Japan: Day 5 (Zoom, Zoom)

Zoom, zoom, zoom...On Day 5, we went to the Mazda museum and factory. The Mazda experience was a lot neater than expected. An English speaking tour guide showed us through the museum - reviewed the history of the company...showed us old cars/trucks, engines, chassis, prototypes. Then after, we toured an assembly line!

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This prototype is made of wax, for the purpose of marketing to review the aesthetic design. It looked very real!

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The plant is huge - this particular plant has the longest assembly line in the world. We took a bus from the check-in area to the museum/factory. We crossed a bridge. All employees drive Mazda's.

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Japanese are known for their lean manufacturing. Unfortunately, we were not able to take pictures or videos when touring the assembly line. It was VERY impressive. The viewable area was quite small though, the main portion of the car was already assembled (body was already on the chassis) and moving in a linear fashion. Workers were moving at a very fast pace. The subassembled parts (e.g. dashboards, windows, etc) were assembled directly below or above and then brought to the main assembly line. I was surprised with the variety of vehicles on the assembly line. For example, there would be a lime mini-van followed by a black 4 car sedan followed by a blue sports car. We were the last ones from the tour group to leave the assembly line part...very neat!

From Mazda (near Hiroshima), we took the bullet train to the next city of our adventure...Kyoto! It was probably a 3 hour train ride. At our first night in Kyoto, we ate a Chinese noodle shop. We didn't know it was Chinese until we looked at the menu (kind of hard to tell the difference at the outside of the restaurant). Below are pictures of us eating our dinner. Does Julie ever take a normal picture? :)