Today, I volunteered at the Accessibility Center of Osaka Expo 2025. You may not be familiar with the term “Accessibility Center”. Osaka Expo 2025 aims to be an Expo that can be enjoyed easily by all kind of guests including physical disabilities.

For this reason, the Accessibility Center lends out wheelchairs and hearing amplifiers free of charge to guests with walking or hearing disabilities. I provided support for wheelchair rental at the Accessibility Center.

Wheelchairs and hearing amplifiers can be borrowed free of charge, but reservations cannot be made, so on the day of the visiting, you will need to go directly to the Accessibility Center next to the East and West Gates to complete the reception procedure. It was just after the opening of the Expo, and there were still few visitors, but depending on the model of machines, the inventory for rental may be low, and I was a little worried about whether the equipment would function properly even if the number of visitors increased in the future. In the future, I strongly wish improvement such as increasing the number of units in stock will be made.

The Accessibility Center is located outside the entrance gate, and you need to go through the procedures such as loaning before entering the venue. However, when visitors look at the map, it can be considered that it is located exactly on the border, so some people entered without getting a loan, left temporarily and then re-entered, so be careful.

Japan Pavilion

After volunteering, I visited the pavilion of the host government. The exhibits were centered on algae, which is expected to be a future source of many materials such as energy and food, and there were some interesting points, but I personally didn’t like the exhibit that used popular characters to show the diversity of the many algae that exist.

Also, the highlight of the exhibit was a rock from Mars that arrived on Earth as a meteorite, but the controlling flow of visitors in front of the exhibit was not well managed, and the inside of the museum was quite chaotic. Since it is also the pavilion of the host country, I felt that immediate improvement was necessary (I guess it was improved quickly because an acquaintance of mine said that there were no problems when he visited later).