Shoji Kawamori, an iconic figure in Japanese animation and a visionary creator, is distinguished by his ability to merge art, technology, and philosophy. For Expo 2025 in Osaka, he unveils two major projects for the Signature Pavilion LIVE EARTH JOURNEY which mark a turning point in immersive experiences.
Since his earliest works, such as the creation of the Valkyrie for the Macross series, Shoji Kawamori has consistently sought to push the boundaries of storytelling and visual representation. His approach is distinguished by the integration of new technologies that serve to impress the audience, but also to enrich the audience's understanding and experience of the profound themes he explores. For Expo 2025, he wants to create works that actively engage the viewer in a dialogue between the human and the digital, highlighting technology's ability to forge new and profound connections between individuals while also stimulating reflection on contemporary global challenges. Each of Kawamori's projects is an attempt to make tangible the idea that technology, when used wisely, can open new doors to understanding life, the universe, and ourselves.
The recurring theme that unites 499seconds My Gattai and Adventures of Life, the two main experiences of the LIVE EARTH JOURNEY Pavilion, is that of transformation. In a world of constant change, where society and the environment evolve at a frenetic pace, Kawamori explores how these transformations affect our daily lives and our perception of life itself. Through visual metaphors, he invites us to reflect on the fluidity of existence, on how each moment can lead to a new form of self.
What inspired you to merge reality and virtuality in such an immersive way?
Shoji Kawamori: My original motivation came from a desire to reconnect people emotionally with the awe-inspiring processes of life. Science gives us powerful tools (rationality, objectivity) but those qualities alone can make life feel abstract, detached. We can watch a scientifically accurate video about the sun or about microbes, and yet remain emotionally untouched. That disconnect bothered me. I began to ask: how can we make this knowledge personal? How can we feel it in our body, in our soul?
That’s where XR technology became essential. Through extended reality, we can bypass the passive act of watching and instead immerse the viewer in an experience that feels subjective and intimate. You don’t just learn about photosynthesis, you become part of the energy cycle. You don’t just hear about marine plankton, you float with them. In this sense, virtuality isn’t an escape from reality, it becomes a means to rediscover just how miraculous our everyday reality truly is.
What fascinates me is how mundane things are in fact incredible, once you step outside the habitual way of seeing. I wanted LIVE EARTH JOURNEY to serve as an emotional gateway into these overlooked phenomena. The virtual tools allow us to re-experience the real.
What were the biggest challenges in creating this kind of multi-sensory, immersive environment, especially when dealing with XR and related technologies?
Shoji Kawamori: One of the main challenges was conceptual. Today’s society is structured around human-centric thinking, around efficiency, specialization, and binary logic: win or lose, fast or slow, strong or weak. That kind of logic is useful, it’s how we build machines, airplanes, smartphones, but it doesn’t map well onto the natural world, where everything is fluid, interconnected, and adaptive.
When designing LIVE EARTH JOURNEY, I knew I didn’t want to simply build another futuristic showcase of human achievement. I wanted to shift the focus from humanity to life itself, to create an ecosystem-centered experience. That meant confronting deeply embedded ideas about hierarchy and function. In nature, things don’t exist for a single function. A bird doesn’t just fly, it sings, pollinates, raises young, transforms landscapes. It has an ecological role that’s multidimensional.
Another challenge was temporal: how do you compress these vast, interconnected lifecycles into a short immersive experience (15 or 30 minutes) and still make people feel them? The answer was to lean into emotion, not just information. I wanted to create a space where the viewer could intuitively sense the intelligence of nature, not through data points, but through experience, by being the fish, the algae, the solar beam. Only through that can we begin to dissolve the boundaries of self and rediscover our place in the living continuum.
And then, of course, there’s the problem of technological limitations. XR environments tend to isolate users in a digital bubble, disconnected from the surrounding ecosystem. My team and I had to find ways to use technology not as an isolating force, but as a connective one. It’s a paradox, using artificial systems to deepen our awareness of organic life. But I believe the arts can guide technology in that direction.
In your pavilion’s narrative arc, from the microscopic to the cosmic, from the roots of the world to the future, I sense a spiritual resonance, perhaps even a link to the Tree of Life and the Tower of the Sun at Expo 1970. Was that an influence?
Shoji Kawamori: Absolutely. I visited Expo ’70 in Osaka when I was ten years old, and it changed my life. I was already fascinated by technology, but the thing that made the deepest impression on me was the Tower of the Sun by Tarō Okamoto. It wasn’t just a sculpture, it was a being. It had presence. It had personality. And it wasn’t merely art, it was a character. That character embodied a mythic vision of life that transcended logic and language.
I remember seeing various masks displayed around the Tower, some golden, some tribal. They reminded me of the Jōmon period, where masks were used to transform the wearer, to become animal or spirit. That ancient concept stuck with me, that a mask isn’t just a disguise, it’s a portal into other ways of being. In that sense, my career has always been about creating masks, robots, mecha, characters, that allow us to explore different identities.
In LIVE EARTH JOURNEY, I’ve taken that idea a step further. The pavilion becomes a kind of mask for the visitor. You become sunlight, you become water, you become life itself. By stepping out of the human point of view, even briefly, you can begin to understand humanity from the outside. That perspective is both humbling and illuminating. I see it as an homage to the Tower of the Sun, another structure that merged the spiritual, the artistic, and the biological.
Expo 2025 will bring together visitors from all over the world. What message would you most like to share with them through LIVE EARTH JOURNEY?
Shoji Kawamori: We live in an age that talks a lot about diversity, but often reduces it to categories, gender, race, identity, treated as boxes to compare or quantify. But true diversity is not just social. It’s biological. Emotional. Planetary.
Technology, for all its brilliance, is based on standardization, repeatable, measurable outcomes. That’s essential for making machines, but life doesn’t work that way. Life is messy, fluid, unpredictable. One function does not define an organism. A tree offers shade, absorbs carbon, shelters birds, communicates underground. You cannot isolate its value to a single metric.
I want people to rediscover the multifaceted beauty of life, its irrationality, its poetry, its cycles of death and regeneration. The convenience of technology should never blind us to the luminous reality that’s already around us.
Japan, in a way, still holds onto something ancient, animism, the sense that all things have spirit. That’s a thread we’ve preserved, sometimes unconsciously, even as we chased Western models of progress. Now I think we’re entering a time when that ancient sensitivity is no longer something to hide, but to share.
My hope is that this pavilion doesn’t just deliver an impressive show, but sparks a shift in how we define intelligence, value, and life. It’s not about man vs. machine, or nature vs. technology. Those are false dichotomies. It’s about creating a new perspective, three-dimensional, inclusive, alive, where all forms of being are interconnected. If we can feel that even for a moment, then LIVE EARTH JOURNEY has done its job.
Through his projects for Expo 2025, Shoji Kawamori offers a radically new vision of the future, one in which art, technology, and the transformation of life intertwine to offer an immersive, sensory, and collective experience. His projects are invitations to profound reflection on our place in an interconnected, constantly evolving world, in which we can envision a future in which we are actors in our own transformation.
