Kevin Huang | Before the Car, the Steel (Toyota Commemorative Museum, Nagoya)

The hardest part of building Japan's first cars was not the cars. It was learning how to bend metal.

The Automobile Pavilion at the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology in Nagoya spends a surprising amount of its floor on this, and it is the part I found most honest. Before Toyota could make a vehicle, it had to understand steel from the inside out — how to cast it, forge it, press it, and what it does when you ask it to take a curve it does not want to take. Europe and America had a generation of accumulated practice in all of that. Japan in the 1930s did not, so the company had to rebuild the knowledge from first principles rather than import it.

The exhibits make the point physically. You walk past casting and forging equipment, stamping dies, body panels. The lesson is that a finished product is the last and smallest part of the work; everything upstream is where the difficulty actually lives. And the engineering was not the whole problem either — the engines and bodies had to suit Japanese roads, Japanese budgets and Japanese taste, so the design questions could not simply be copied from abroad either.

I do a lot of my own infrastructure work, and this is the exhibit I think about most often afterwards. The visible artefact is never the expensive bit. The expensive bit is the understanding underneath it that nobody can see, and that you cannot skip by adopting somebody else's answer.

The museum stands on the site of Sakichi Toyoda's 1911 test weaving plant in Noritakeshinmachi, Nishi-ku, and has been open since June 1994. Nearest station is Sakō (栄生) on the Meitetsu Nagoya Main Line.

— Kevin Huang (黃冠融), who builds and runs Metablox.co