Eh, they were luxury cars. It just wasn't in Japanese culture to use separate marques for luxury and non-luxury cars (though I guess it's changing, with Toyota

Eh, they were luxury cars. It just wasn't in Japanese culture to use separate marques for luxury and non-luxury cars (though I guess it's changing, with Toyota bringing the Lexus name to Japan about a decade ago). The Toyota Crown is probably Japan's most historically significant luxury car, and it's always been sold as a Toyota alongside cheaper cars like the Corolla and Yaris (fun fact: a huge chunk of Toyota's cars are named after the Crown, including both the Corolla and the Camry, plus cars that aren't too well known outside of Japan like the Corona and Carina). Another interesting tidbit about the Japanese market: you know how American car companies used to practice badge engineering? That is, they would sell the same car under several different marques, each with its own dealer network; an example of this would be the GM's W-body cars from the 1990s where the Chevrolet Lumina, Pontiac Grand Prix, Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, and Buick Regal were all pretty much the same car, but different dealer networks would sell them (though Pontiac and Buick eventually merged dealer networks). Well, Japanese manufactures did that too in Japan, except they put all the badge-engineered versions under the same marque while selling them through different dealer networks! For example, Toyota has something like four different dealer networks in Japan, each one gets to sell about 1/4 of their cars, all their cars at all their dealer networks are badged as Toyotas (or at least they were until they introduced Lexus in 2006), and it's not uncommon for two different dealer networks to each get a car that's identical to the other in all but name and minor styling differences. A classic example of this is the Toyota Corolla and Toyota Sprinter. They're pretty much the same car, but they have slightly different styling, and they go to different dealer networks (fun fact: the Sprinter styling was available in the US during the '90s, badged as the Geo Prizm). With that said, Toyota has been cutting down on this lately, just like how GM has also been cutting down on their badge engineering (mostly by killing Oldsmobile and Pontiac).