I was only 11 at the time, but I was dazzled by the private tour of Kurobe Dam. It’s size of Hoover Dam and freaking huge. The dam was nearly finished when we visited as guests of Kansai Electric, and we took this strange little Elves railway deep, deep into the mountain. We got out of our mini-train carriage into a brightly lit station with gleaming tiles, and directly opening into a modernist office area, with desks and office furniture.
Rather than office windows looking outside, there was a massive expanse of glass overlooking the turbine hall, from three stories up. I assume the control room was in the floor underneath us ... didn’t get to see that, but we did go to the main turbine hall. Two were up and running, the third Hitachi-made unit was on a crane, and there was a vast and deep concrete pit for #4, yet to arrive. All new and the walls all done in gleaming white tile, not bare concrete. Basically, an office and power station deep in a mountain, with a very quiet thrum as enormous quantities of water flowed through the penstocks into the turbines. You could just barely feel it.
We left by another route and saw the ultra high tension power lines coming out of the mountain, There was a faint glow around the wires from corona discharge and a sound like crickets from overhead.
Dad drew our attention, as we left on the micro train out of the very deep valley, that all this was being built 15 years after the most overwhelming defeat in history, with nearly every Japanese city in smoking ruins, and tens of millions on the verge of starvation. A scant 15 years later, a Japanese-made technological wonder that put Hoover Dam in the shade. It left quite an impression.
I have to give Dad credit. As Economic Attaché, he wangled some spectacular tours while we were overseas. Kurobe Dam. A Japanese steelworks at full blast. A visit to the 8-reactor carrier Enterprise. A visit to a factory assembling magnetic-core memory. An aerial tour of Hong Kong on a four-engine Super Constellation as the FAA aligned Kai Tak’s landing systems.
Although he was a diplomat with a Masters in Economics, he was a big fan of technology, the more spectacular, the better. If you want Big Tech, Asia’s the place.