I have a nice early start to the day in Nagoya, which is good, because I plan to go to the Toyota factory. I need to be there by 11:00 AM for the tour, and it is supposedly 1-1/2 hours by treian from Nagoya. I have one hell of a time trying to figure out how to get there. Of course the tourist office doesn't open until 9:00, maybe 10:00. I run back and forth between several maps, fare tables, and time tables trying to figure it out. There is no hiragana or romaji on the maps, but there may be on the time table, so I go try to figure out the kanji from the time table, then take that back to one of the maps, but it doesn't have all the stops on it, and no info on where to transfer, so I go try elsewhere. I am really begining to feel at a loss, desperate, knowing that I am looking for Toyota city or somplace with the kanji for Toyota in the name, and I try to coordinate the info from all these maps, my dictionary, and the vague directions I have from someone on the Toyota-mods internet mailing list. Fortunately, there are only three train companies in Nagoya, and I know which one I wanted to take. I also know the general direction I want to go. Unfortunately, most of the maps are designed for ease of layout and reading, with no mind paid to direction or scale, which is very difficult for my brain to accept and process. When I know the general direction and distance I need to go (it is essentially in a straight line out of downtown Nagoya) and I am trying to figure out where I need to change trains, but the map is in Kanji only (no hiragana in Nagoya, the first place I have been where this is the case!) and shows all stops evenly spaced along a line which spirals back onto itsself, it doesn't help me much. I eventually figure out that the train tracks don't acutally spiral, and I figured out I could take the Limited Express super speedy to Chiryu and switch there to the local train.
This Limited Express has a speedometer in the car! We are zipping along at 105-110 kph (maybe 65-70 mph) when the Shinkansen blows past us on a parallel track like were are standing still! I switch trains at Chiryu, fighting my way through a sea of uniformed schoolkids on their way to school. I ride to where I think I need to be and get off but decide to not actually leave the platform area. I can't see how I could transfer to another line here. I can't even see how the lines could possibly diverge here...I am on a tiny platform, one track in both directions as far as I can see, out in the middle of rice fields. I check the map again, and sure enough, this is the spot. I hop on the local going the other way (there is nothing preventing you from buying a cheap ticket to the next station, riding to the very end of the line, and then turning around and riding back all but one station and getting off) and get off at the next stop. I had noticed the name of this stop on the other train going through here the first time, and I knew it-essentially "Newer Toyota City." I ask the guy monitoring the ticket gate, and he tells me to walk over the sky bridge to other line, and took my ticket.
So here is the map of the lines according to the train company...
...and here is the truth. Helpful, huh?
It was a combination of luck and attentiveness that eventually got me there. I was feeling glad that I had started as early as I did! I walk from the station to Toyota Kaikan (Exhibit Hall) asking directions three or four times on the way there, per Lester's instructions. The surroundings are unlike any part of Japan I have seen yet...they are still urban, but largely industrial, lower and more spread out than in Tokyo...almost like some parts of the American west. This place is cool! Although the city is non-descript suburban/industrial, probably ninety percent of the cars on the cars on the road are Toyotas. Probably half of those are modified Toys! Another lowered Supra, aero-kitted Chaser, whoa! check the rims on that Starlet, loud Chaser, cute girls in a hot Vitz complete with roll bar, and blowoff valves sounding everywhere!
I get to Toyota no problem. As I approach the Exhibit Hall, I see a large screen that says something to the affect of "Toyota Exhibition Hall-Toyota Motor Corporation Japan would like to greet members of the foreign press visiting today: Mr. Jesse Fairbank, USA" Hehehe! It feels like Toyota runs the town. They have a high school which not only meets state requirements, but also grooms students as the next generation of Toyota technical wizards. In America, you never see all the tech and R+D that Toyota is involved in. Although I don't think they are in every cast the industry leader, it is impressive the amount of ground-breaking development Toyota has done and is doing with direct-injection gasoline engines, cleaner diesels, hybrids, electric vehicles, crash-safety, and innovative production facilities. While the Insight is a big deal in America, the Prius has been on the road for three years here. I have yet to see an insight on the road here, but I have seen countless hundreds of Priuses. It almost seems like every tenth car on the road in urban Japan these days is a Prius. The technology in the two cars is also more similar than I had realized. Honda simplified things a bit, but many functions are the same: regenerative braking, auto stop, electric motor assist for hills or passing on the highway. The big difference seems to be in around-town type of running. The Prius starts and drives at city speeds as a purely electric car. The gasoline engine can recharge the batteries at a constant speed through a (separate?) generator if needed...I think...if I am reading the Japanese correctly!
