OHIRA, Miyagi Prefecture--Toyota Motor Corp. held an opening ceremony on March 27 for an in-house technical training school in the quake-battered Tohoku region.
OHIRA, Miyagi Prefecture--Toyota Motor Corp. held an opening ceremony on March 27 for an in-house technical training school in the quake-battered Tohoku region.
The auto giant invested 1 billion yen ($10.6 million) in Toyota East Japan Technical Skills Academy, a 30,000-square-meter structure on the premises of Toyota Motor East Japan Inc., one of the automaker’s subsidiaries.
It is Toyota's second training school in Japan. A year after its founding in 1937, it established what is now known as the Toyota Technical Skills Academy in Aichi Prefecture.
Around this time last year, the Aichi academy accepted 15 trainees from Tohoku who will start work in Tohoku this spring.
Toyota is eager to develop human resources in the quake-hit Tohoku region, the automaker's third largest production base following the Tokai and Kyushu regions.
The new school’s training program is limited to 30 trainees.
Of them, 15 are graduates of industrial high schools in the Tohoku area. The school is instructing them in the fundamentals of manufacturing for a year.
After finishing the program, they will be sent to work at Toyota's factories in the Tohoku region and elsewhere. The school also accepted the remaining 15 trainees from local manufacturing companies.
"We’d like the public to understand that Toyota is pleased to set down roots in Tohoku and help the region recover from the (March 2011) disaster," Toyota's executive vice president, Satoshi Ozawa, said at the ceremony. "We plan to continuously develop human resources in the region."