Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology, Industry and technology museum in Noritake-shimmachi, Nagoya, Japan
The Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology is an industry and technology museum in Noritake-shimmachi, Nagoya, housed in the original brick factory buildings of the Toyota group's former textile plant. It is organized into two main wings, one dedicated to textile machinery and one to automobiles.
The factory buildings date to the early 20th century, when Sakichi Toyoda founded his textile machinery business on this site before the group later shifted to automobile production. The museum opened in 1994 to document that industrial evolution.
The museum occupies a former factory building with brick walls and large windows that have remained largely unchanged since the early days of Japanese manufacturing. School groups and families visit regularly, drawn by the working demonstrations that show textile and automobile production side by side.
The museum is within walking distance of Sako Station and also easy to reach from Nagoya Station. Plan for at least a couple of hours, as the two exhibition wings cover a lot of ground and working demonstrations run throughout the day.
Sakichi Toyoda held over 80 patents for textile inventions, and several of the machines on display here are still run by trained operators, not just shown as static objects. Seeing a loom from the early 1900s in motion gives a very different sense of scale and noise compared to looking at a photograph.
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