Mobile air taxis that race headlong through the air and transport visitors as if in the fifth element! A modern application for simultaneous translation of any language in the world works on autopilot so that sometimes you forget in everyday life that people without simultaneous translation do not understand you. The most powerful and largest AI is integrated in every area and solves everything so that no person can even physically get in line. Robots that constantly patrol the exhibition areas, providing people with the necessary assistance, delivering food, giving them a lift (if there is no air taxi stop nearby), and simply coming up to chat. The most transparent and understandable system for booking entrance tickets and pavilions, implemented so easily and simply that my grandmother confused the call button on her phone with her grandson’s number and was able to easily organize her visit to the largest world-class show. And of course, super-fast and state-of-the-art Wi-Fi that always keeps you connected so you can enjoy all the benefits of civilization! You can only dream about such an expo!!! But, you will have to keep dreaming, because all this were not at the expo.

To say that Japan screwed up with holding the world expo is an understatement. Let’s start in chronological order. A few years before the expo begins, a website is launched for visitors where a lot is explained in beautiful hieroglyphs. Fortunately, you can switch to English, which is not the default language at the world expo, and read a lot of completely incomprehensible rules of the exhibition. Some lotteries, and not one but two, where you can win entry to the pavilions and to the show. What does it mean to win entry to the show, will they be private? Nothing is clear, there are no answers yet, or rather, they are there, but it is becoming more and more complicated. It is only clear that you need to buy tickets in advance in order to take part in the lottery two months in advance. Well, okay, let’s listen to the official theme song of the expo. Oh, this button just opens a story about the composer, okay. Groups on social networks were flooded with questions without answers. The Japanese government decided not to waste money on some online experts who could at least explain something.

Then the famous Expo app came out. More precisely, it’s five Japanese buttons that simply open five sections in the browser on the site. I wrote a bug report that the app should default to the device’s language, because the app has English, but I didn’t get anything in response, the Japanese government decided not to allocate funds to support the app. Well, maybe they’ll improve it later. Who would have thought that this is already the final version of the app?

Then there was an information update on the site, the Japanese filled it with so much information that I am convinced that there is not a single person in the world who would have seen even half of the site. Now you can’t find anything on the site at all, you have to forcefully extract information from the site with Google and AI. In my profession, I constantly encounter problematic applications and sites, but I have never seen such crap in my life. The site also added a PDF document with detailed descriptions of the pavilions in the form of a picture, it seemed to be done intentionally so that no one in the world could translate what was written there, although it was well dubbed in English. But it didn’t make it any easier for our mothers who fly to the expo.

Time to buy tickets

Two months until the Expo, now some kind of lottery will start, you need to buy. It is logical that there should be a ticket purchase button on the website or in the application (which simply opens the website). It seems that there is, and it would be logical for this button to sell tickets. Then you have to sort through a bunch of forums and groups on social networks where people share their experiences of who managed to find the button that will sell the ticket. Fortunately, my 15-year experience in testing helped me go through that maze myself. And then, you need to choose the type of ticket… It seems that an unlimited summer pass is suitable for us. But it comes with a whole instruction. You have to book a time in advance for the first two days, and the specific gate through which you will enter, and to get to the third day, you have to physically leave the first day, and you will be able to book the next day. All this has to be done through the application, where they forgot to add the “Login” button. But they did not forget to make a forced two-factor authorization. So, learn the math part if you want to get to the Expo. But that’s half the trouble. If you have a summer pass, then take a picture of your face and you will see “error 504”. If you start looking for an error, then on the official website there is an explanation that “Error 504” translates as, please physically fly to Japan and only then will the function work, once every 30 minutes it works, if it does not give an error and if you open the “internet” program on your Samsung phone, because then even in Japan there will be a black square instead of a face. It should also be noted that if you see a black square, then you have already lost your attempt once every 30 minutes.

Time to enter the lottery

We bought two summer passes, from one account, now we can simultaneously apply for the lottery together, in order to win the same pavilions. However, it is still unclear why we should win them. The site functionality opens in the form of an old html format, when the page refreshes after each action. The name of the pavilion must be entered in the field with accuracy to upper and lowercase letters. For example, if you want to search for the Korean pavilion, then all letters must be written in uppercase, otherwise you will not find it, if others, then sometimes all in lowercase, and sometimes the first one is uppercase. And of course the cherry on the cake, the pavilion with the name null ² . If you bypass the functionality a little, you can get a list of all pavilions. Without any filter, and those that are only for people with disabilities and all the others in a mix. It is good that they added five pavilions on the first day, and five on the second day. Then it turns out that you can only win one out of five per day and then if you’re lucky. And of course, they won the same pavilion twice at the same time. I asked support if they could fix it, to which two months later I was advised to click the “Cancel Pavilion Visit” button. I don’t know why Japan made this lottery, but I’ve never read so many curses about any event as curses towards Japan for the Expo app and the lottery.

