Friday 31^st March 2017

Caught the “Me-Guru” bus for our first stop of the day, the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology. Tickets cost about $6 for a one day pass which also gives discounts for entry to the various facilities.

This facility preserves a vast amount of textile machinery, one of the key industries which helped build modern Japan and which evolved into automotive technology.

You enter through the Textile Machinery Pavilion where there is a very large circular loom which symbolizes the “spirit of being studious and creative”. Beyond is every type of machinery used in spinning and weaving. All the machinery is working so it is quite noisy and many of the exhibits have an employee doing demonstrations. We even received a sample of woven cloth, hot off the press!

After the vast textile area you pass into the Automobile Pavilion. This starts with metalworking, casting, forging & cutting and then goes on to demonstrate the trial and error effort behind the casting of the cylinder block. Next is a replica of the first passenger car completed in 1936 through the efforts of the branching into vehicles by the founder’s son. Fascinating was the modern day assembly robot demonstrations, with so much hi-tech machinery fitting nicely together and producing a car!

Back on the bus and the next stop was Noritake porcelain/ceramic centre. Inside the Craft Centre you progressed through the techniques of the making of bone china. Upstairs over two floors the museum features Noritake pieces through the ages, including the first dinner set to be made in Japan.

Next up was Nagoya Castle. This was rebuilt in 1959 after being mostly destroyed in the war. The original castle dated from 1610. Castle is surrounded by a wide moat. From the Observation room at the top (34mts) you have a good view of this large city (it was drizzling rain so the view wasn’t so good today). We saw in the paper today that it is planned to rebuild the castle in original timber removing the existing concrete.

Final stop was a 1920’s house, Futaba Palace, where the first modern actress in Japan lived. She became a geisha at 16 years old and performed on the stage for the first time in America. The house has beautiful stained glass windows and the doors and stairs are typical of the era.