TOM'S Co., Ltd (株式会社トムス, Kabushiki-gaisha Tomusu^?) is a factory supported racing team and tuner of Toyota and Lexus vehicles. The name stands for Tachi Oiwa Motor Sport. Their head office is located in Tokyo, Japan. They are currently heavily involved with Super GT racing and Formula 3 racing. TOM'S creates aftermarket parts for current Toyota vehicles, and have also created their own special edition of certain current Lexus models.

TOM'S stands for Tachi Oiwa Motor Sports. As cited in the TOM'S English website, TOM'S was established in 1974 by Nobuhide Tachi and Kiyoshi Oiwa. Despite an oil crisis at the time, the two were able to show productive results and a healthy development of motorsports for Toyota. With the support of Toyota, TOM'S went into business in 1974.

In 1975 the Toyota Motor Corporation officially recognized TOM'S as an authorized tuning shop. In 1978, the firm opened a garage in the Tama area of Tokyo. The tuning firm expanded to Norfolk, England with branch openings in 1987.

Uncle Tom is the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The phrase "Uncle Tom" has also become an epithet for a person who is slavish and excessively subservient to perceived authority figures, particularly a black person who behaves in a subservient manner to white people; or any person perceived to be a participant in the oppression of their own group.

At the time of the novel's initial publication in 1851 Uncle Tom was a rejection of the existing stereotypes of minstrel shows; Stowe's melodramatic story humanized the suffering of slavery for White audiences by portraying Tom as a Christlike figure who is ultimately martyred, beaten to death by a cruel master because Tom refuses to betray the whereabouts of two women who escape from slavery. Stowe reversed the gender conventions of slave narratives by juxtaposing Uncle Tom's passivity against the daring of three African American women who escape from slavery.

The novel was both influential and commercially successful, published as a serial from 1851-1852 and as a book from 1852 onward. An estimated 500,000 copies had sold worldwide by 1853, including unauthorized reprints. Senator Charles Sumner credited Uncle Tom's Cabin for the election of Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln himself reportedly quipped that Stowe had triggered the American Civil War.Frederick Douglass praised the novel as "a flash to light a million camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery". Despite Douglass's enthusiasm, an anonymous 1852 reviewer for William Lloyd Garrison's publication The Liberator suspected a racial double standard in the idealization of Uncle Tom: