One Colossal Binge

Undeterred by an unseasonal dusting of snow, Emperor Hirohito and several other members of the imperial family trooped into their private box last week as the strains of Kimi-ga-yo, Japan's national anthem, wafted over the Senri Hills near Osaka. While multicolored flags and paper cranes swirled about them in the brisk breezes, cannons boomed a five-gun salute and a 100-piece orchestra blared Fanfare of the 21st Century, a piece specially written by composer Masaru Sato. Then two giant robots clanked into Festival Plaza, disgorging 110 members of a children's band who launched into the Expo March. Japan's gaudy Expo '70 was officially under way.

World's fairs have been a Western fixture ever since Britain's Prince Albert staged his Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851. But this--astonishingly--is the first world's fair ever to be held in Asia. The site is eminently suitable. Japan, all but crushed at the end of World War II, has far outdistanced every Asian nation, and most of those in the West, in an amazing economic surge that has carried it into third place (behind the U.S. and the Soviet Union) among the world's industrial giants. Gaudy, opulent, bursting at the seams, Expo '70 stands as the supreme symbol of Japan's growing self-confidence and strength.

At least, that is how its hosts feel about it. "Subarashii [terrific]!" said Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, after a pre-opening tour. "This is not a statement of the 20th century but one of the 21st --a good expression of our national power."

Animals No More. Two years of intensive preparations and more than $2 billion (a large part of it for new roads, subways and housing to handle the mobs) have gone into Expo. "Why not?" asked Taizo Ishizaka, president of the Japan Expo Association. "Once in a blue moon, we Japanese must indulge in one colossal binge." Another Japanese businessman, commenting on the cost, predicted: "Nobody outside Japan is going to call us economic animals any longer. If we were, we wouldn't have spent so much for such a thing."

Seventy-seven countries and one colony (Hong Kong) have pavilions on the 815-acre Expo site. The U.S. exhibit, catering to the baseball-mad Japanese, features Babe Ruth's uniform, a lunar module and a genuine moon rock. The Russians are showing the two Soyuz rockets that docked in space in 1969, as well as a replica of the elegant 19th century room of Composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, complete with his actual grand piano.

Fair officials say they expect 50 million Japanese (roughly half the country's population) as well as 1,000,000 foreigners to visit Expo. Japanese police are ready to offer a special greeting to 203 guests--internationally known pickpockets whose biographies and photos have been supplied by Interpol; the police are also on the lookout for 482 outstanding locals.

New Version. What worries officials most of all, though, is the prospect of horrendous traffic jams and an acute shortage of hotel rooms. The Osaka area is heavily booked and even the tiny ryokan, or country inns, are doing good business. Tokyo, 250 miles north, is jammed as well.

It was in anticipation of the overflow from Osaka, in fact, that the owners of Tokyo's famed Imperial Hotel timed the opening of a brand-new version last week. Two years ago, wrecking crews razed Architect Frank Lloyd Wright's splendid, low-profile building, which withstood the great earthquake of 1923 and thereby became a legend. In its stead there now stands a 17-story, $60 million structure of intersecting bronzed slabs, capable of accommodating 2,400 guests. The front courtyard and main lobby of Wright's Imperial were carefully dismantled and stored near Nagoya, south of Tokyo. They are scheduled to be reassembled in a Japanese equivalent of colonial Williamsburg, but enough money has not yet been found to pay for reconstruction. All that remains of the original Imperial in the new hotel is a 6-ft. by 5-ft. slab of green-tinted lava rock. It serves as a room divider in one of the bars.

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