NAGOYA (Aichi) • Nagoya, the capital of Aichi prefecture, has the dubious honour of twice being named Japan's "most boring" city.
In what has been mocked as an own goal, Japan's fourth-most populous city commissioned two surveys in 2016 and last year, asking residents of eight major cities in Japan to choose what they found to be the most appealing location.
The surveys found that Nagoya residents were hard-pressed to choose their own home town.
But Nagoya has long been one of the country's most innovative cities, and is now seeking to position itself as a Mice (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions) and tourism hub with a Legoland theme park.
The host city of the Group of 20 Foreign Ministers' meeting this weekend was drawing enough visitors to warrant the opening of a second terminal at Chubu Centrair Airport, dedicated to low-cost carriers, on Sept 20.
It welcomed 12.36 million international and domestic passengers in the last fiscal year, up 7 per cent from 2017, to reach peak capacity.
And in August, the Aichi Sky Expo, a 60,000 sq m convention hall that is directly linked to the airport, was opened.
Still, Aichi prefecture's bread and butter has long been - and will continue to be - its manufacturing industries. Japan's largest automaker Toyota is headquartered in its namesake Toyota city.
The Central Japan Railway Company, based in Nagoya, is building the Linear Chuo maglev high-speed rail that will slash travel time between Nagoya and Tokyo to 40 minutes, down from 100 minutes, by 2027.
Aichi is also where as much as 35 per cent of each Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft, including its main wing, fuselage and the centre wing box, is manufactured.
One of the four Boeing 747 Dreamlifters in the world is parked at Chubu airport, to transport B-787 parts to its assembly plants in the United States.
And the world's first B-787 Dreamliner is on permanent showcase at the Flight of Dreams exhibition hall beside Chubu Centrair Airport, in what is a homage by the company to the city.
Aichi is also home to futuristic industries like SkyDrive, which is developing flying cars, and PD Aerospace, which is developing "spaceplanes" that, unlike one-off rockets that launch vertically, can take off like an airplane and are reusable.
PD Aerospace has an eye on realising space travel by 2024, flying to an altitude of 100km from where passengers can experience five minutes of weightlessness, seeing the earth beneath them.
All in, the size of Aichi's economy is about US$342 billion (S$465 billion), or about the size of Malaysia's economy, according to prefectural data.
A packed events calendar going into the new decade may result in Nagoya relinquishing its ignominious honour.
It will host the mega K-pop extravaganza, the Mnet Asian Music Awards, in two weeks and the World Robot Summit next year.
In 2022, the new Studio Ghibli theme park, dedicated to the works of acclaimed animator Hayao Miyazaki, will be launched in the nearby city of Nagakute, while in 2026, Nagoya is set to host the 20th Asian Games sporting event.
Walter Sim
