Carmaker shows off new version of vehicle traditionally used by Japanese royals and CEOs
3 min
TOKYO—Toyota thinks the world outside of Japan may finally be ready to embrace its six-figure super luxury flagship car.
Toyota’s Century—often described as the Rolls-Royce of Japanese cars—is a frequent choice of corporate chieftains and government leaders in Japan, including the emperor.
Since it made its debut in 1967, the Century has been sold almost exclusively in Japan and the model has changed little from its original boxy sedan shape and classic styling.
Toyota on Wednesday showed off a new, larger, plug-in hybrid version of the model that “from the start had its eye on the world,” Executive Vice President Hiroki Nakajima said, speaking at the unveiling event in Tokyo.
The new Century model will be introduced this year in Japan at a suggested retail price equivalent to around $170,000 and will be offered to customers in all regions of the world, Nakajima said. Toyota said select dealers in Japan would sell the model but didn’t describe sales procedures in other countries such as the U.S.
With its new Century, Toyota is targeting two segments—larger and luxury vehicles—that have continued to grow despite stagnation elsewhere in the car market. Until now, Toyota has primarily served the luxury market through its Lexus brand.
In 2022, global sport-utility vehicle sales grew 3% from the year earlier despite a slight decline in overall car shipments. That was due in part to strong demand for the vehicles in the U.S., India and Europe. Demand for luxury cars has also continued to rise through recent economic uncertainties.
One thing that won’t change is Toyota’s practice of having specially trained workers hand-make and customise the Century models in Japan. For now, Toyota said it wouldn’t produce more than 30 of the new Century models a month in addition to the existing sedan type it also continues to manufacture.
That means the new Century will likely have a bigger impact on Toyota’s brand image than its bottom line. Nakajima said the Century is a way to show off Toyota’s craftsmanship. He said details of overseas rollout plans would be determined based on initial reactions from customers.
Through the decades, Toyota’s Century has gained a following for being a decidedly Japanese take on a superluxury car. While little-known to most Toyota buyers in the U.S., it has attracted a following from some car enthusiasts such as comedian Jay Leno, who featured the model on a 2018 episode of his car-review series.
The vehicle’s grille features a badge inspired by the golden phoenix that adorns the Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto. The exit from the rear passenger cabin is lowered so that a person wearing a ceremonial kimono can easily get in and out.
It targets the Japanese upper crust who want to broadcast success, but not in a flashy way. The styling is boxy and understated, typically black with chrome accents.
When introducing the most recent iteration of the Century in 2018, Toyota said it had no plans to sell the vehicle outside of Japan because it didn’t think the car would appeal to foreigners.
The new models presented on stage Wednesday were a departure from the Century’s original styling—similar in shape to an SUV and showing a range of silver and gray shades.
Still, many of the Century’s interior features designed for chauffeured passengers remain. Those include rear seats that fully recline.
Chief Branding Officer Simon Humphries said the new Century was designed to maintain “the highest of Japanese sensibilities,” while also keeping in mind that customers are changing. The roomier new Century is designed for passengers who want to join online meetings from the back seat of their cars and drive without producing emissions, Toyota said.
“It’s a Century for the next century,” Humphries said.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
