>>Who knew that a manufacturer of automatic looms - Toyoda - would eventually give rise to a major automobile manufacturer - Toyota?
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>Is the story of the name change true? I heard that Toyoda requires some 19-20 strokes to write, while Toyota is less than half of that. Considering the number of times a company name must be written, rendered in neon or what have you, the saving* would be significant.
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>* There, I wrote "saving" in singular. Something you don't see every week. "A savings" is the norm, for which I never heard a good explanation.

As far as I recall, both Toyota and Toyoda are written as 豊田 in kanji (Chinese ideogram). The story that I recall about the two companies is that the eldest son of the founder of the company that produced automatic looms (Toyoda) was the one that started an automobile division, which was later spun off as a separate company. One of the confusing bits in Japanese language is that pronunciation of kanji may change according to context or usage. It's rather confusing at times, as the same name kanji may have numerous pronunciations. Equally confusing are also cases where you could have names that are homophones (i.e. they sound the same) but are written using different kanji (and thus different meaning). There is the typical prank where you write someone's name using different kanji that have a rather unflattering meaning.