The plan for our last full day in Hiroshima was to go to the Mazda museum in the morning and then go to the floating torii in the afternoon. We walked to the train station and took a train out to the Mazda factory. When we arrived we learned that there are only 2 tours per day, the first at 9:30 and the second at 1pm. We'd just missed the morning session and the afternoon session was the English one anyway.
We took the train back to the station and caught a street car to where we could walk to Carp Castle, also known as Hiroshima-jo. It was originally built in 1589, was partially dismantled and the A-bomb wiped the rest out. A ferro-concrete re-creation has since been built. The grounds were originally very large with 3 encircling moats. These grounds have steadily been encroached upon by the growing city and now only the innermost moat remains.
The 5-storey Carp Castle housed a range of artefacts of the region, particularly relating to the Samurai. On display were costumes, some very fancy swords and knives, re-created living environments, warriors clothing and the history of the castle.
We took the street car and train back out to the Mukainada station and the Mazda factory again. Lunch was sandwiches whilst sitting on a bench in the train station.
Arriving at Mazda brought us into a showroom with the newest of Mazda's car's on display, the Mazda2. From here we were all given strict instructions about the use of cameras as we were ferried through the plant in a bus. Trucks, vans, cars and cars in camouflage zipped around us as we went.
The site itself was very interesting. Part of the port is owned by Mazda and they've even built their own 500m long bridge over it. The plant was laid out linearly, with metal stamping at one end and cars rolling out the other, after going through 4 plants. The distance from the end of the plant to the waiting ships was about 100m. There were even Mazda schools and their own power sub station. Talk about optimised.
The museum was set adjacent the main finished assembly factory building. Mazda started out in 1920 building trucks and, 11 years later, motorbikes. It built it's first passenger car in 1960. The museum housed some absolutely mint condition examples of all the major Mazda models, including a 1960 R360 coupe, a very rare (because it was rubbish) 1975 Roadpacer, various Familias, Capellas and Cosmos and one each of the 3 major releases of RX-7.
The next area showed the history of the Rotary engine with Mazda, including the car they won the 1991 Le Mans 24 hour race with. Rotary engines were banned the next year.
Following on was a technology display that showed things like a car without a body, displays of the thousands of components that go into making a car, displays showing the development process from concept through to clay model, a seating buck and a mock-up, one of the crashed prototype RX8's and the metal fabrication and painting processes.
On the other side of a set of double doors was the the finished vehicle assembly line. Here they assembled MX-5's, RX-8's, the Mazda2, the Bongo van and a small Japanese domestic-only buzz-box. The line hardly stopped whilst workers worked at the speed of utter slaves to assemble the cars. Each person did just a couple of activities on each car, starting at the front and working to the back. It was the leanest Lean Manufacturing line I'd ever seen, with components coming from above, below or the side just seconds before the workman needed them. Mental note to self - never take up a job on the Mazda production line.
Lastly was a display room with some of Mazda's future vehicles. These included one of the Hydrogen-powered RX-8's, a car that can drive itself and a couple of other working concepts.