Nagoyaruns on a handful of strong industries. If you’re job-hunting or weighing a move, here’s where the opportunities (and the big-name employers) are.
Top industries & employers
Automotive & mobility
Toyota Motor, Denso, Aisin, Toyota Industries, JTEKT, Toyota Boshoku
Toyota's headquarters sit in Toyota City half an hour southeast, and the tier-one suppliers cluster around Kariya and Anjō. Aichi has led every Japanese prefecture in the value of manufactured goods shipped for more than forty consecutive years.
Aerospace
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Subaru, Shinmaywa
The Chubu region builds a large share of the Boeing 787 airframe, including the composite wings, and Mitsubishi Heavy's aerospace works sit at Komaki and Tobishima. It is the densest aerospace cluster in Japan.
Machine tools & robotics
Yamazaki Mazak, Okuma, Brother Industries, Makita
Two of the world's largest machine tool makers are headquartered within half an hour of Nagoya. Brother began here as a sewing machine repair business in 1908 and is still a Nagoya company.
Ceramics & advanced materials
Noritake, NGK Insulators, Niterra, LIXIL
Noritake, NGK Insulators, Niterra and TOTO all descend from the Morimura group, a trading house founded in Tokyo in 1876 that put its porcelain works in Nagoya in 1904 — one nineteenth-century merchant house that became four global materials companies, three of them still headquartered here.
Rail & infrastructure
JR Central, Meitetsu, Nippon Sharyo, Toyota Tsusho
JR Central runs the Tōkaidō Shinkansen and is headquartered above Nagoya Station. Its Chūō maglev to Tokyo is built from here, though JR Central abandoned the 2027 opening in March 2024 and now says 2034 at the earliest.
Trade & logistics
Nagoya Port, Toyota Tsusho, Aichi Steel, Chubu Centrair
The Port of Nagoya handles more total cargo tonnage than any other Japanese port, largely because it is where the country's cars leave from. Centrair airport sits on an artificial island 28 minutes from the centre.
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