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The speech made by Lisa Nandy, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport on 22 May 2025.

Good evening everyone. Konbanwa .

It’s a pleasure to welcome you all to the UK’s Pavilion to celebrate our National Day at the Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai. I would especially like to extend a warm welcome to Her Imperial Highness Princess Akiko of Mikasa and former Prime Minister Kishida, both good friends of the United Kingdom.

The UK and Japan bilateral relationship is the strongest it has been in decades, underpinned by our common values, shared view of the world and our close people-to-people links. From security to economic growth and working together to tackle global challenges, our partnership is going from strength to strength. This step-up in collaboration was launched under the 2023 Hiroshima Accord – with thanks to former Prime Minister Kishida – and last year Prime Ministers Starmer and Ishiba agreed to build on it even further. The State Visit to the UK by Their Majesties the Emperor and Empress of Japan in June last year celebrated the depth and breadth of our partnership – as His Majesty the Emperor said, ‘we are friends like no other’.

I have seen this partnership first-hand here in Japan. And if you have had a chance to go through our visitor experience today, you will have seen the power of UK and Japanese collaboration. We can achieve so much more when we harness our shared creativity and innovation. In this spirit, the National Ballet of Japan makes their European debut at the Royal Opera House in London with their production of “Giselle” in July, under the artistic direction of Yoshida Miyako, who made her career as the first Japanese Principal ballerina in the UK’s Royal Ballet.

Ours is a partnership that is more relevant than ever. With growing uncertainty and instability around the world, there is so much that the UK and Japan can do together to ‘design future society for our lives’. This is, I believe, the defining challenge of our lives – to empower people the world over to build a world that works for us, and us for it.

So, I am delighted to be launching Musubi: a flagship new initiative that will foster meaningful people-to-people connections between the UK and Japan and build the shared leadership to tackle the challenges and opportunities ahead of us.

That includes championing our young people and building a pool of international talent. And today we are announcing:

• A new Musubi Scholarship with University College London, supported by Amano Enzyme Inc.;
• A Youth Offshore Wind Scholarship Programme with SSE Pacifico to foster future talent in this dynamic sector; and * The Robert Walters career development programme to help our brightest young people reach their full potential.
• It includes drawing on the power of sport to build connections and enrich lives. Where:
• 2025 Premier League winners Liverpool Football Club’s International Academy in Kawasaki is developing young players and providing opportunities to build leadership qualities.
• And the UK Ekiden – inspired of course by Japan’s famous relay race – is bringing teams together in a celebration of teamwork, connection and friendship.

And it includes building the leadership of the future.  Later this summer at this Pavilion the UK and Japan will host an event focused on promoting female leadership in business, building on the fact that our agreement with Japan was the first UK trade agreement to include a chapter on women’s economic empowerment.

All of this will be championed by our Musubi Friendship Ambassador – Hello Kitty, presented by Sanrio.

This is the most ambitious initiative of its kind between the UK and Japan – but it is also just the beginning. Over the years to come, this initiative will continue to grow – building a lasting legacy of connections and opportunity for our countries. Thank you to all our Pioneer Partners – and I hope to see many other companies and organisations joining us on this journey! I am now delighted to introduce a congratulatory message from The Princess Royal in her capacity as Chancellor of the University of London.

Finally, this event and indeed our pavilion itself would not have been possible without our key sponsors and contributors: I would especially like to thank AstraZeneca, Aston Martin, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Diageo’s Johnnie Walker, Robert Walters, Liberty, the governments of Scotland and Wales, Ampetronic, Brompton and last but certainly not least, BBC Studios.

Finally, I would like to thank everyone here this evening – I’m delighted that we have been able to gather so many of the UK’s closest friends in Japan, and I know with your support the UK-Japan partnership will continue to flourish. Arigato gozaimasu!

The speech made by Lisa Nandy, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport on 22 May 2025.

