When I made my second visit to the Yeosu World Exposition last week with a small group of friends, road signs led our minivan into a vast parking area located in the petrochemical complex 15 kilometers away from the Expo site in the port city’s New Harbor. (On the earlier visit in mid-May, our buses had been allowed direct access to the Expo ground.)
The parking zone established in a landfill area was scantily occupied by cars and many shuttle buses were awaiting visitors to transport them to the Expo. As we arrived at one of the four entrances and passed through the metal detectors, there were more “doumi” volunteers than visitors.
But once inside the Expo ground, we met the usual hustle and bustle of a festival. Long queues were formed at the aquarium and other “popular” pavilions. A magician wowed people with fantastic tricks, giants juggled and human robots moved about under the long, high ceiling of a “digital gallery” displaying all kinds of letters and pictures.
Ethnic foods are served at reasonable prices beside national pavilions where high-tech devices, videos and live performances tell important themes related to ocean life and marine industries.
The Yeosu World Exposition has a month to go in its 93-day run and organizers seem to be anxious about how close the actual number of visitors will approach the originally expected 9 million.
The 25-hectare (63 acre) exhibition site is adequately crowded every day with viewers from near and far, although the daily tally was hovering between 50,000 and 60,000. If the daily average rises to 100,000 during the final month with schools in summer recess, the total number of visitors would still remain somewhere at two-thirds of the target figure. By now I suspect that they just had overblown expectations on the volume of entrants.
The government and private investors spent 2 trillion won ($1.75 billion) on the Yeosu Expo, half of which went to the construction of exhibition facilities and the other half to the infrastructure in the surrounding areas. Revenues from ticket sales will cover only a small portion of the cost and it will take a long time to make a judgment on whether the second world expo in Korea in two decades ― after the first in Daejeon in 1993 ― was a success in garnering economic benefits estimated at 18 trillion won.
The Yeosu Expo surely has good “content.” There are many informative, entertaining and even awe-inspiring exhibits, and one would need at least a week to look into all major exhibitions showing what mankind could and should do with the ocean and coasts. The problem with the Yeosu Expo is that it is simply too far from the nation’s population centers. And people are reluctant to spend more than one day to see a single event, even if it is a “world exposition.”
This contrasts the great enthusiasm Koreans have showed over the past decades to host major international events. We hosted the 24th Summer Olympics in 1988, the FIFA World Cup (together with Japan) in 2002 and have won the right to hold the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. A world fair raises Korea’s prestige in the international community and the organizers were just a little too ambitious in estimating the number of visitors.
It was in 1997 that Huh Kyung-man, then governor of South Jeolla Province, first conceived the idea of hosting a world exposition in the port city of Yeosu near his hometown of Suncheon. The project won the backing of the central government as Kim Dae-jung who hailed from South Jeolla was elected president. A bidding committee was formed jointly by the provincial and central governments but the first application failed as the 2010 registered (major) exposition went to Beijing.
Yeosu made a second bid in 2005 and won the 2012 specialized (minor) exposition after a three-way competition with Tangier, Morocco and Wroclav (Breslau), Poland. It was a dream come true for the people of Yeosu, an old port on the South Coast which, until the 1960s, was known as a center of smuggling to and from Japan.
The construction of a petrochemical complex in nearby Yeocheon had brought pollution problems to the area and the establishment of POSCO’s second iron and steel mill and a container terminal in Gwangyang Bay further eclipsed Yeosu.
Governor Huh may have had certain political ambition ― he was reelected in 1998 ― but he had the right vision to upgrade the picturesque “Dadohae” meaning “the sea of many islands” to an international center of marine transportation, industries and leisure. Hosting a world fair could expedite the process although it sounded too quixotic at first.
Since Yeosu was confirmed as the host of the 2012 Expo in a BIE vote in 2007, the actual funding for preparations was slow arguably due to the change of government. Work on the Expo site started as late as in November 2009 along with the construction of new bridges and extension of highways and railroads. The 2nd Dolsan Bridge, Yi Sun Shin Bridge and Myodo Bridge were completed barely in time for the May 12 opening of the world fair in the Korean pattern of last-minute spurt in public work projects.
We can say the development of Yeosu and its vicinity has been advanced by at least 10 years thanks to the world fair. With the addition of permanent facilities such as the aquarium and the marine biological center and the new cruise pier and railway station, Yeosu will become an anchor for a triangular marine tourism linking Jeju Island to the south and Busan port to the east.
If Kang Dong-seok, chairman of the Yeosu Expo Organizing Committee known for his energy and efficiency, made a little miscalculation about the size of visitors, he does not have to be too apologetic. He could blame it on the location of Yeosu and Koreans’ still short time for leisure. I am afraid it would have been quite a chaotic world fair if it had twice as many visitors as it now has.
By Kim Myong-sik
Kim Myong-sik, former director of the Korea Overseas Information Service, was a member of the advisory panel for the Yeosu Exposition Bidding Committee. ― Ed.