The model city

Tokugawa Ieyasu retired to Sunpu — modern Shizuoka — and rebuilt its castle in 1607. Over the Edo period the town kept calling in carpenters, most famously for the long rebuilding of Shizuoka Sengen Shrine in the 1800s. That brought large numbers of skilled woodworkers to the area, and many stayed.

Wood to plastic

Those workshops became a woodworking industry: furniture, lacquer, and then wooden toys and model kits. By the early twentieth century Shizuoka was Japan's centre for wooden model aircraft and ships, largely for schools.

When injection-moulded plastic arrived in the 1950s and 60s, the companies already here simply changed material. The skills — precision, tooling, a culture of exact scale — transferred directly.

Tamiya, Hasegawa, Aoshima and Fujimi are all Shizuoka companies. Bandai's Gunpla factory — the Bandai Hobby Center — is here too, and it makes essentially all of the Gundam kits sold worldwide.

What you can actually see

The Bandai Hobby Center is a working factory, painted white and red like a Gundam, and does not generally take casual visitors — but it is visible from outside and it is unmistakable.

Model shops in the city carry stock and back-catalogue items that are hard to find elsewhere, at Japanese domestic prices. If you or anyone in your family builds, this is a genuinely important stop.

The Shizuoka Hobby Show, in May, is the industry's main annual event and fills the city.

Why this matters on a cruise

Because it is the least likely thing about this port and it is completely real. Shimizu sells itself on Mount Fuji, and Fuji is the reason most people come. But the city you are docked in is also, quietly, the world capital of a global hobby.

It costs you twenty minutes and a train stop to see that, and it is the sort of detail that makes a port day memorable rather than photographable.