August 2020, a government livestream almost nobody outside Japan is watching. Five red shapes, each sprouting a different number of rolling, lidless eyeballs, splitting apart and rejoining like something under a microscope that has decided to misbehave. This is the official logo for Expo 2025 Osaka, revealed with the kind of ceremony usually reserved for a national flag.
The reaction online arrives almost instantly, and it is not relief. Kimochi warui — unsettling, skin-crawling — becomes the phrase of the week. Someone compares it, not fondly, to cosmic horror. By most measures available to a government logo, this one has failed in public, in real time, in front of the entire country.
Fast-forward to 24 August 2026. The Expo itself has been closed for over ten months. Keihachi Fukunishi, 85, and his wife Akiyo, also 85, walk into Osaka city hall and each hand the mayor a certificate for two hundred million yen — four hundred million yen between them — with one request attached: build the cosmic-horror blob a statue. A big one.
What the logo was actually trying to say got lost almost entirely in the reaction to how it looked. The red sections are cells, dividing and multiplying; the blue sections are water, chosen because water takes whatever shape its container gives it. Designer Kohei Yamashita turned the design into an actual character in 2022, picked from a nationwide open call that drew 1,898 submissions, and a separate committee of judges, celebrities among them, settled on the name Myaku-Myaku. That name is not an invented coo for a heartbeat. 脈々, myakumyaku, already existed in Japanese before any of this, and it describes something passed down through generations in an unbroken line: a tradition, a bloodline, a skill a grandparent hands to a grandchild, continuing precisely because nobody let it stop. Japan had, apparently without noticing the irony, given its unsettling cosmic-horror government mascot a name that translates roughly to legacy.
Once a costumed Myaku-Myaku started wobbling around the Expo grounds after it opened in April 2025 — blinking, swaying, letting toddlers hug a torso made of cells — the online mood reversed almost completely. Lines formed outside the official merchandise shops; goods sales reportedly reached close to 80 billion yen by that August alone, enough that organisers extended sales two full years past the Expo's October 2025 closing date, through March 2028. Myaku-Myaku displays became specific targets for shoplifters, stolen plushies turning up for resale online within hours. In an internal popularity poll among the Expo's dozens of pavilion mascots, Myaku-Myaku didn't even win — that went to Circular, the German pavilion's mascot — and it barely seemed to matter, because by then it had stopped competing with other mascots and started competing only with its own 2020 reputation.
That is the character the Fukunishis walked into city hall to fund. Local reports describe the couple as longtime Osaka business owners who simply wanted Myaku-Myaku to stay somewhere permanent, in a statue said to be planned at roughly 20 metres, sited near the former Expo grounds at Yumeshima — visible from a distance, the way a lighthouse is visible from a boat. Governor Hirofumi Yoshimura, thanking the couple publicly, said he'd like the final statue to be "Gundam-sized," using a real, enormous robot from Japanese animation as a unit of ambition rather than a joke. Mayor Hideyuki Yokoyama wants to fast-track planning so Myaku-Myaku can eventually stand near the Grand Ring's surviving arc, the other oversized structure the Expo left behind on the same island. The final height, site, and date were still unsettled at the time of the donation; a crowdfunding campaign is expected to cover what two private citizens, however generous, could not pay for alone.
Every retelling of this treats the ending as proof that Japan simply came around on a design it once hated — that the internet got tired of being cruel and switched to being fond instead. That undersells what actually happened. Nobody redesigned Myaku-Myaku between 2020 and 2026; the dividing cells and the rolling eyeballs are identical to the ones people called cosmic horror. What changed is that two people in their eighties looked at a character literally named for unbroken succession and decided the succession shouldn't break just because the event that created it already had. A mascot invented to represent generational continuity got handed four hundred million yen by people old enough to be somebody's grandparent, for the specific purpose of letting it keep existing past its own expiration date. The joke about cosmic horror was never really wrong. It just turned out the horror was supposed to keep multiplying — that was the design brief from the very start — and multiplying, given enough time and the right two donors, is also just what a legacy does.
- Expo 2025 Osaka's logo, unveiled in August 2020, drew immediate backlash online as "kimochi warui" (unsettling) and was likened to cosmic horror; the mascot built from it, Myaku-Myaku, was picked in March 2022 from 1,898 submitted design proposals by an official selection committee, designed by picture-book artist Kohei Yamashita, with its name — 脈々, an existing Japanese word for something handed down continuously across generations — chosen separately by a naming committee that included ten celebrities.
- After the costumed mascot began appearing at the Expo in April 2025, official Myaku-Myaku merchandise reportedly brought in close to 80 billion yen by the end of that August; sales were later extended two years past the Expo's October 2025 closing date, through March 2028, and the mascot's displays became frequent targets for shoplifters reselling stolen plushies online.
- On 24 August 2026, Osaka business owners Keihachi Fukunishi and his wife Akiyo, both 85, donated 200 million yen each — 400 million yen total — to Osaka city toward a planned permanent Myaku-Myaku statue reported at roughly 20 metres tall; governor Hirofumi Yoshimura said he would like the eventual statue to be "Gundam-sized."