I have a few more minutes until my factory tour, so I continue to look around at the exhibits in the Toyota Kaikan. I have seen that most of Japan's zillion taxis are relatively new Toyota Crowns, but I didn't know that they are mostly GDI versions of...suprise, suprise, a 2.5-3.0-liter straight six. There is a cut away display of one of these motors, and the top of the piston is crazy...dishsed, but not a round or symmetrical dish! I guess both consumption and emissions both went down considerably with GDI. If you don't believe me about Toyota's R+D and commitment to reducing car emissions: Did you know that Toyota is making an electric car in Japan? Yes, it's true. Minimalist 1400 pounds, two-seat, similar size and dimensions to a Smart...designed purely for urban use. No, you can't buy one, even in Japan, but your community can. Toyota is selling them for carpool and carsharing public-car type use only. I have seen a few of them around city streets so far this trip...cool!
Our tour guide meets today's group for the tour and starts to tell us about Toyota. We get some background info on the founder, Mr. Toyoda, and the factory facilities in the area. In the past few years, Toyota has decided that they were really at a risk of falling behind, or looking like they were falling behind, so they started stepping up their expectations of themselves. They have instituted extensive waste reduction/reuse, and recycling programs at their Aichi prefecture factories (the ones I am visiting.) Since the program started, they have reduced waste produced by 85%!! Before I am able to recover from my suprise at the success of this program, I am hit with a fact even more amazing: Toyota is pleased with how effective beyond their original hopes this program has been, but rather than rest on those laurels, they have set a new goal of being a zero-landfill contributor in the near future, and are instituting plans to pull it off! The factories for all the components of the cars are located close to each other to reduce the costs, both monetary and environmental, of transporting parts for final assembly. Toyota provides all the packaging materials in which various components are shipped to them; the boxes become bumper skins, and the packing material becomes headliners. They have these amazing machines that chop and sort car parts for recycling. If the workers doing assembly come across a damaged or defective part, in the hopper it goes. A series of magents, sifting screens, puffs of air, and who knows what other processes, sort the resulting pellets by material. As a demo, they toss a defective wiring harness in. First we hear it being chopped into little pieces, like a mini wood-chipper. Then it flies all around inside, and comes out of two pipes in two piles: One is little shreds of copper wire, and the other is little shreds of insulation and plastic connectors!
This machine can handle and sort steel, aluminum, copper, rubber, plastic, dense foam, soft foam...you name it! The factories here don't contribute to water pollution, and air emissions are closely monitored to keep them at some number that doesn't mean much to me, but is well below the level required by national and local regulations. Toyota purifies all the water used in the factories, and the resulting precipitate is collected and used as a fuel. I am really quite amazed to learn all of this!
Toyota has also instituted a program called GOA to improve crash safety. The Prius at Amlux in Ikebukero was part of the GOA display there. They have more wrecked cars here on display. What they are doing is running their own crash tests at higher speeds than government tests. Toyota's new cars now meet government crash standard tests, and pass the same tests at 10% higher speed...this program will also continue to ramp up. Impressive when you think about how much higher the forces involved are at a slight increase in speed. Talk about relentless pursuit of perfection!
