Leaving

On the way back to Hekinan from the Toyota factory tour, we came across a tract of farmland in Anjo city. The farmers were out harvesting their rice. To my Saskatchewan eyes, it looks like mini-farming, but it's big business out here. Talking about the price of rice in China, or Japan, it's going up, and the people of Asia rely heavily on rice for food. If too many farmers leave their land, rice production goes down and so does the food stock.

The good news is that there is a small emerging trend of young people moving to small farms and working the land. There's even a hip, young, fashion businesswoman (famous for the 'shibuya gal' look) who has started farming and marketing the brand as "Shibuya Rice". ShibOOya is a super cool district in Tokyo. Here she is with her fashion model labourer. They are sooo roughing it.
I like the trademark white towel on the head that male labourers wear in summer. The towel truly is one of the most spectacularly useful items in the galaxy.
Here's the mini-harvester dumping its mini-load of rice into the mini-dumptruck. It appears to be a family affair.
As the harvester goes around, hacking off the stalks, the cranes gather to hunt in the stubble for frogs, bugs, and maybe missed grains too. I had never seen so many white cranes in one place before.

Seeing harvest in action reminded me of the fall season in Saskatchewan. Now that we're leaving, Mandy and i are feeling a little nostalgic about our time here. We will miss life in Japan, although we both agree that it's the right time to go back home. We're leaving behind ready employment, some good friends, and mild weather. But it's just not home, is it? I don't know that i could feel at home in Japan, no matter how long i would live here.

We have a bye bye party tomorrow, and then we're leaving to visit Kelly on tuesday for a while, and then off to Malta/Italy for a proper honeymoon! There's a lot to look forward to.

"The heartbeat of Japan"

In these final days of our adventure in Japan, we are enjoying some free weekdays, seeing some sights in our area that we have missed so far. Yesterday we took a tour of a Toyota car factory in Toyota City, which is nearby. This plant makes the economy-rescuing Prius, the Camry, plus two models i don't think we have in N.A., the Allion and the Premio.

The factory is amazingly huge, covering acres and acres of land. It was the first Toyota factory to reduce its landfill trips to zero, plus it recycles water, purifying it and sending it back to the river from whence it came, and tons of iron waste from welding are recycled into new material.
Here's Mandy in the IQ, a new model that seems to be Toyota's answer to the smart car, but this one has a back seat, which is almost a waste of effort in such a tiny car. I don't know if this model has come to North America yet.

This is the showroom lobby as seen from the museum gift shop on the second floor. The trumpet playing robot does a show a few times a day, which is pretty cool. The wheeled thing in the background is a car of the future, which stands up tall and is mobile that way, and it also transforms into a low-riding sports mobile on the go. It was really busy earlier in the day, but the robot seems to be performing for two this time. Oh well, robots' feelings can't get hurt, at least not yet. Some day though, i think we'll have to be careful about what we say around vending machines and parking meters.

We couldn't take our cameras into the factory and assembly lines, but of course, someone has, and i found a cool video of the welding robots. This is pretty much exactly as we saw it in the Japanese factory.