Can Expo rekindle Japan’s spark?

Visitors posing at the site of Osaka’s 1970 World Expo, now a park, in Osaka, Japan. This year’s Expo is stirring memories of the earlier exhibition, when postwar Japan was taking off and possibilities were limitless. — Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

WHEN Osaka first hosted the World Expo in 1970, a quarter-century after World War II, Japan’s economy was newly affluent and expanding so rapidly that it was hailed as an economic miracle. The Expo broadcast that momentum to the world.

It was the first World Expo – a tradition dating to 1851 where countries gather to show off their cultures and achievements – to be held in Asia.