In early May, Osaka Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura traveled to South Africa to attend a Japan-Africa economic meeting and chat up Osaka's efforts to host the 2025 World Expo. At the gathering were representatives from dozens of African countries, though it is not clear how many actually had earnest talks with him.
Yoshimura's reason for traveling halfway around the world for a couple of days was simple. Of the 170 members of the Paris-based Bureau International des Expositions, nearly a third are from Africa. Their votes will be crucial when the BIE awards the 2025 Expo in November.
Yoshimura's foray into this kind of international lobbying was preceded by plenty of "administrative guidance," which in the previous century was recognized among foreign businesses and Japan scholars as a euphemism for "tight bureaucratic control." In this case, those who guided Yoshimura included not only smiling suits from the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry and the Foreign Ministry, but also the Japanese business community.