The assembly factory itsself is very interesting. It is definately production-line...nothing very personal about it. However, I am disappointed that we can't take pictures, but I can understand why. We tour the factory by following the guide along a catwalk above the assembly line, stopping at certain points along the way to receive a short lecture on the points of interest. I am impressed by the workers' ability to switch between models...I don't think there are more than two in a row of anything on the production line. I ask the tour guide about this, and she says that it is the preference of the workers to have the whole range of models interspersed. More on the guide in a moment... Also of interest: Following painting, the doors and hood and trunklids, along with the windshields, are carried on a separate, but parallel conveyor (above the ceiling) and are fitted to the car last, after interior, suspension, wheels, trim and badges, etc. The guide implies that this process is unique to Toyota; I am dubious, but in any case, it seems a good way to improve access and cut down on dings and scratches. The workers apparently designed the assembly line. They have rollstands on a tether, so they can be rolled up and down along the line with a particular car. The workers also have a self-designed swivel stool they can sit on; it is suspended from above on a long arm that curves way out to the side and back. The height is set at a level that allows one to sit inside or outside the car, going in and out of the trunk, engine compartment, and door openings. Cool! It seems very well thought out, as one would expect it to be when the people who work there daily get to design it. I guess the workers also have continual opportunity to give input and suggestions about effective changes for the future. The thing that suprises me the most about the whole process is the willingness to shut the line down. There is a pull cord that runs above the entire lengths of the line, and at any time, with any doubts or problems, any worker can pull it and shut down the conveyor. The guide explains that it is the first step in quality control. The reason I am so suprised by this is that I know that some other manufacturers, GM for example, almost never shut down the line..."time is money! Who needs quality control?" There are signs above the work areas, reading, "Good thoughts make good products." The tour guide explains that workers can't have good thoughts with unreasonable pressures, hence their level of input on their working conditions. Someone pulled the cord during the time we were there, and it wasn't a big deal for anyone else. Some took a short breather, while others used the time working in place to get ahead a little. After initial assembly upstairs, the cars are conveyor-belted downstairs through a huge hole in the floor for drivetrain, seats, wheels, etc. to be installed.
Our tour guide is a very cute young woman who whole-heartedly believes in Toyota as a company, and seems to love her job as a tour guide. After she introduces herself, I wonder to myself why a Japanese woman would be named Connie, but then I feel really stupid when I figure it out...duh!...Kani. She and I started talking between each of the scheduled stops on the tour. Everyone else in our group is from Iran, and they are going to be opening a car factory soon. I slowly gather that someone outside of the fields of car-production and journalism is a rarity on these tours, as is someone close to our age. I imagine she is usually much more businesslike, but she seems intrigued by me, and is obviously very curious about not only how I got here, but what motivated me to come. I luxuriate in the attention as much as I can. I don't know exactly how to explain it, so I honestly tell her that I am fanatical about Toyotas, I belong to a Toyota club of sorts (the Toy-mods mailing list) and Gary and Rob and some others on the list recommended the factory visit to me, and that I wanted to see the birthplace of my car. She is excited that I am so commited to Toyota, and asks me what kind of car I have. When I tell her about my hachiroku and show her some pictures of me on the track, I get instant recognition. Now we have made a good connection, we are really friendly, just talking away when she is not giving her spiel. The rest of the tour goes great, and I am really startled by her attempts at humor, as most Japanese women I have met seem fairly humorless due to a combination of being reserved and having a different idea of funny. Cool! I am in heaven now! We sit next to each other on the bus, and she starts getting into the Toyota trivia, "Does anyone know why Mr. Toyoda changed the name of his company to Toyota?" She also tells me with excitement that one of Toyota's Formula One drivers, Mika Salo, will be visiting the factory next month, and she is really hoping to meet him and get his autograph. We are laughing and having a good old time, that is, until I tell her that I really really want an Altezza RS, but they aren't available in America. I want an Altezza, and she likes WilL...yuck! "The Altezza is too big, and has ugly taillights." I think WilL is fairly disgusting. Oh well, you can't win 'em all, but at least we had a good time together on the tour.
Back at the Kaikan, I decide to finish looking at the exhibits there I didn't catch in the morning; there are some really enjoyable displays. One small case in a really big room has all of Toyota's Japanese Car of the Year Awards, dating back to the early days, even. They have two race cars on display: a '98 JTCC Chaser with a 3S-GE and a '95 Supra Le Mans with a 3S-GTE. There are also various cutaway displays: GDI straight-sixes, and Altezza 3S-GE to demonstrate VVTL-i, a CVT transmission, a Toyota (Lexus) aluminum V-8, a Prius drivetrain, etc.
Two Toyota race cars on display at the Toyota Kaikan. Foreground is a '98 JTCC (Japanese Touring Car) Chaser with 310hp of 3S-GE power and rear-wheel-drive! Behind that is the Denso SARD Supra that was raced at Le Mans in '95 driven by Jeff Krosnoff, among others. This car features 650 hp from a 3S-GTE...RWD four-cylinders forever!
