The Campaign

The entertaining installation space, combining digital technology and traditional art, presents aspects of Japanese food culture – such as spiritual approach to food, and traditional wisdom passed on in farming villages. Rather than being limited to a folkloric showcasing of Japanese culture, the innovative use of technology and art succeeds in offering an emotional experience, encouraging visitors to feel more involved and personal, and to see Japan and their own country as sharing the same future.

Creative Execution

[Prologue] Visual art using calligraphy and painting tells the story of coexistence of nature and people. Treating calligraphy as moving images, it became accessible to people who don’t read Japanese. [Harmony] Four seasons of the Japanese rice fields are recreated with digital imagery, using the whole room as the medium. Paddies are expressed with a series of waist-high sculptural screens. In spring, Watered paddies with green seedlings attract little creatures; as visitors walk into the screens, sensors detect the movement, and little fish gather around them. In autumn, golden fields are reflected by mirror effect and spread endlessly in all directions, where villagers celebrate harvest.

During the 184-day season, 2,280,000 people visited the Japan Pavilion. That amounts to 1 in 10 of total Expo visitors. In a survey conducted by an Italian agricultural organization, Japanese Pavilion was voted number one as the most popular pavilion. The Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera gave a favorable review, recognizing the “balance of the poetical and the high-tech” of the Japan Pavilion. The word spread through various media, resulting in 9-hour-long waiting lines at peak periods. In the Pavilion Prizes awarded by BIE (Bureau International des Expositions), Japan Pavilion was awarded gold (the best prize) for installation design. This is the first time ever that a Japanese Pavilion has received the gold award.

We presented the beautiful four seasons of the Japanese countryside by using the space as a whole as a visual medium. The deeply immersive environment offered the visitors a completely new and moving experience.

Young and old, men and women, from all around the world, who might not have an opportunity to actually come to Japan. Regardless of the language they speak, our exhibition aimed to communicate through the visitors’ senses, offering an entertaining virtual landscape that recreated four seasons in the Japanese countryside. A deeply immersive effect was achieved with the use of interactive sensing technology, as well as the 1200 sculptural screens likened to a field of rice stalks. Each stalk comprises a circular screen, 350 millimeters across, lying flat on a shaft and coming up to an adult’s waist. By making the shaft structure flexible, the visitors were able to walk among the screens, experiencing a unique sensation of wading through the images.