What was happening on social media?

It seems that Japan tried to hide the real rating of the app and the rating of the expo on Google Maps, because it constantly disappeared. The AI told me that it is possible that the reviews and the entire event periodically disappear from Google Maps because the site is so complex that even the AI cannot determine whether the expo actually exists and at what address it is held, and therefore it is possible that Google automatically removes the expo as a non-existent event. But something suggests that Japan periodically removed the expo from the map to hide the hundreds of negative reviews that Europeans left. Despite the fact that the rating of the app was not visible officially, it could be seen through Google search, so the rating of the app is 2.2. The AI ​​gave an analysis and reported that this is the second large-scale failure of the organization by Japan, the first was during the past Olympic Games.

Queues

All non-Japanese reviews on the Internet describe the exhibition as endless queues. Of course, it will be so if you do not approach the visit wisely, but nevertheless people really stood for hours in some pavilions, an hour to enter and almost did not manage to see anything at the exhibition during that one allocated day. The Japanese tried to save the reputation of their country in reviews, which was sinking like the Titanic in an ocean of negativity. There were reviews from the series “Yes, there were a lot of queues, I did not see anything, so next time I will be more prepared!”, bravo Japan, shift the blame for the failed expo onto the visitors, bravo! Or a review from the series “I walked all day, saw long queues, so I did not get anywhere but I bought myself a soft toy, it was very cute lol”. We personally talked to a Japanese woman after the expo who only managed to see two small pavilions and an evening show, she really liked it and the price of $30 seemed relevant for a day, because the evening shows are really cool. But there is a big but. If you live there, it will cost you $30 plus a few dollars for the metro. But if you, as a tourist, paid $850 for a plane ticket, $600-700 for a hotel, $600-700 for food and a couple of dollars for the metro. Then maybe two small pavilions and an evening show will no longer seem worth $2,000+. To be fair, I will note that we saw almost all the pavilions in 5.5 days, where we were allowed and stood in queues for 12-20 minutes and twice for 40 minutes.

What Japan promised but didn’t happen

Two big flops were the air taxi that was shown directly in the expo’s advertising and the app that will translate languages simultaneously for communication. On the first day, the air taxi was canceled due to bad weather. Japan, did you really design an air taxi that is afraid of bad weather??? But they canceled it by 2028. At least that’s what it said in the pavilion, the first commercial flights are planned for 2028.

The second big failure was an app that actually translated as many as 12 important languages, such as Korean, Chinese, and similar ones, into English. Not synchronously, crippled, and only through the Internet, which of course was almost nonexistent at the expo. Many pavilions had QR codes with explanations that required Internet, which was not available. An employee even gave me a map with the zones where there would be Internet.

Show booking

The final nail in the country’s reputation was hammered when the app launched pavilion booking. If you’re not at the expo alone, then you need to set up synchronous booking. If you’re not a programmer or a tester, don’t even try to figure out how to do it, and if you do, Google will hire you as a very advanced specialist. If tickets were purchased together, then during face registration they were forcibly disconnected. If you still manage to link the tickets, then booking can only be done after entering the expo. The user is transferred to the module where you have to guess what letters spell the pavilion, but the trick is that all pavilions are always occupied, sometimes a place appears, and then there are two possible cases, either the site will say “Sorry, there really is no place,” or when you go to booking it will say “Sorry, you two, we didn’t take this into account when we showed that there was a free place.” You are given about three attempts to make such a reservation, then the site gives an error 500 and you have to re-authenticate and connect the tickets, which are automatically disconnected. Then the expo employees report that the error 500 appears only if you make a reservation from the wifi that is available in some places on the expo territory, if you do it via mobile Internet, or the wifi of some cafe, there will be no error, but there will also be free seats. You can stand in line for up to an hour, where there is a stationary machine, which will also tell you that there are no seats. Woe to those people who bought a ticket before entering the expo and the first thing they found out after buying it was that all the pavilions were already booked, and the second thing was that the ticket could not be returned. It sounded like a failed Japanese prank. Why Japan is taking such revenge on tourists is unknown.

