Word: expo
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...handheld device like Sony's PSP or the Nintendo DS. It doesn't have the in-house multimedia expertise Sony has, or Nintendo's big-time kids' franchises like Mario and Pokémon. All three companies will be showing off their demos at this week's Electronic Entertainment Expo...
...Standard World's Fair fare, really. But what's different about the Nagoya exhibition is this: when the show is over in September and all 15 million expected visitors have gone home, the government will raze the expo, recycle the construction materials and reinstate the children's park. Other former expo host cities may proudly flout their rusting space needles and rocket-ride pavilions on postcards as reminders of glory days past, but not Nagoya. This city is moving too fast to be anchored down by white elephants-in-waiting. After all, in 30 years we may all be breathing...
...Above all, Nagoyans do not see themselves as quaint-not now, not in the future. Ditching the expo is the kind of unconventional thinking that has turned greater Nagoya (pop. 7.2 million) into Japan's most vibrant region. While the rest of the country wheezes in and out of the economic recovery room, Aichi prefecture has become Japan's most reliable and energetic commercial engine. Specializing in high-value, high-tech manufacturing, Aichi has posted one of the top economic growth rates in the nation in recent years. It boasts one of the lowest unemployment rates, the second highest household...
...Kanda claims to be baffled by all the attention his city is getting in the run-up to the expo. "We are just doing what we have always been doing," he says with the humility of a people known throughout Japan as kenjitsu (rock solid). Compared with residents of Osaka, where personal and corporate bankruptcy rates are among the highest in the nation, Nagoyans are frugal. Local companies resisted making foolish bets during the bubble years, hence avoiding most of the damage from the crash. To this day, Nagoya companies sport some of the lowest debt loads in the country...
...with careful cost controls. (In the rest of Japan, many public-works projects are case studies in waste.) The airport, headed by former Toyota executive Yukihisa Hirano and half funded by the private sector, was almost $1 billion under budget when it opened last month. Combined with the World Expo, it may help local leaders to build an international profile to match its rising domestic status. But will that "Nagoya Gal" look play abroad...