Today started out too early. I had to get to the Toyota Kaikan for my tour of the factory by 10:30 and it was a weird series of trains I took from Hamamatsu to the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t eat the ‘free” breakfast at Toyoko Inn because it was too crowded (as they often are) and made do with an egg sandwich and awful coffee at a Starbucks. Then it was off schlepping my bags on “normal” trains for a couple of hours.

As I left Hamamatsu and tried to find the right train station, I saw a weird building. “May One” is something engraved on a stapler I have that came from a closed state home for the mentally challenged so I thought it was a weird coincidence.

This is what passes for a rush-hour train in Hamamatsu.

I had to transfer twice and this was the busiest train.

Seriously, Toyota’s headquarters is in the middle of nowhere. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the train traces from both sides of the station merge into one line.

The train itself wasn’t all that impressive. Two cars on this one.

The directions were pretty poor as well. The last step was “take a taxi or start walking”. I figured out which direction to go and first ducked into this building to ask where I was supposed to be.

Turns out it’s the supplier’s building, and the headquarters is the tall building.

This is the Toyota headquarters, in the middle of nowhere.

If I had followed the road instead of the walking paths, I would have seen this as the Toyota Museum.

I wasn’t able to take any pictures on the factory tour, but they let me take pictures inside the museum. I don’t have that many, besides the backwardness of the inside of this car.

I finally got to sit in a couple of Lexuses as well. The museum was full of guys in nice suits. Mostly Koreans and Indians and I’m not sure what the Indians were doing besides playing a lot of grab ass.

I didn’t take any pictures of the new cars or any of the race cars, but I do have a couple of pictures the classics.

The factory tour was pretty cool. I tried to go on one in Kentucky, but couldn’t schedule it due to several busloads of school kids showing up at the same time. This time the only problem was my sniping at some of the suited Indian guys who kept pushing past me for no reason other than, like I said, to play grab ass. They weren’t paying attention and just wanted to get ahead for some reason and kept shoving past me. The lack of sleep and food made me particularly testy and I just said, “What is wrong with you Indian people?”

Anyway, the factory trip was pretty cool.

I got back to the station and couldn’t find any restaurants. I finally realized one of the buildings right next to the station was a restaurant and they had a lunch special which I misread as “tenteki”. Tenteki means IV infusion or it means mortal enemy and I just about passed it up. It actually said TONteki, which means pork steak. It was tasty.

After that I headed back to Nagoya. I’ve been taking my train tickets out all day long and showing them to various conductors on the train and when I got back to Nagoya I realized I had my four-day ticket from Tokyo to Osaka, and I somehow had my ticket for the short train from Mikawatoyota to Okazaki, but I didn’t have Sunday’s shinkansen ticket from Nagoya to Osaka. I went back to the train station to replace the ticket which, fortunately, was only ¥2,920 ($36.86 today) and also got a huge page of explanation of what I was supposed to do about a missing ticket. I guess I’m supposed to get special validation on the replacement ticket so if I ever get the old ticket back, I can get a refund of most of my money. I think it’s going to take lots of special rubber stamping of my ticket.

I was hungry, but didn’t feel like eating dinner yet so I went to Cafe de Crié. The coffee was so-so and the cake was bland and it cost more than my lunch. 

When I finally made it out to dinner I had a Nagoya specialty, tonkatsu with miso sauce. Other guys sitting next to me at the crowded counter were getting it half-and-half, one half miso and the other half regular tonkatsu sauce, but I figured I might as well go for it. I wasn’t disappointed.

I wish I could say I’m getting to sleep early, but uploading these pictures took several hours. The internet connection at this Toyoko Inn is kind of slow. Ah well. Tomorrow I explore more of Nagoya and probably see yet another Toyota Museum and, of course, shrines and temples. Or maybe the maglev museum. I haven’t figure it all out quite yet.