Today was my last day in Nagoya, I’d be leaving later for Tokyo. First, I wanted to check out some of the city. The hotel had a little room where you could leave your luggage, but the only way to secure it was with some cable locks and I didn’t feel too comfortable leaving my stuff there. I walked to the train station to check out the locker situation to make sure my big suitcase would fit and to find out where they were so I wouldn’t have to be searching while dragging all my luggage. I stopped in a bakery and got some food to take back to the room. This wasn’t as good as the bakery yesterday, so maybe all the food isn’t great. I went back to the station and had to use two lockers to store stuff.
The Toyota Automobile Museum is about an hour outside of the city and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take that much time out of my limited day. This is now my favorite museum that I’ve been to. It’s not just about Toyota, but a history of cars. It starts off with the dawn of the automobile through the various decades. The second floor goes through to the 50s.
I made a post with a massive photo dump that I’ll link to at the end, but for now these are just a teaser.
There is an exhibit about the Japanese history of car making and they have a wall with all the Japanese manufacturers lineage. It shows the various mergers and splits that have formed them into where they are today. I thought it was so neat and it’s the kind of history thing I love.
The third floor continues on from the 50s into the modern day.
I’ve been to a lot of car museums, but the depth and variety here is fantastic. They had manufacturers I had never heard of. At this point it’s already great, but they have a second building with car related cultural items. Here they had a temporary exhibit featuring every generation of Toyota Crown for its 70th anniversary. There is also a big room that has magazines, posters, toys, stamps, license plates of just various car culture. Three things really got me; the displays of the car mascots that used to be on old cars, a history of car badges, and an automobile timeline in 1/43 scale of all kinds of cars from the 1900s to the 2000s. Those are some of the things I love about cars and as someone who collects diecast cars, that was a good way to display them.
This building also has a library filled with all kinds of car related books that you can peruse. There are books about manufacturers and models; technical & repair books; automobile history books; magazines; comics; thousands of catalogs for thousands of models of cars. I could’ve spent hours there. The books aren’t all in Japanese, many were in English also.
It felt like a declaration of love for all thing automotive. I highly recommend it.
Toyota Automobile Museum Photo Dump
I took a lot of photos at the Toyota Auto Museum, I’m going to post them here with their placards so you can know what cars they are.
To get to this museum you change trains in a little town called Fujigaoka. On the way in you can see the streets are lined with cherry blossoms, so I had to walk around the station for a bit for some photos when I changed trains on the way back.
I was a bit hungry and there was a McDonald’s across the street. One of those things I just have to try and see what’s different. I got a Samurai Mac, a burger with soy sauce on it and it was okay.
One of the places on my Nagoya list was the Nagoya Castle, so that was my next stop. On the way I’m riding the subway, and I have a seat and at one of the stops an older man sits next to me. He starts chatting and asks what I’m doing in the city. I tell him I’m visiting, and he seems surprised and makes a comment that there’s not much to do there. I say I’m there for the F1 race and he tells me he used to be a teacher and Yuki Tsunoda’s dad was one of his students. That’s neat I said. This was all in English by the way.
I’m walking around the castle grounds headed for the main tower area and I see a path going off to the side. Like a video game, you know where you need to go but that side path is going to lead to a collectible, so you’ve got to go there first. This side area was a private bath built for the shogun. As I approached it the guy at the front told me it would be about a 10-minute wait, then I was looking confused, so he said it in English this time. Then the Duolingo kicked in and I was like “oh I know what you said.” The bath area is small, and they only let in a few people at a time with a staff member who tells you about it. My group was a Japanese mom and daughter and myself, and the guide only spoke Japanese. Luckily, they had a paper about the baths that I read while waiting so I kind of had an idea of what was going on. It was a cool little experience that most of the other people seemed to be skipping.
The main tower was closed for refurbishment, so I just spent my time walking around the whole thing and taking pictures.
It was a really pretty place to see and walk around.
The last thing I planned to do was Toyota’s other museum in the city. The Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology. This museum is about Toyota’s history, mostly their start as a textile manufacturer.
The first part is various machines that would turn cotton into yarn and looms for sewing. It’s a pretty interesting to explore as you go from early machines to modern hardware doing these tasks.
Then it transitions to Toyota’s start as an automobile manufacturer. They’ve got some of the machines used to make various car parts and a small collection of Toyota cars on display.
I wasn’t as interested in the subject matter as Toyota’s other museum, but this was a neat place to check out.
I collected my bags from their lockers and caught the shinkansen back to Tokyo. Goodbye Nagoya. Nagoya was an interesting place for my first area to visit. I don’t think it’s as touristy, especially for foreigners and there was more of a language barrier than I expected. It was nice getting to see a part of the country that most visitors skip.
I had a large suitcase, a duffel bag, and a backpack which was a bit hard to maneuver through the subway stations. I chose the wrong route to my hotel and had to walk about 800 meters, or about 1/2 a mile, which was a bit too far with all my luggage. So, I was definitely checking those walking distances on my future journeys.
I stayed at the same chain, this was the Sotetsu Fresa Inn Tokyo-Akasaka. This room was a bit bigger, so I could walk around a little more.
I was hungry and went out to explore this area and find some food. Most of the places I passed were closed when I found a place that was on my list to try.
CoCo Curry. It did not disappoint. I liked the chicken and curry a lot; it was exactly what I was wanting at the time.
I headed back to the room to rest and ready to explore Tokyo for the first time tomorrow.
