By Kenji Nakanishi

8:00 JST, August 30, 2025

“Osaka reminds me a lot of Odesa,” Oleksii Sobolev told me in an interview at the Osaka-Kansai Expo this month.

Sobolev is Ukraine’s economy, environment and agriculture minister, appointed when President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reshuffled his Cabinet in July. He noted that the Japanese and Ukrainian cities share similarities as major port towns.

“Odesa, Osaka — it even sounds a bit similar.”

Odesa, a grain export port on the Black Sea, has been a target of intense missile and drone attacks by Russia. When the minister asked me, “Have you been to Odesa?” I replied, “No, but I watched the movie ‘Battleship Potemkin,’” referring to the internationally acclaimed Soviet-era silent film that was shot in that city. The minister responded with a smile, “Culture truly connects people.”

As an example of cultural connections between Japan and Ukraine, he cited Aonishiki, who left Ukraine in 2022 because of the war and has now become a popular sumo wrestler. Our interview took place on the 80th anniversary of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Sobolev said he had seen the anime “Barefoot Gen” several times in his childhood and condemned Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons as “inhuman.” The anime is about a boy named Gen who loses most of his family in the bombing but bravely carries on with his life.

The minister’s communication method is similar to what Ukraine itself is doing at the Expo. His nation’s exhibition there aims to deepen connections between visitors and Ukraine through content that everyone can relate to, such as culture and education.

The Ukrainian pavilion is in a corner of a building on the Expo grounds called Commons-C. The pavilion, with only about 50 square meters of floor space, is designed to look like a store decorated in the yellow and........

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