March 11

It wasn’t much of a day untilt the afternoon. The news with breakfast has been getting interesting lately since the last few topics have been sea life (especially the tako!) and French car shows.

At school, I had two classes taught by Hanashiro sensei, which went not badly because they were LL and yomimono, both of which are very easy. It seems (from discusions in class) that Japanese people can’t get over the idea of tipping, but they admit that there is a service charge built into a lot of their transactions, so I don’t really know what the big deal is.

Lawson’s is trying very hard to get people’s money with their point card (buy things that have stickers on them and collect the stickers to redeem for a cute plate) and the (panda) cell phone charms that come with certain tea. I made my daily Valor run instead and found yet another Japanese okashi that is placing highly among my favorites. It’s monjuu (dough rather than mochi wrapped around an), and this particular one was macha flavored.

A bit after noon was the Toyota koujou tour. I was ready for a slightly boring time since the assembily line closed weeks before we got there, but it was a bit disappointing anyway. First, we were taken to the actual factory and given weird receivers (one ear piece and an iPod-sized box) to listen to the guides with. The factory was indeed a factory, complete with nothing but the basics. The guide did her best, but to tell the truth, all the information she gave us either seemed elementary or propaganda-esque. Desipte the lack of movement inside, there were quite a few employees either looking at papers or doing next to nothing to the factory equipment. All of the unfinished cars and parts were still on the lines. According to the guide, about 3% of the factory workers (and 10% of Toyota) are girls. 90% of assembly is done by robots. All cars get three coats of paint (that isn’t allowed to dry between layers) and a clear-coat. If someone screws up or has a problem and they (with the supervisor) can’t solve it before the end of that part of assembly, the entire line is shut down until it is solved. There was an interesting part of the tour where we got to look at some of the factory equipment (like rollers that cause continuous flows of boxes and inventions that change the orientation of items in incriments of 90º by gravity alone) and try to do things as fast as they are done on the assembly floor (flipping items, wrapping rope, etc.) but we weren’t given enough time to try them all.

When we had been taken from the interesting part of the factory, we were loaded onto the bus again and got our en-route tour. The tour guide apparently thought we knew no Japanese at all (since we had opted for the English tour) and described katakana a little too much like an elementary school instructor. The concept she was illustrating was at least interesting. Apparently, Toyota was founded by the Toyoda family (that’s not a typo), but they changed the name for two main reasons. First, Toyota has eight strokes rather than ten, and eight is lucky for Japan because the strokes of “eight” expand at the bottom, much like they would like money, success, innovation, etc. to expand in the future. The second reason (or so we were told) was that Toyoda wanted the company to be for the workers and the people, rather than a private benefit, so he did not give it his own name.

We finally got off the bus at the Toyota museum, which was as much about cars as it was about humanoid robots. Again, we opted for the English tour guide, who turned out to be very bad at his job and showed us all the informational movies (including one we saw at the factory) in the museum rather than explaining for the most part. He even asked us if we knew things already so that he wouldn’t have to explain. That’s fine with me, but I would have rather had more time to myself. The highlight of the tour though was being able to sit in the cars in the showroom. There wasn’t much that was impressive (other than the size of the IQ), but I did sit in the driver’s seat of a $72800 Lexus convertible. The truth is though, it has a lot of similarities to the Saab. We, of course, were rushed out of the museum far before we were bored. Before we left though, we were shown the trumpet-playing robot. Most of us were more interested in the cars though...

At dinner, it was just okaasan and me. Okaasan made tenpura (ten-don just for me) and we watched the news about the North Korean spy in Japan. She tried to explain it to me, but I think there were so many stories in one newscast that I couldn’t keep up with what she was saying. We were able to bond a bit afterward though, I think by talking about food, friends, Kyoto, etc. Maybe it’s just less intimidating to have one host parent at a time...