Your Imperial Highness, your excellency and esteemed guests. It is a great honour to be hosting the UK’s National Day celebrations here at Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai

Let me start by offering my congratulations to the Government of Japan, the Expo Association and everyone involved in organising Expo 2025. In today’s world where many want to focus on differences and divisions, it is no mean feat to bring together over 150 countries with a shared goal of “designing future society for our lives.” I am very much looking forward to seeing more of this amazing Expo site in the course of today.

Expo 2025 is very much about a global conversation, and within that global conversation, the UK and Japan have a particularly strong partnership. Our bilateral relationship is the strongest it has been in decades, underpinned by our common values, shared view of the world and our close people-to-people links. As His Majesty the Emperor said on his State Visit to the UK in June last year, we are ‘friends like no other’.

The UK has a long history with Expos – going back to 1851 when the first ever EXPO was held in London – and a long history with Japan, from the arrival of William Adams/Miura-Anjin in 1600 to the Choshu 5 travelling to Britain in the mid-19th century to learn about the Industrial Revolution which was transforming my country and the world.

The Japanese pioneers who travelled to Britain learnt much about our industrial prowess, bringing that technology back to Japan helping to transform Japan into the thriving, technologically advanced nation it is today. It is especially pertinent to reflect that one of those pioneers who ventured as far as Manchester went on to found the Osaka Chamber of Commerce, giving rise to Osaka’s tremendous growth. So our links are long and very relevant to this region. I am personally delighted as someone who was born in Manchester to see those links between Manchester and Osaka grow ever stronger.

It was the sharing of technology and ideas which drove the UK-Japan relationship then, and still drives it now. And it is that belief in the power of ideas to build the future that lies at the heart of the UK pavilion at Expo. The UK’s theme at Expo 2025 is Come Build The Future. It is about the power of small ideas to come together, as children do with building blocks, to create something magical and potentially world-changing.

We are a country of ideas that thrives on diversity, on a special mix of tradition and modernity. Our ancient universities drive world leading research, our whiskies and gins are still made to centuries old recipes, produced using cutting edge technology by a new generation of female distillers, our historic playhouses showcase the newest creative talents; and our small island is home to people from every country on the globe and has a capital city where over 300 languages are spoken.

Today our National Day offers a snapshot of that, underlining the message of partnership: the Edinburgh Military Tattoo will perform with taiko drummers, later today the BBC Planet Earth Live III concert will be performed by the Osaka based Century orchestra with a renowned UK conductor, and musicians from across the four nations of the UK will connect with new Japanese audiences.

I said earlier that the UK-Japan partnership is stronger than ever. This is evident from our ever-deepening economic and trade ties, through CPTPP, our collaboration on the green agenda, in defence, security, and digital technologies. But today I want to draw attention to the powerful cultural and people-to-people connections between our countries which underpin that partnership. I want to salute the power of the creative industries, of our story-tellers, to bring people together to entertain and delight, and to cross divides of language and culture.

Later today, as part of our National Day, we are bringing the Japanese premiere of BBC’s Planet Earth III Live in concert to the Expo Hall. The BBC will be well known to all of you – it has an average global reach of 450 million people across the world, bringing both independent news you can trust and award-winning television – both drama and documentary. Their BBC Earth natural world documentaries have been seen by a quarter of a billion people and have inspired positive environmental change across the world. Planet Earth, by transforming abstract climate data into personal, emotional experiences, has motivated viewers to care and take action to help shape a sustainable future.  Again, well aligned with our UK pavilion theme and that of Expo 2025.

For a partnership to flourish you need to bring not only ideas but also people together. That is why later today I shall be announcing a new form of UK-Japan partnership which focuses on that very idea of connection, of bringing people together. The UK and Japan have been connecting for hundreds of years. We want to make sure we continue to do that into the future too. We hope young – and old – visiting Expo 2025 and our pavilion will be inspired to connect globally and to seek out new ideas and new partners.

To make progress towards the SDGs and tackle the global challenges we all face, we need to come together to share our ideas, to use them as the building blocks of a better future. The UK is committed to doing that, to doing that in partnership with others and is delighted to be here at Expo 2025 to take that partnership still further.