03/28 Toyota-Kyoto

Today we went on a factory tour of Toyota factory in Toyota city. It
was a little bit of an adventure getting to place and we had take a
private train to get to the city. On one of the trains, we asked a passenger if it stopped at a particular stop, which they said yes. a couple minutes later, she gave us a piece of paper she wrote with all the stop names in romanji and kanji. Then this business man took the paper and wrote in the times it would stop there. They were really nice and totally unexpected. We also walked through the
restricted toyota factory area to reach the meeting point in the
exhibition hall, which we didn't realize until later.

The exhibition hall had a showroom containing the newest models, both
toyota and lexis, as well and displayed for safety, environment and
production.

We started our tour at 11 and went to the welding factory and
assembly. Our guide was very cute, which was nice. In the welding
plant we saw 8 different models being made, and learned about the
process. Toyota only makes enough cars to cover orders to reduce usage
of materials and have very little inventory storage. The spot welding
spot was very cool with 4 robotic arms welding various points of the
car body. Another neat thing about the building was it had solar
collectors to redirect sunlight of the interior lighting. Also, the
welding sparks/spladder is collected and recycled.

In the assembly factory, the parts all come together. Unlike the
welding factory, the assembly factory consisted of primarily human
worked. The doors are the last thing to be assembled, to give more
room for the interior installations, which was neat.

Back at the exhibition hall they demonstrated the Partner Robot and i-
unit. The partner robot was a robot with artificial lungs and lips and
could play the trumpet, which was cool. The i-unit was a personal
vehicle which color transform, was ultra mobile and electric powered.
They did a demonstration driving around and looked neat.

At the hall a English teacher and her students used us to practice
English and asked us ours names, home country and favorite Japanese
food. I used my iPod sketch function to write my name. It was pretty
cute.

Some other interesting things i learned during the tour, the company founder is toyoda but he named the company toyota because to write toyoda takes 10 stokes, and only 8 for toyota, 8 being a lucky number in asian countries. also, the town was originally called korowmo town, renamed to toyota in 1959 because of the factories in the region.

When we were walking back to the train station, we took the same route back but were stopped by security asking for ID this time, which we explained to them we were tourists. It was kind of funny.

when we got back into Kyoto, Dima did some shoppig and then went back to the hostel while Keegan and I went to find food. We walked down some alleys and found a small noodle house. The inside was a little sketchy looking but the food was really good. We had nabeyaki, a udon soup with a bunch of narutos, shrimp and chicken, it was really good and all prepared fresh.

Back at the hostel we talked and drank with some of the other tourists and then called it a night.