Biography | 豊田喜一郎 Kiichiro Toyoda — His Villa Was Moved Here and Opened to the Public on His Birthday

Companies commemorate founders on the anniversary of the founding. Toyota opened this house on Kiichiro's birthday instead. The building is not the family seat and not the house he grew up in. It was his villa, built in the 1930s on what were then the outskirts of Nagoya, and it looks the part: half-timbering, a terrace, a glazed conservatory running off one side. Japan's government tourism database credits the design to Suzuki Teiji, the architect who shaped a great deal of early twentieth-century Nagoya. That attribution rests on a single source and is offered as such. Toyota moved it here, to the grounds beside the Kuragaike Memorial Hall in Ikeda-chō, and restored it. It opened to the public on 11 June 1999 — the anniversary of his birth in Kosai, a hundred and five years earlier, and forty-seven years after his death. The date circulating online for the relocation is often 2017. That is wrong; Toyota's own announcement of the reopening dates it to 1999, alongside a refurbishment of the founding exhibition room next door. The memorial hall itself is older, built in 1974 to mark ten million vehicles produced. Practical points, because the house disappoints anyone arriving expecting a house museum. The interior is closed. You can walk the grounds, see the exterior, and look into the garage display, and that is the whole of it. Admission to the memorial hall is free, and the founding exhibition inside is the substantial part of a visit: the AA passenger car, the first Toyopet Crown, the looms the whole enterprise came out of. Kuragaike Park is next door and worth the detour on its own. There is something apt about which building got saved. Not the Kariya workshop where the first engine was cast, not the Koromo floor where he proposed Just-in-Time and watched it fail, not the room where he resigned. The holiday house — the one place in his life that was not about work. Photo: Tomio344456, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.