Mazda Museum, Hiroshima

For something completely different, I decided to visit the Mazda Museum in Hiroshima.

Here you can see the Mazda Head Office in Mukainada, which is 8 minutes by train from HIroshima. Mukainada means 'facing open sea', which describes well the position of the factory, ideally situated for sea transport of cares across the world.

I can't show you what this mind boggling, huge facility looks like as they ask you not to take any photos inside the facility, apart from the museum.

However, I can tell you that

-the facility itself is over 7 km long. When you arrive at the Head Office and register for the tour, they put you into a bus and drive you to the museum, which takes about 15 minutes drive, which gives you an idea of the facility size, considering that you only get driven about a third of the way into the facility.

-Mazda has its own working port to ship cars across the world. I saw a huge tanker moored for international transport of vehicles. NB it was massive! And inside the facility! It takes 15 hours to fully assemble a car, and I saw a map that shows it takes 14 days to ship a car to Australia (16 to New Zealand) from Japan - all from this facility.

- Mazda has it's own huge road bridge across the river that flows through the facility. The river is a source of water. The bridge if the longest and largest private bridge in the world.

- The facility has five fire stations that are on call 24 hours a day.

- Mazda has two of its own power stations which provide 70% of it's power requirements.

-Mazda has its own hospital with 17 medical departments. I'll show you how huge that is in another blog entry as it's on the main road.