In the City of Toyota you can find a very big community of Brazilian people. On this day we went to an apartment complex where 8300 people live, 4000 of them are foreigners. Not only from Brazil, which are the majority of them, also from Peru, Philippines, China and other countries.

Inside the Apartment Complex we visited a Non-profit organization that works with the kids of the immigrants, kids that can go to school because they don’t speak the language or are not up to date with the school work and can’t keep up, that’s the price they have to pay for being immigrants.

Mrs. Imura decided to open up this NPO 10 years ago called Homi Danchi, to help those kids to continue to go to school. Today the NPO keeps helping kids and even young adults to continue with their education. Some of them keep going to the place just to do homework or to feel part of something.

Toyota is a very interesting community because is very different from the rest of Japan. You can find many foreigners there, specially from Brazil, and diversity is not seen as such a strange thing. People are more used to seeing people from other countries there, many people speak English and the interest for learning about other cultures and languages is obvious.

It is good to know that we, as World Campus – Japan, could see a little bit of a different Japan in the City of Toyota. Every place in Japan, for sure has its own magic and Toyota has a very special magic.

Obviously, we couldn’t leave the City of Toyota without visiting… “Toyota!” Even though we couldn’t visit the cars factory itself, we got to see the Toyota Museum of Technology.

Now, you’re imagining a boring museum, full of old cars and stuff like that, right?

Wrong! The Toyota museum was surprisingly fun! In Techno-land, for example, you could do and try all kind of experiences, so that you could learn about physics forces that they use all the time to produce cars. And for those who love robots, they had one that would play musical instruments! We posted a picture a few days ago with a caption “Future”, check it out!

And, obviously, for those who love cars, they had one part where they would explain how things are done in Toyota factory. So, even though we couldn’t get to see the real factory, we understood the whole process.

We sure had a good time, hanging in the museum! The fact that the Nagoya college students were with us, giving us some explanations sometimes, made it a really good day!

(Ana Margarida – Portugal)