expo 2005 photo essays
- weekly report from the World Exposition in Aichi, Japan

About this site

· What is this site about?

Here at expoessays.com you will find various essays and photographs concerning the EXPO 2005 in Aichi, Japan. The weekly updates are comprised of a mixture between a personal diary of my daily life and thougths and some articles about various topics concerning the World Exposition.

· Why this site?

Even though I came to Japan to work (and work hard), I still didn't want to stop there and quit writing altogether. I thought it a pity that even though the Expo offered lots of interesting topics and was supposed to address a worldwide audience, most people outside of Japan weren't able to experience it themselves. Also, working at the Expo lead to all kinds of funny and weird situations which I wanted to record since they might give you a clue about what makes this strange country tick. The site also had the distinct advantage of enabling me to share my thoughts and photographs with my friends and family back home.

The weekly Expo essays focused on various topics concerning the World Exposition with some personal episodes thrown in. Whereas in the first weeks I tried to convey the general atmosphere of the Expo, after a while the articles turned into mere criticism of the blunders of the Japanese side. As you will soon realize upon reading these pages, I never hesitated to rebuke the organizational failures and the disagreeable treatment of (especially foreign) staff at the Expo. It must be stated, however, that I never expressed the general opinions of, say, the foreign community at the Expo (if there was anything that could be called that). Also, lest you be mistaken about it, I do not wish to make general comments about the Japanese as a people or even "race" (this is for you people who accuse me of being racist). So please keep in mind that all expressed opinions on this site are highly subjective and - in some cases - not politically correct.

· Can I reuse the photographs for my site?

The photographs I take here play a vital role in some of the weekly updates. In case you are interested in this kind of technical information, I am taking all of my pictures with a Kyocera Finecam SL400R. The image size in my photo gallery is not great but reasonable and still good enough to make out details on the photographs.

Now, you might be tempted to reuse these images for "other purposes", say, your web site about Japan, print publications etc. In this respect, I count on your fairness that you don't use these pictures in any malignant way (i. e. commercial use) without asking for permission beforehand. As you can see on this site (and all of my other web sites), I don't make any money of this by including advertisements or partnership programs. This philosophy of course includes that no one else will be exploiting my content. If you want to reuse some photographs or content on your website or otherwise (like I do with some web images "stolen" from other sites) that is fine with me and I am more than happy to hear about it - drop me an email.

· Why did you steal some images and/or photographs from my web site without asking?

I took the liberty of posting images collected the web in my web images gallery. These are mostly images appearing on other web sites about the Expo, but also quite a number of personal photographs published on the net. The reason for this is that it is much easier for me to keep an image database organized if they are located on my server; also, it takes way too much time to check for dead links leading to other web sites about the Expo (most of which will disappear from the net over the next few months anyway, as I know from previous experience). If you do not agree with your intellectual property appearing on my site don't call your lawyer - please contact me by email first and let me sort things out. I'm not amalgamating foreign content to pretend it's mine, I just want to use these images for illustration's sake. Also keep in mind that hotlinking your images from my site would ultimately cause traffic for your account. (And let's face it, if your photographs appear here it may also mean that yours are much better than the ones I took myself)

· Who is writing this?

My name is Manuel Derra, and I worked at the German pavilion at the Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan. Last time around I wrote the Nippon Photo Diary (in German) when I was studying in Osaka. Apart from that I am running a bunch of other websites, most notably the William Gibson aleph. If you wish to contact me about the site, you may do so via my mail address, or you can find me on Myspace.