Toyota Commemorative Museum

Toyota began as a loom manufacturer. Sakichi Toyoda invented an automatic loom that stopped itself the moment a thread broke - the principle he called jidoka, machines that detect their own faults, which later became one of the two pillars of the Toyota production system - and the licence money from selling those patents to a British firm funded his son's move into cars. The museum occupies the original red brick loom works of 1911, and its distinction is that almost everything runs: a hall of textile machinery from hand spinning through to modern air-jet looms is demonstrated in sequence by staff, and the automotive hall shows metal-forming, casting and assembly with working machine tools rather than static exhibits. The noise and the smell of oil are part of it. It is a genuinely good industrial museum and is often skipped in favour of the car collection elsewhere.

History

Toyota began as a textile firm before growing into an international carmaker, and the museum opened in June 1994 in an old red-brick textile factory, its displays running from looms to the history of cars (Wikipedia, Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology).

What's there

• Working machinery - looms and machine tools run and demonstrated by staff.
• Jidoka's origin - the automatic loom that stopped itself when a thread broke.
• The 1911 brick works - the original Toyoda plant kept as the museum building.
• Metal in process - forming, casting and assembly shown on working equipment.

When to go

All year; weekday mornings for the demonstrations. Three hours.

Things to know

Closed Mondays. Demonstrations run to a timetable and missing one means waiting. The textile hall is longer than most visitors expect and some find it dry. It is loud, which is the point but tiring.

Nearby

Nagoya station is south-east; Nagoya Castle is east.

Key facts