused on whatever locale is hosting it this time, and while most are fine only a few really stand out owing to how they take a left turn in presentation (stay tuned for Okinawa…). Let’s credit Hideo Murata’s original expo ondo, though we won’t be seeing many more around these parts.