Online queue

In addition to physical queues, Japan decided to keep up with the times and created an online queue. When you enter the site, you may be told that you are in the 47,000th queue and have to wait for more than an hour. And when you wait, the site allows you to press one button and transfer you from the main queue to the queue of those who clicked on this button. This is not a joke or a metaphor, this is how it worked. There is a queue and there is a queue to get in the queue.

Queues for queues at the expo

If you think that queues can only be online, then no, there will also be queues to get in line on the expo territory and it seems that sometimes there is a queue to get in line to get in line. That is, there is an employee with a sign saying “Queue temporarily closed” and then there is a queue waiting for the first queue to open to get in.

Violation of equality

There are two types of visitors – accredited, who have the right to skip the line everywhere, and simple scumbags. Japan divided simple scumbags into groups based on financial status. The more you pay through the expo wallet, the higher your status over other slaves and the more goodies you have access to. We didn’t find out exactly what goodies were, because instead of an application, a white screen opened on the website. So all people are equal, but some are more equal.

Employees

If people all over Japan speak English fluently, then at the expo they selected employees who speak exclusively Japanese. In the pavilions, the explanations are also in Japanese, sometimes a few words in English and then again many sentences in Japanese. Of course, you can read the information from the QR code, oh yes, there is no Internet in the territory, or you can use a translator that supports as many as a dozen languages and of course also does not work without the Internet, which is not there.

Failure to meet booking guarantees

We got the night rainbow show by lottery, that is, we could sit in a special sector where the show is best seen, but when we arrived, they told us that there were no seats, so we would have to stand, despite the fact that we had a specific time booked. They explained to us that they simply allow more people to win in the lottery than this zone is designed for. And those free seats, they are not for you, they are if those accredited persons come, “But even if they don’t come, I still won’t let you into that place even if it is free all the time and despite the fact that you have a reservation.” The last one, it was a direct quote from an expo employee.

Outdated technologies

Many reviews feature people with loudspeakers balancing the queue, and we also witnessed this. At many exits and entrances, there are employees shouting into loudspeakers which way to go, which is a bit strange, because such people could be replaced with a banal arrow, and from the outside it looks like they are leading the herd.

Inconvenient intersection in the central area

The only effective way to get anywhere in the territory is to walk along the circle. In the center there is a forest with trails, which should simplify navigation. But some of the exits from the trails are blocked by fences, so it is impossible to pass through the cut and get to where you need to go. Why fences were put in the center of the main intersection is unknown, but it made visiting the exhibition very difficult.

Number of visitors

Judging by open reports, fewer people visit the exhibition per day than planned, but even with this number of people, the entrances and exits cannot cope, which even creates queues to leave. On one of the days, we got into a 40-minute queue to leave.

Water dispensers

Another big failure. There were taps on the territory that could quickly fill a bottle of water, but they were a minority. Most of the machines had a sensor that was supposed to determine the level of contamination of your bottle and then determine whether you needed to go to a special machine that washed bottles. The sensor itself did not work well, and the water was filled slowly, which created significant queues for water, and if simple taps with water were installed everywhere, there would be no such problem. The machines publicly counted how many kilograms of plastic they saved, but did not count how many thousands of man-hours they spent in total due to the slowness and poor quality of the technology.

Lack of cover on the entrance gate

Considering that the queue to enter could take an hour, people had to stand under the scorching sun or in the rain without shelter. Of course, you could borrow an umbrella somewhere, but it is not known where to get one at the entrance.

Internet at the exhibition

As noted above, Japan spared no expense on Wi-Fi coverage at the expo.

Comparing the organization of Expo 2020 Dubai and Expo 2025 Osaka

Japan should apologize profusely for its disgrace to the world and ideally compensate for the money spent by dissatisfied tourists with the low quality of the Expo 2025.

What was done well

Compared to Dubai Expo 2020, Japan had some really good decisions:

1. In many pavilions, people were encouraged to sit on the floor to watch the activities, but at the expo in the Emirates, people had to stand.
2. Themed music around the pavilions.
3. The pavilions of small countries were grouped in large pavilions and were presented much better than at the previous expo.
4. There were two chain Japanese markets on the expo grounds with the usual cheap food prices. At the expo in the Emirates, there was only expensive food.
5. If there is a queue in front of the pavilions, you can take an umbrella from the sun. In the Emirates, there were no queues, because everything was available through online reservations, so it is difficult to compare this aspect.