Hey again! It’s me, Izzie – back with my final instalment of my Tokyo diaries. The crew have been back home for a while now, so it’s been nice to reminisce on our trip and all of our incredible experiences. If you haven’t seen my previous posts about Tokyo, feel free to check them out here and here.
One of the activities that our host company, Mitsui & Co. organised for us was a trip to Toyota City and its historical museum just outside of Nagoya, Japan. As expected, we were pretty excited about the opportunity – Toyota is legendary when it comes to manufacturing standards and innovation (BSB115, anyone?)
We boarded our bullet train at around 7:30am, setting in for a scenic trip from Tokyo to Nagoya. Suffice to say, my favourite part of the entire bullet train experience was the presence of the trolley ladies selling a seemingly infinite amount of snacks. You can take the girl out of the Hogwarts Express, but you can’t take the Hogwarts Express out of the girl (or something like that).
After a sneaky bus ride to Toyota City, we’d finally made it for our day trip. And yes, the Toyota headquarters, factories, and plants make up an entire city – it’s insane! We got to have a play with some of the new Toyota and Lexus models coming out soon, and check out some behind the scenes looks at things like motor engines, smart city plans, and more.
Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to film or photograph our experience in the Toyota plant, but it was absolutely incredible. The workers and robotics average roughly 10 minutes in time to build a car, with each car having over 30,000 parts. Talk about efficiency! This is where we saw JIT inventory systems come to life, for all of you Management majors out there. It was pretty fascinating stuff, and we had a blast seeing the cars being built on the assembly lines.
We then journeyed to the Toyota Automobile Museum, where we learnt all about the history of Toyota and its supplementary brands. Did you know that Toyota officially started its business in cotton looming? Me neither! Toyota’s journey is one of countless innovation, jumping from one manufacturing industry to another. It was awesome to be able to honour the history of the company and understand its legacy in Japanese culture.
And with that, my posts from Tokyo have come to a close! It’s been a great time blogging about the Mitsui Immersion Program. Thanks for having a read, and I can’t encourage you enough to apply for next year’s program cohort. It’s a once in a lifetime experience! Feel free to hit me up in the comments if you have any questions about Japan, or the program itself.
