02-12-2026 – Learning from Japan: Expos Past, Present and Future with Angus Lockyer

Thursday, February 12
4 PM – 5:30 PM
121 Bay State Road, Boston MA

Please register here.

Last summer saw crowds flocking to Expo 2025 on a reclaimed island in Osaka Bay. This may be a surprise, given its absence in the western media and the assumption among many that the age of expos is over. In this talk, we’ll explore why expos are still a going concern. We’ll start with a report from Osaka, then travel back in time, to understand how Japan got there, adopting the form of modern expos from the West in the 19th century, but also adapting it over the course of the 20th as a tool for development. Drawing on a recently-published book, the story will take us from early 18th-century exhibitions — materia medica, exotic animals, animated puppets, and revealed deities — through industry and empire, war and peace, technology and environment. We won’t have time to look at all the 1,300-plus expos Japan has seen in the last 150 years. But we’ll see enough to understand how Japan’s use of them has served its own needs, and provided a model that continues to be adopted beyond its borders.

Angus Lockyer was educated in Dorset, Cambridge, Seattle, and California, and has taught Japanese, East Asian, and global history in North Carolina and London. Exhibitionist Japan: The Spectacle of Modern Development was published by Cambridge University Press earlier this year. Japan: A History in Objects, based on the collection of the British Museum, will come out from Thames and Hudson in early 2026. He currently lives in Rhode Island and teaches at Rhode Island School of Design.