Nagoya: Ghibli and Toyota Auto Museum - 4 Day Weekend Travel Extravanaza Day 1

Thanks to the combination of a national holiday and some overtime I have to make up (I can't work overtime, so when I work a Saturday I have to take another day off), gave me a 4 day weekend from 10/31-11/3! Luck would have it some other ALTs, Sarah, Mandy, and Jillian, were headed to Nagoya. I decided to join them to check out stuff I missed on my short one day excursion last month.

We started going to Moricoro Park on a tram. The park is an odd blend of a nature preserve, exhibition area, water park, and gardens. This massive park located to the east of Nagoya seems to be the epicenter for family events. So it was a fitting place for the Ghibli Exhibition and the house from Totoro, the latter which is a permanent fixture of the park (the tram even came with a collectible ticket for the event). The first part of the exhibit celebrated Ghibli's 30th anniversary by featuring all of their promotional posters, from concept to final product. I found it fascinating to look at the original hand drawn sketches outlining the layout of the poster, and how those rough sketches evolved into a clean professional poster. Also in this exhibit they had an area where they showed the process for creating their movies, from storyboarding, continuity checks, keyframes, in between frames, to final production. Ghibli's production style is purposefully old fashioned to give a hand drawn look.


The second exhibition featured the Ghibli film "When Marie was There". The exhibition had large set recreations of areas from the movie, which were quite neat to walk through. This exhibition focused extensively on the background art of the film, which is something I think many fans take for granted. The art is stellar. Many of the paintings I was sure were pictures until you looked at the edge of the canvas on the unframed photos, where the paint strokes shoot off the edge. It boggles my mind that there are artists of this caliber who create such fantastic still life works in bulk to be used for a mere few seconds in a film. The walking path snaked through life renditions of rooms used in the film, further adding to the impressive nature of the exhibit. They even had a massive scale model of the house and lake from the movie, and hologram displays of other scenes. The anime artists in Japan are truly on another level. I wish I could have shown you, but pictures were strictly forbidden.

After going to the exhibits, Sarah and Jillian had to catch a bus back to Osaka, so Mandy and I wandered into the park to look for food. As we wandered the park we came across various gorgeous landscaping exhibits and flower displays.  Further in there was a stage and food stalls set up for a concert event going on throughout the day, so we stopped by and got some good food before we wandered into the park towards the Totoro House.

During our walk we got sidetracked, first by a suspended walkway which went through the trees in the park which was a neat experience, and secondly by a notably great Japanese garden. I appreciated this Japanese garden in particular for its use of large trees and rocks, which in my experience is uncommon for these types of gardens.  While in the garden we had a surprising conversation with a local artist who was sketching in the garden. I have had great luck meeting a multitude of friendly people in Japan during my travels.

Journeying through the garden we ended up at the Totoro house, which was neat to see. It's oddly surreal to see a place from a cartoon actually exist in real life.

After stopping for some delicious ice cream (I got the tiger tail - pumpkin & dark chocolate), we left the park to our next destination.



Next we stopped by the Toyota Automobile Museum, which is a show floor of cars from Model Ts to Fuel Cell powered vehicles. Some notable cars were an electric carriage from 1902 (guess green energy has been around for a while), the first Honda car, and Teddy Roosevelt's presidential coach. There was also an exhibit with hood ornaments, which were illuminated. In person their appearance was impressive, the photos couldn't handle the lighting well.  Speaking of hood ornaments, the cars on the show floor came from so many different eras that I was able to see many of the older company logos.  Subaru and Mazda have some cool retro logos, and Toyota interestingly enough used to have font that spelled Toyoda. There was tons of other interesting vehicles and things to see in the museum, far too many to discuss, so please just browse the gallery up top.

This evening we went out for a famous Nagoya specialty, Miso Katsu. We went Yabaton, a notable local restaurant chain specializing in the dish. It did not disappoint.  Nagoya is known for a darker, stronger flavored miso than the rest of the Japan, so their signature dishes often feature it.

On our way back to the hostel we also saw an incredibly large dance meetup at an underpass in the middle of the city, as well as three street performing drummers jamming. The group's name was Mamy and Seven. All three were incredibly impressive, and the little girl added a unique charm to the whole performance.