Florence Tan at 22 posing in front of the Tower of the Sun at the World Expo in Osaka, 1970 (left), and at 77 years old at the World Expo in Osaka in May 2025 (right). - Courtesy of Florence Tan
SINGAPORE: She was 22 when she lived for three months in Osaka, one of four “Singapore girls” who represented the young Republic in its first World Expo outing in 1970.
Now 77, Florence Tan returned to the western Japan city’s second Expo in May 2025 - a visitor and the oldest contributor to the Singapore pavilion's display.
Much more discreet than the ethnic dresses and variously styled wigs that was her costume in 1970, her work this time is one of 15 small pieces of art printed on a wall of the pavilion’s cafe. Each was sieved from submissions to a nationwide open call.
World Expos are universal fairs for nations to flash their technological or cultural achievements, and have since the first edition in Britain, circa 1851, produced such monuments as The Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower.
Tan’s entry to the 36th World Expo in 2025 reflects a tender personal history.
Drawn up on what she waves away as “simple software”, the template disc is filled in with a ring of photos from her 1970 Osaka stint ending in a recent picture with her two grandchildren.
In the centre is a tagline she repeated several times while speaking to The Straits Times: “55 years…The romance continues.”
In fact, her part in the 1970 Expo had launched a love affair with its host country. It was her first time out of Singapore then and she was astonished by the changing of the seasons, said Tan, a retired businesswoman.
Florence Tan (second from left) and her fellow “Singapore girls” at the World Expo in Osaka, 1970. - Courtesy of Florence Tan
Even her attenuated diet – living off tinned curry and eggs from winter to spring – was an amusement. “My main aim was to save money,” she said, chuckling.
In mid life, she studied Japanese for three years at the Japanese Association and began to watch Japanese TV.
“I really appreciate all the fine things of Japan. They call it ikigai (a passion that gives joy to life), it’s a lifestyle,” said Tan.
A later interest in Japanese skincare led to a job selling Japanese beauty products – she was the first to stock the brand La Prairie, she explained – which she parlayed into her own salon. But really, “it’s about connection and relationships”.
Tan means it literally.
She has kept up a 55-year friendship with a local Osaka woman who worked as one of the Singapore girls, hired to make up for her and her Singapore Tourism Board colleagues’ then-paltry Japanese language skills, she said.
“You can learn a lot from them (the Japanese). Hospitality, cleanliness...” she said.
She met other delegations too. From the Germans, for example, she took steel, guts. “They are fierce and very professional,” she said, in effect validating – on a micro scale – the Expo’s contemporary stated purpose of global togetherness.
In 1970, 64 million people visited Osaka’s first Expo, as the Japanese post-war economy soared. Its second run is reportedly not pulling in the numbers.
Organisers had aimed for 28.2 million visitors over the six-month period of the Expo, or about 150,000 tickets daily. As of late April 2025, figures had petered to as low as 40,000 a day, at the fair, which far from its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th century, has come to be plagued by public cynicism or indifference.
But for Tan, the romance continues. - The Straits Times/ANN
