Two casual notes today.
【Osaka Expo】
I went to the Osaka Expo.
Bottom line: it was really good. The pavilion buildings are beautiful (personally I was blown away by how cool the China pavilion is), and the circular wooden Grand Ring is a wonderful idea.
Almost everything made me feel it would be a waste to tear it down once the Expo ends.
The restrooms were well maintained and clean, and there wasn't that much of a toilet queue either — impressive.
That said, it was brutally unfriendly to first-timers — the kind of operational gaps the media has written about showed up in many places.
And yes, the lottery-booking UI everyone complains about is terrible. I planned a weekday midday visit, reserved two weeks ahead, tried two-weeks-before, three-days-before, and same-day lotteries — lost them all, and got zero pavilion reservations.
Blogger Yoppy's article covers it in detail, so read that.
Quoting directly: the optimal strategy is "Buy tickets as early as possible, enter every advance reservation — two months before, seven days before, three days before — line up at the gate before opening, and the moment you enter at 9 a.m., hammer same-day slots with both your phone and the venue terminals."
It requires Disney-hardcore-level hacking. By any measure, someone like me who casually decides to go can't fully enjoy it that way.
You can still get into pavilions by lining up same-day without a reservation — but with this absurd heat wave, waiting out there? For me, obviously no. Too much stress, and the body wouldn't hold.
Rest areas don't have enough chairs either, and there were benches baking in direct sun that nobody could sit on — what's the point?
I went with solid sunscreen, a parasol, and a cooling towel around my neck. Without those I'd have been about five times more exhausted — it's that hot.
I went in expecting that missing the pavilions was fine if I could soak up the atmosphere, so I was satisfied — but if your expectations were higher, it would be rough.
If I lived in Tokyo and had come specifically for the Expo, I might have been pretty disappointed.
Still, amid all the criticism and mockery, they actually pulled this off — I genuinely admire that. It's my hometown Osaka, so I have attachment too, and my gratitude is large.
Yumeshima, the host site in Osaka, is next planned as an IR (opening targeted for 2030), which should also help the finances — I hope they make it.
【Checking my coordinates】
As I wrote last time, ideas for blog posts have been harder to come by lately.
Not only blog topics — new thinking itself has gotten harder to generate.
Within that, if there's a time when thoughts come more easily, it's when I'm reading.
For me, especially when reading novels.
I often read after a bath before bed, so a relaxed brain is probably part of it — and maybe reliving characters' lives links to my own memories, or stirs some emotion.
But then, after a good experience like that, I end up thinking about reproducibility: what do I need to do to feel that good again?
The answer is of course just read a novel already — but if grit alone fixed it, the thought wouldn't arise in the first place.
Either way, time for novels matters a lot. But when I'm on my phone or thinking about work, I don't feel like reading.
In this age, people who can still read novels feel rare. Put bluntly, it might be an activity with terrible cost-performance.
Hitting a book that isn't interesting at all is pretty rough, after all.
The novel "Naruse Is Going to Take Over the World" was getting a lot of buzz, so I bought it. From the opening it wasn't interesting at all — it felt like a short-form video that had somehow become a novel.
Pushing through was painful, so I didn't. Novels are probably being asked for better cost-performance too.
Anyway — I feel like I've wandered off.
Right. Ah — while writing this I remembered what I wanted to write about: a recent sense of "checking my coordinates."
When I notice my attention getting scattered, I close my eyes once and ask, "Where are my coordinates right now?"
※ Setting aside whatever the original meaning is (like when you use "vector" to mean "direction" and a science undergrad flips out).
The image is: where am I now, and what state do I want to be in?
The physical "where" might be part of it — but also: what have I been wanting to spend time on lately, what worries do I have and how do I want things to turn out, how was I before and how am I now — that kind of thing.
Then thoughts feel like they gather, and something like focus comes back.
That's all.
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