Over the weekend, I packed up the fam and took at road trip to Nagoya, where we stuffed our faces with miso katsu, marveled at the spacious city roads and headed over to the Toyota Automobile Musuem.

Featuring vintage American, European and Japanese cars, the museum traces the dawn of the car and follows it up right through the present day. There are the requisite halls of old cars, as well as an exhibit that ties automobiles to Japanese history.

The exhibit goes generation by generation. There are a Meiji-era rickshaw and a pre-World War II Osaka-made Chevrolet, which are contrasted with clothes or photos from the period. The post-war period gets sports cars and electronics and antique cameras.

The entire exhibit culminates in a several giant TV screens that were showing Dragon Quest. Important products from this period include the calculator, the Walkman, the Game & Watch and the Famicom. Both Nintendo products do carry a huge cultural impact in Japan. But, so does Sony's game machines, and to a lesser extent, Sega's. Guess we know which console Toyota is looking forward to this autumn. Brian Ashcraft

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