Toyota City is in the outskirts of Nagoya in central Japan and as the name suggest it is the home of the huge Toyota motor company. The company is trailing these cute little electric cars called the Crayon which can be hired thought the city. For a few hundred yen (a couple of dollars) you can hire them at many locations around the city. They have a cable on the front of the vehicle which has a paddle which plugs into a electric repowering station. The vehicles travel at reasonable speeds and have a range of about 30 kilometers they are quiet popular for getting shopping home and for buisness trips for many of the people who don’t have a car in this tightly packed city.

Nagoya travel guide

Nagoya was the home of Expo in 2005 and one of it’s most popular attractions were robots. So many of the robots featured at Expo and quiet a few others now make up Japan’s first Robot Museum in Nagoya. The two storey complex has a huge range of robots and many interactive displays, including manufacturing robots, toy robots and the next big thing helper robots. Already companies like Honda and Toyota are planning to produce robots which will live and assist around the home and be more than a futuristic gimic. The museum has over 1000 exhibits and a gift shop which is just as big with plenty of toys and gizmos to empty your wallets. Click our more info link to visit the official website- the Japanese cartoons are really fun.

For more information visit www.robot-museum.net

Postnote: we have been informed the Robot Museum may now be closed the message on their website reads in ‘Jinglish’

“Completely Closed from Oct 1st 2007 Please be careful, not available now”

It is unclear from the information we have wether it will reopen, keep checking their website and hopefully some useful information will develop- who knows?

Post-postnote: it looks like a few exhibits from the museum have temporarly moved to Aichi Institute of Technology head temple campus for display.

The last World Expo was in Nagoya in central Japan and to help get the 20+ million visitors to the site the Linimo Maglev Train was built. This amazing piece of technology offers a fully computerised, safe and smooth ride and is the first Japanese train to use the maglev system. It is hoped the technology will be used in the Shinkasen bullet trains in years to come, a Tokyo to Osaka train is in final stages of development, infact testing is being currently undertaken with speeds in excess of 580kmh. Nagoya’s train however is a suburban train it stops at 9 stops and rides upon a elevated track and reaches speeds of up to 100kph and actually floats 8 mm above the track being held up by magnetic force. The Linimo Train is able to carry 4000 passengers in each direction every hour with each train designed to carry 244 passengers, but as with all Japanese trains many more will squeeze in.

For more info: �http://www.gizmohighway.com/transport/japan_maglev_train.htm