Just after textbooks were due, there was a public holiday in Japan so we had a long weekend to play with. Russell and I decided to jump on it and we set off for Nagoya.
We had a great time in Nagoya over New Years last year and we have always wanted to go back and explore it when the city was open. This is something that our Japanese friends don't seem to understand. Nagoya is something like the 4th largest city in Japan, but it is not seen as a place worth visiting for fun. It has traditionally been the industrial heart of Japan - and as such it was bombed very heavily during World War II. In rebuilding the city, though, Nagoya really pushed to be cutting edge. They have really interesting architecture and art all over the city. The city also feels very organized and easy to navigate. 
This time around, Russell and I weren't sure what we wanted to do, but we were pretty sure we would find something. We booked a hotel and headed over on the bullet train. We arrived late in the afternoon, stopped in at the tourist center to get maps and advice for local attractions, and then set off to explore the area around our hotel. The first night, we went to the orchid garden. It was a little disappointing - we weren't big orchid fans going in, and there wasn't much there to convert the unaware. I'm sure its awesome if you know and love orchids. After the garden we checked into our hotel and then headed out for dinner. As I mentioned before, our Japanese friends tend to respond to our interest in Nagoya with, "why??" They also always seem to come to the conclusion that while the city may not be interesting, they have to admit that Nagoya does have some awesome food. They are known for a variety of grilled eel dishes, miso sauce on pork cutlets and spicy chicken wings. Our first dinner we were looking for a cutlet restaurant, but after failing to locate it, we stumbled on an izakaya that, judging from the caricature of the dude out front wearing chicken wings, could help us out with Nagoya special #3. As it turned out, this was a rather large chain of izakaya that are well known in Nagoya. The place was huge (unusual for restaurants in Kobe). The individual booths were in a fairly traditional-made-modern style that gave the sense of privacy. On the more modern end, though, they also had touch screens in each enclosure where you could browse their menu and place your orders. It also automatically split the bill for you at the end in however many parts you wanted. Very cool.
We, of course, ordered the wings. They were super good and we ate far too many of them. Most foods in Japan are not even remotely spicy, but these were nice. Russell lamented that they were not quite as good as buffalo wings, but good enough to really make him wish he had some buffalo wings. Poor Russell. We make due with what we have. In all honesty, we thoroughly enjoyed the restaurant and had a hard time not just going there for every meal.
The next day was the public holiday, so all the museums were open for visitors. After agonizing over which places to go to, we narrowed our list down to two must-sees. One was the Toyota factory museum and the other was the Tokugawa museum.
The Toyota museum was way more than we expected. Half of the museum had nothing to do with cars, but rather with textiles. The Toyota family made its name by inventing automatic looms and continuing to invent better and better technology for making fabric. The museum started out by showing how fabric had traditionally been made, early looms and then the increasingly complex automatic looms that Toyota invented. We tagged along with a tour and were really impressed. 
Some of the more modern technologies include a machine that passes the thread from one shuttle to another to allow for wider fabrics, a loom that mades synthetic fabric by shooting the light nylon fibers through the loom on a jet of water, and a multi-color loom that can weave photograph images into cloth. Two hours of looms later, we still hadn't seen anything about cars, and we didn't care at all. It was great. 
After the looms, the cars did take over, though. After Toyota senior passed the loom business onto his son (also an accomplished engineer) the son started to explore the possibility of using the Toyota company's industrial abilities to introduce the first domestically made car in Japan. Several other companies had tried this, but there had been very little success and there was a lot of skepticism that it was possible. Toyota Jr. set out to make it work, though. Eventually, he managed to start making domestic cars and the Japanese automotive industry has, of course, surged forward from there. The museum included history about how this was possible and the different hurdles Toyota had to overcome (they had to do extensive studies into metallurgy to make sure the vehicles' parts would be sound, etc). Then the museum moved onto a history of Japanese cars and how they are made. We got to watch a guy stamping engine parts to show the process and we got to play with all the different parts of the car to see what they did and how they worked. It was really interesting and nicely interactive.
We spent another couple of hours in the automotive part of the museum, though we did have to step out for lunch before we both fell over. A+ for the Toyota Museum. I highly recommend it. Having chewed through most of the day, we were a little rushed at the second stop, the Tokugawa Museum. The Tokugawa Shogunate was the feudal regime that ruled Japan during the Edo period, from 1603 until 1868. Many of their personal belongings and a history of the Edo period are on display there. We saw some of the Tokugawa armor and swords, costumes for Noh plays, including some of the most outstanding Noh masks I have yet come across, and personal effects. Things like fancy lacquer picnic boxes, vases and art from China and the biggest treasure - an illustrated Tale of Genji book. The Tale of Genji is sometimes called the world's oldest novel. It was written by a nobel woman in Japan in the early eleventh century. Early copies of the book are extremely rare and illustrated copies are even more rare. The actual text is only on display one day out of the year to help preserve it, but images of it and analysis of the story and illustrations are a core part of the museum.
We were more than a little footsore after a very full day wandering through museums, but both museums were outstanding. There are still a lot of places we would like to go in Nagoya. It looks like we will need to make a third trip one of these days. Our friends are never going to understand...
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