Kanagawa Prefecture announces "Kanagawa Pavilion" logo and mascots VIBRANTs and Momon at six-months-to-go event

• The event ran from 16:30 to 17:00 on Tuesday, 8 September 2026, in the large conference hall of the Kanagawa Prefectural Government’s main building. There, the governor introduced the highlights of the “Vibrant INOCHI Forest Kanagawa Pavilion.” The pavilion is the prefecture’s exhibit at the GREEN×EXPO 2027 venue, made up of an indoor exhibition facility and a garden.
• Official logo: Overlapping leaves represent the prefecture’s 33 municipalities and show a sense of unity between them and the prefecture. It was created by Yuji Oda, a designer whose work includes spatial art.
• Mascot characters: Two characters were introduced together.
  • VIBRANTs: Leaf-shaped characters born from the Vibrant INOCHI tree who represent “inochi” (life). The name is a collective term for several characters, each with a different personality.
  • Momon: A curious young Japanese flying squirrel who lives in the same forest as the VIBRANTs.
  • The two are good friends and will promote the Kanagawa Pavilion both inside and outside the venue from now on.
  • Note: Kanagawa Prefecture has not published official English spellings for these mascot names. “VIBRANTs” and “Momon” are trip-jp’s own rendering of the Japanese names “VIBRANTs (バイブランツ)” and “モモーン.”
• Theatre: The theatre inside the exhibition facility will screen an original film featuring VIBRANTs and Momon, titled “Vibrant INOCHI Forest — You, Life, and the Future —.” In the story, changes in the forest send Momon on an adventure through time and space together with the VIBRANTs.
• Part of the permanent indoor exhibits: a skull specimen of a baby blue whale that washed ashore at Yuigahama in Kamakura in 2018 (the trigger for the prefecture’s “Declaration of Zero Plastic Waste in Kanagawa”), an interactive digital globe, a hands-on corner for the Mi-Byo (pre-symptomatic health) index and ME-BYO BRAND-certified devices, and “Tomoiki Art” works that will be rotated during the exposition.
• Garden: The central “Kanagawa Flower Bed” will be planted mainly with flowers grown in the prefecture: canola flowers at the opening, then pansies, and sunflowers planted by children in July. The flower bed reuses timber from the Grand Roof Ring at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai. Other features include an aquaponics system combining fish farming and hydroponics, raised beds designed for wheelchair users to work comfortably (an agriculture-welfare collaboration), a smart-agriculture display pairing the prefecture’s own “joint training” fruit-tree cultivation method with robotics, and a garden created by five agricultural high schools in the prefecture.
• Staff uniforms: Exhibition attendants will wear the prefecture’s image colour, blue, while operations staff will wear a tree-and-leaf motif. The uniforms are made mainly of PIECLEX, a fiber made primarily from plant-derived polylactic acid, and will be collected after the exposition to be composted. The design is by costume designer Kana Furushiba.
• Kanagawa Flower-Blooming School Project: An initiative in which schools across the prefecture grow pansies, violas and tulips to bloom them all at once. At the event, the governor presented flower seedlings to children from four representative schools. Photos of the growing process will be displayed inside the pavilion as mosaic art and in a slideshow.

What the logo and mascots look like

In the prefecture’s illustration, six VIBRANTs of different leaf shapes and colours stand in a row while Momon glides across the top right with limbs spread. One is a long green leaf, another a yellow leaf like a ginkgo, another heart-shaped, matching the description of “several characters, each with a different personality.”

The logo is a circle made of overlapping yellow, green, blue and pink leaves, with the words “Vibrant INOCHI Forest Kanagawa-kan” beside it. Three layouts are shown: the text to the right, the text below, and a compact version. The overlapping leaves stand for the prefecture’s 33 municipalities, as the prefecture explains.

Our take

Grand Ring timber will be visible at the Yokohama venue. The prefecture has said outright that the central flowerbed reuses timber from the Grand Roof Ring at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai. We have been following where that timber goes, and this is one of its first uses in Yokohama. For anyone who went to Osaka, that alone is a reason to stop here.

Canola at the opening, then pansies, then sunflowers planted by children in July: the flowerbed changes with the season, so this is not a pavilion you see once. It is the kind of exhibit that rewards repeat visits, the argument we made in how to think about the season pass.

List the contents and a theme appears: a whale skull, a health check corner, aquaponics, raised beds, smart farming, gardens by five agricultural high schools, uniforms that will be composted. Much of the pavilion presents the prefecture’s environmental, health and farming policies, and photos of schoolchildren growing flowers go on display inside. A pavilion aimed at children and schools.

VIBRANTs and Momon are the prefecture’s own creation, separate from the organiser’s Tunku Tunku. Name origins, official English spellings and merchandise: not announced. Nor does the release say where the pavilion stands on the site, whether same-day reservations will be needed, or how long the film runs.

Tips for visitors

• Timing changes what you see: canola right after opening, pansies in spring, sunflowers from July. Two visits, spring and summer, show the difference.
• Whether the pavilion needs a same-day reservation is not announced. The reservation system is in our news on timed entry, and the pavilion itself in our Kanagawa Pavilion article.
• To compare it with the others, see all pavilions at a glance. The prefecture’s pavilion and Yokohama City’s are separate.
• The school flower project shown here has a companion scheme for local groups, which we covered in Kanagawa’s flower seedling programme. Together they explain why Expo signs will start appearing in flowerbeds across the prefecture from late November.