We had a good time in Nagoya but not really because of anything Nagoya has to offer in particular. In fact, the city is quite forgettable and I struggled to remember much about it. There’s a wicked Dinosaur museum (Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum), which you can read more about in Toucan’s Tips For kids in the information pages. However, that was more than 3 hours drive away in Fukui.
The downtown of Nagoya is pretty typical Japanese, some big shopping malls but there’s not a whole lot to do here about from Nagoya Castle. It’s been called the most boring city in Japan, and this article here pretty much sums it up and is worth a read. If you can’t be bothered clicking through, here’s a snippet from it.
After all, it was the city of Nagoya that conducted an unfavorable survey last summer among residents of eight “key cities” to determine which were the most appealing as travel destinations. Nagoya came in last in almost every category, but what people found hilarious was that the respective residents of each city surveyed picked their own hometowns as their favorites except for Nagoya’s, who chose theirs as the third favorite, behind Kyoto and Tokyo.”
By Philip Brasor of the Japan Times. Follow Philip on Twitter here.
I actually didn’t think it was that bad, Nagoya Castle was alright, we went to a few other places (which you can read about in What To Do in Nagoya), the weather was nice and you can find good Japanese food pretty much all over Japan. I don’t think we’d go back in a hurry, other than the Fukui Dinosaur Museum, there’s better cities in Japan, but I can think of worse places to go.
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