On Monday Karen and I continued west as the cast returned to Tokyo. The reason was an invitation to tour the Yamaha instrument factory in Hamamatsu. The city is beautifully situated on a plain with mountains off to the North and the Pacific Ocean to the South. Others must find it accommodating because Honda, Suzuki and other famous Japanese corporations have facilities there as well. We got a presentation on some of the advanced acoustics work they are doing and then had a chance to see where they make the instruments for which Yamaha is famous. It is interesting to see a whole room full of people looking down the barrels of bassoons, hammering discs of brass into trombone bells or handmaking $40,000 flutes. My enduring image is of a trombone slide technician, sitting amidst state-of-the-art laser and other high tech manufacturing methods adjusting trombone slide tubes by bending them over his knee!
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