Day 2

Hi, hai--sorry for posting delay.

Kawasaki Good Times World was good times indeed, and the start of what promises to be a series of walk-and-gawk activities that have the 18 journalists on this trip shuffling around like obedient school-kids (while looking signifcantly less cute than the actual school-kids who swarmed KGTW in matching hats).

The museum opened into a hall that chronicled the origins of the 129-year-old company (collectively called Kawasaki Heavy Industries) and offered a glimpse of the surprising range of events and areas they've been involved in since. Of all the ships, robots, bikes, helicopters, and bullet trains on display, though, I have to say I was most impressed with the Kawasaki tunnel-boring machine, responsible for excavating the Eurotunnel from France to England in 1991. Whatever 1/20th scale means, you still have to stand in awe of the kind of technology that shrinks cars to fit through a football-sized passage. Then again, a Rubik's-cube solving robot is nothing to sneeze at—nor is an '07 ZX-6R, whether you're a moto-journalist or a 7-year-old Japanese school-girl.

Post-Good Times World, it was back on the bus for a ride to KHI's Akashi Works plant, which is not only the source of "leisure products" (like motorcycles) familiar to U.S. consumers, but also responsible for bohemoth projects like fabricating one of the two main towers of Japan's Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, which boasts the longest span of any suspension bridge in the world and did a first-rate job of getting our bus from one side of the Akashi Straight to the other.

Once the bus arrived at Akashi Works, we were quickly outfitted in jackets, hard hats, and ear-pieces for a tour that wove in-and-out of various motorcycle assembly lines, the noise and bustle of which didn't obscure the obvious efficiency of a system that allows several different models of bike to be assembled on the same line. Cameras weren't allowed in the facility—and won't be in any of the other factories we tour, either—but some stock photos are apparently winging their way home for use in a later RRX article, and hopefully they'll convey some of the wonder of seeing motorcycles careen overhead while you jump to avoid racks of tanks, fairings, and forks that have somewhere to be. In the meantime, I think you'll be pretty well satisfied with this excellent sketch I just did, though I admit it doesn't speak to the remarkable strangeness of hearing alerts that sound like ice-cream-truck music occasionally flutter down on a floor full of serious, fast-moving laborers. And yes, as someone pointed out, it kind of looks like the bad end of a stockyard.