Japan’s Camry Comeback Is Now Weeks Away

The Kentucky-built Toyota Camry is set to go on sale in Japan as early as late November, bringing the sedan back to Toyota’s home market about three years after it was dropped there.

The car headed to Japanese showrooms is the same eleventh-generation hybrid sedan that Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky builds for American buyers, finished in right-hand drive for Japan. Toyota had promised a launch this autumn, and the late-November window puts the Camry on sale within weeks of the deadline it set for itself.

The timing was reported by Nikkei on Monday evening in Tokyo, which said Toyota has notified its domestic dealers of the launch and is treating the Camry as a strategic model for Japan rather than a token import. Toyota has not announced the date, the grades or the Japanese prices, and nothing about the Camry had appeared on its Japanese newsroom as of Monday, so the launch should be treated as unconfirmed until the company publishes it.

The Camry is the last of three American-built Toyotas the company said on December 19, 2025 that it would bring to Japan from 2026: the Camry from Kentucky, the Highlander from Indiana and the Tundra from Texas. Toyota said at the time that the imports would meet a wider range of customer needs and help improve Japan-US trade relations, and that it would rely on a new certification route the transport ministry was considering after the two governments negotiated. That system took effect on February 16, and the Tundra and Highlander went on sale on April 2 through Toyota Mobility Tokyo, at 12 million yen for a Tundra 1794 Edition and 8.6 million yen for a Highlander Limited ZR Hybrid, with Toyota saying the Camry would follow as soon as preparations were complete. We covered the Tundra’s next step when Japan got the facelifted truck for this winter.

The Camry took longer because it is being handled differently. In June, Nikkei reported that Toyota planned to sell it at dealers nationwide this autumn, build it in right-hand drive at the US plant, obtain Japanese certification by the end of June and aim for 10,000 sales a year. Toyota’s own account came in a Toyota Times story in July about a fan vote between two customized Camrys at the Fuji 24 Hours, which Akio Toyoda’s entry won 5,812 votes to 4,670. Executive Vice President Hiroki Nakajima said there that orders had begun, that the plan was for the US-built car to "pass all necessary inspections and be driven on Japanese roads as a right-hand drive vehicle," and that "we hope to begin delivery to customers in the fall." The goal he gave was about 10,000 cars a year.

For American buyers the relevance is the factory. Every Camry bound for Japan comes off the Georgetown, Kentucky, line that builds the car sold here, where the 2027 Camry starts at $29,700 with a 2.5-liter engine and Toyota’s fifth-generation hybrid system, rated at 225 horsepower with front-wheel drive and 232 with all-wheel drive, and up to 51 mpg combined on the LE. A 10,000-a-year export program is small next to the plant’s output, but it is new volume for a sedan that is outselling the RAV4 in the United States this year, and it makes Kentucky the only place in the world the Camry is built for Japan.

The Toyota Report Take

The Tundra and Highlander were the easy half of this program, because a 12 million yen pickup and an 8.6 million yen three-row SUV were always going to be curiosities in Japan, sold through one Tokyo dealer group at a few dozen a month. The Camry is the real test. It is a car Japanese buyers already know, it is going through the full inspection route rather than the shortcut, and Toyota is talking about 10,000 a year and calling it strategic. If the Kentucky plant can profitably build right-hand-drive hybrids for Tokyo while tariffs are squeezing the other direction of trade, that is the most useful kind of trade gesture, the kind that shows up on a production schedule rather than in a speech. The number to watch when Toyota finally publishes the price is how it compares with the Crown, because a Camry priced anywhere near Toyota’s home-market sedan would land squarely on top of its own showroom.