Once again, is this coming through

Seems top work in the reply, also...

Actually, that is not Kanji. It is Katakana and says "Hachiroku." There is no Kanji for hachi roku so the correct way to write it in Japanese would be numerically.

AHA! Ray is correct! (As well he should be) since in Japanese they use Arabic numbers! I had forgotten that, didn't I? ;)

But, take a look at my 'new' tag!

The tag doesn't make sense (at least to me it doesn't). Keep in mind that I can't read more than around 20 Kanji characters but I can read Hiragana and Katakana. BTW, there are Japanese/Chinese numbers.

Oh. As far as I knew, the Japanese and Chinese used Arabic. It seemed kind of odd to me that they wouldn't have developed their own numbering system.

I know on my early cars the nameplates were in Japanese and English, and the numbers were all the same, so by logical deduction you could figure out what some of the characters meant.

I figured out on my Carina that Toyota was on the radiator cap as To yo ta The To charachter looks sort of like a T, the Yo looks like a backward E and Ta looks a lot like a squared off cursive F. Since I can't do Japanese on this computer. . . .

Charles of Schaumburg

t3q

I always figured it was an abbreviation...

In 1937, the department was spun off and became an independent company inside the group, which continues to make textile machinery. The name of the new company was changed from Toyoda to Toyota - one you will probably hear if you go on one of the plant tours. The name "Toyota" for the company instead of the family name "Toyoda" for several reasons. First, Kiichiro Toyoda wanted to make a distinction between his family (private life) and his company (public life). In Japan, people count the number of strokes it takes to write kanji, hiragana or katakana. In katakana, it takes 10 strokes to write "Toyoda" and 8 strikes to write "Toyota". In Japanese, eight is a good number because the kanji used to write eight also has the meaning of "infinity".

The Chinese and Japanese numbers are the same but are not widely used. The Chinese/Japanese numbers are used in certificates and ceremonial stuff, but Arabic numbers are used every day.

Those characters were Katakana and used to be Toyota's logo before they adopted the oval one.

Besides automotive-related businesses, Toyota also imports wine from CA to Japan for sale on passenger trains and carpet and building materials for use in their pre-fabricated housing division. Toyota has a machine-tool division, textile machine division that makes automatic looms, sewing machines, and embroidery machines, and they used to be the Cessna distributor in China.

I notice a lot of times the model designate is in Roman, as well. For instance the Carina comes up with TA12 behind it, that's definitely not Japanese.

Charles of Schaumburg

WOW! I knew about the Textile part (That's how they started) but wine? Cessnas?

Very interesting!