This is a slightly cut away 3S-GE at Toyota Kaikan. It is a rear-wheel-drive Beams motor out of an Altezza. The continuously variable timing through adjustable on-the-fly cam gears is shown in a partial cut-away view. Also note the tubular intake manifold. Too bad the picture of the nearby cutaway CVT (from a Corolla) didn't turn out!
Upstairs they have some fun old TV advertising clips arranged by decade. In the 60's and 70's, they had Corollas outrunning everything in ads: a bullet train, a biplane (?!?) and an archer's arrow. There is an early one bragging about how the 1100cc Corolla (KE10?) would do 0-400m in 19 seconds and topped out at 140 kph (86 mph) and a later ad has a RA23 Celica doing a Bullit (the movie) impression in San Francisco. I think my favorite is one from the early 80's. It starts with dawn light-essentially just a dark grey screen, and you see three sets of headlights slowly approaching from very far away, appearing to flash as they bounce on what must be a bumpy dirt road, and weaving everywhere. It is three KP61 Starlets rallying on a dusty dirt road! The text on the screen is bragging about affordable, reliable, and the best fuel economy you can get, meanwhile the Starlets are doing massive oversteering slides in formation, catching air, kicking up baseball-sized rocks, and generally being driven the way RWD Toyotas should be driven. I watch it three or four times, laughing my head off. There is also some cool 80's Japanese ice-racing footage-KP61s, AE86's, TE72 Corollas, TA22 Celica...fun stuff! I don't spend as much time at the style-your-own-car computer demo, or the films describing all of Toyota's facilites worldwide, but I do really enjoy myself, and would highly recommend the trip to any and all Toyota nuts.
The train station sign at Mikawatoyota (Toyota City) the home of the Toyota Kaikan, and parts of the Toyota factory.
I think what I like best about the town is that everyone is so honestly and genuinely enthusiastic about Toyotas! I spend a while wandering around looking at cars on the street, and this serves as an excellent lesson on JDM Toyota models over the past ten years or so. There are many models and variants we have never even heard about in America, and I see all kinds of cars, let alone minivans, I haven't seen before: Corolla, Corolla II (3-door hatch) Ceres, Marino, Sprinter, Sprinter Carib, Vista, Levin, and Trueno, all Corolla variants, Corsa, Celica, Carina, Corona, Caldina, Chaser, Mark II, Celsior, Soarer, Crown, Windom (ES300) Starlet, Vitz, Platz (Echo) Prius, WilL, Corolla RunX (a tall 5-door wagon with Celica GT-S drivetrain) Opa, Supra, MR2, and very occasionally, but not often, a Camry. I am at a loss for what else to do, and given my sleep record of late, I am so tired. I am also in bad need of a men's room. I find one in the department store in Shin-Toyota, but the rest of the train ride is a long one back to Nagoya. I go to the Youth Hostel on foot from the train station, walking along under a raised highway, and get there sometime early evening. It takes a bit of finding as it is in an unlikely neighborhood, and near a ditch I was on the wrong side of. After checking in, I run out for a bite to eat. The sky is overcast, and Nagoya seems like a not-very-exciting, busy traffic, in places run-down and undesireable, grey city. The hostel has nice Japanese-style rooms, big, a nice o-furo (Japanese bath-evenings only-two hours alotted for each gender) and it is in a modern ugly high-rise in a sleazy urban neighborhood. Adding to my unsettling feelings about the place is the fact that is seems to be deserted. I heard a few voices in the hall, but couldn't see anyone. I haven't met any other travellers here yet at all. Too tired to get really worried, I head for the bath. There is one other guy in there, and we have an akward almost-conversation in Japanese about the temperature of the water. He finishes up as I am settling in, and I am eventually forced out by the upcoming women's hour. When I get back to the room, the guy from the bath turns out to be my roommate. He warms up and is a nice guy, a student who is touring Japan on his motorcycle. I think he is from Osaka, and I also think he is nuts for touring by small bike in the winter. I make plans to go to the castle in Nagoya the next day and go to bed.
