This chapter opens with this rather peculiar anecdote recorded by a group of Korean college students in Tokyo after their visit to the Tokyo Industrial Exposition (1907) because the unusual encounter between two different groups of Koreans on the opposite sides of a gaze emblematically exposes the essentially conflicting nature of Korea's overall experience of modernity. Since The Great Exhibition (1851), the first international-scale exposition held in London, the world's fairs and expositions were among the most popular cultural features in the latter half of the nineteenth century and throughout the early twentieth century in the West. They served primarily to celebrate the great achievements of Western modernisation and imperialism by way of exhibiting its technological and scientific achievements, as well as the actual bodies of ‘Others’ from the ‘uncharted’ territories it had conquered. Imperial Japan not only participated in the fairs and expositions of the West in order to ‘demonstrate its place among the powers of the world’ but borrowed the imperialist politics of the world's fairs and expositions from the West to hold its own versions of them. Japan's expositions functioned similarly to its Western counterparts, aiming to commemorate Japan's imperial expansions and also to display its differences from other Asian countries.