Day 19

We left Gifu this morning and took our luggage right to the Yamaha’s Toyooka Plant.  Again I was regretting packing so much.  The Yamaha Toyooka Plant is one of the largest wind instrument plants.  This facility produces flutes, clarinets, saxophones, trumpets, and trombones.  We were told how the company started, the locations used today, and then were given a tour of the production facility.  The tour guide was scripted and had to ask others when we asked her questions about the process and the company.  I was surprised to see how much physical work goes into making each instrument.  Technology has made some improvements on the process, but still expert craftsman are needed to assemble each instrument.  I was surprised to see the artists engraving each saxophone, by hand, one at a time.  I thought that they would have a machine to do that.  We saw almost all the different stages of production of the brass instruments, many parts of the woodwind production process and the quality testing.  We even witnessed the 10 minuet afternoon break.  Some workers stayed a few minutes to finish up the part they were working on, but everyone was back to their station by the time the 10 minutes were up.  Some of the men were doing stretches to help fight the physical stress of some of the jobs.  After the tour we were allowed to play all the different instruments on display in the show room.  Most of us liked the supersized xylophone and the electronic drums set the best.  The xylophone was so much fun, every note sounded good.  When I played with the electronic drum set, I hit the beat button and the beat was extremely loud in the head phones.  Carol caught that moment on video.  From there we headed to the Shinagawa hotel that we stayed in the first few nights in Japan.  We were free to eat dinner and explore on our own.