> But Risaburō Toyoda, who had married into the family and was not born with that name, preferred "Toyota" (トヨタ) because it took eight brush strokes (a lucky number) to write in Japanese, was visually simpler (leaving off the diacritic at the end) and with a voiceless consonant instead of a voiced one (voiced consonants are considered to have a "murky" or "muddy" sound compared to voiceless consonants, which are "clear").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota
Obviously, though, I don't speak Japanese. Would both the family name and the company name be Latinized as Toyoda?
But back to the naming thing, I think it is not the worst idea to name things after japanese terms, because often they can be pronounced quite easily and are often rather memorable. I have often forgotten company names because they sounded so stupid and hard to remember.