Nagoya

Nagoya built Japan's engine room and kept its manners. The Tokugawa made it a castle capital — the golden shachihoko dolphins on the rebuilt keep are the city's emblem, and the Tokugawa Art Museum guards the family's swords and the oldest illustrated Tale of Genji scrolls — while Atsuta Shrine, holding one of the three imperial regalia, gives the city a sanctity older than the shoguns. The local genius, though, is mechanical: from karakuri, the Edo-period clockwork puppets that still perform on festival floats, a straight line of ingenuity runs to the looms of Toyoda and the global machine that is Toyota — the city's industrial museums narrate the lineage from wooden automaton to assembly robot with justified pride.

The concert address is the Aichi Arts Center, the prefectural complex in Sakae whose Concert Hall — the venue documented in the concert record — serves as home stage of the Nagoya Philharmonic and host to the touring orchestras of Japan's third metropolis, opera house and museum sharing the building in vertical efficiency. The table dissents from Tokyo cheerfully: miso-katsu, hitsumabushi eel and morning-service coffee shops are civic institutions. Golden dolphins, clockwork ancestors, a concert hall ten floors deep: Nagoya engineers even its pleasures — reliably.