Why Tokai?
In the '70s, both Fender and Gibson made drastic changes to most of their flagship guitars. When people asked for reissues of Les Pauls and Flying V's and Explorers, Gibson basically told people "those models were sales failures (that's why we stopped making them) and you don't really want reproductions, we know better than that -- what you really want are 15 pound Les Pauls with pancake bodies, bigger heads, shallower head angles, simpler top carve, short tenons, 3-piece necks with volutes, and fat binding in the cutaway".
Fender never disowned Strats and Teles, but they too had tunnel vision. They were so sure that heavy Northern Ash bodies, Mazak (zinc) bridges & saddles, 3-bolt necks and Bullet truss rods were "improvements" that they didn't see any need to offer a traditional Strat. They figured they made changes in the mid '60s and sales and profits went up, so the same thing would happen when they made another round of "improvements".
Gibson dropped the original run of Les Pauls in '61 and when Norlin bought the company the Les Pauls they produced in the '70s were basically a different model that were somewhat similar in appearance to the originals. Fender had dropped ash Strats in the mid '50s, dropped one-piece necks in mid'59 and switched to rosewood fretboards (optional maple cap necks were rare special orders), and then when CBS bought the company they dropped the small head in '65/'66, dropped nitro in '67, and dropped the 4-bolt heel-adjust neck and the steel bridge in '72. And despite customers and dealers begging for "ones like they used to make", they sold every new-spec guitar they could make so they saw no reason to fill what they thought would be a tiny niche market.
But then Tokai, Greco, Burny and others saw an opportunity. Instead of making copies of the guitars CBS and Norlin were currently making, why not make the original Fender and Gibson designs that the new owners of those companies had abandoned? They interpreted those designs as having become public domain due to non-use/non-protection by their original owners, and there's no clear cut answer whether that's a correct interpretation -- some courts agree, some disagree.
And even when the replicas sold well in the Japanese market (the second largest guitar market in the world) despite the fact that many cost just as much (or more) than new Gibsons or Fenders, Norlin and CBS ignored the trend. When the Japanese replicas began to make inroads into the US, Norlin and CBS didn't respond by making replicas of their own and slugging it out in the marketplace -- they took it to court to deny entry of those guitars into the US. They didn't just abandon those US consumers who wanted '50s replicas by refusing to make replicas -- they prevented those consumers from acquiring the replicas they refused to make.
In the late '70s, a few dealers commissioned special custom runs of replicas from Gibson. Leo's, Jimmy Wallace, and Guitar Trader ordered '59 replicas but Norlin dragged their feet. They were willing to do 1-piece mahogany necks (instead of their concurrent 3-piece maple Les Paul necks), but the first batches still had short tenons and shallow carves. Guitar Trader got so frustrated with the hardware that they started replacing the bridge, tailpiece, and tuners with Japanese parts. (The Japanese companies were putting original spec aluminum stopbars and wireless ABR's on their high end guitars back in '78 -- Gibson didn't re-adopt aluminum stopbars until the late '90s.) And then after they had cobbled together about a thousand "kinda sorta almost replicas" they stopped. During the '80s they played around with some even less accurate "reissues", but it wasn't until Norlin sold the name to Henry J and the eventual introduction of the Historic series that they finally offered something as accurate as the Japanese models.
Fender wouldn't even entertain the notion of "reissues" until early/mid '80s. But to their credit, when FMIC bought the Fender name from CBS they immediately jumped into the replica model. The new management studied the Japanese guitars rather than ignore them. Still, it took them until '97 to get the 12th fret inlay spacing correct on their reissues.
In my opinion, Tokai et al rescued Strats, Teles, Les Pauls, Explorers, SGs, Flying Vs from the disastrous direction the previous owners of those names had been taking them, both in design vision and build quality. I'll always remember the bitterness I felt towards Gibson and Fender in the '70s and early '80s. I applaud the current owners of the Fender and Gibson names for finally doing what the previous owners should have been doing back in the '70s and '80s, but the Japanese did replicas first, and also offered updated, "modernized" versions that had a better grasp of what had made those designs classic. Bill Smith, who led the FMIC buyout of Fender, credits the Japanese replicas as inspiring FMIC's direction. To me, the late '70s/early '80s Japanese Strats are almost as important a part of Strat history as the original '50s Strats -- a beacon that lit the way to a rebirth, a purification of the original design that had become corrupted by the corporation that owned the Fender brand name. I wouldn't see your '84 Tokai as anything other than a real Strat -- I'd be proud to own one of the guitars that inspired the Fender brand to improve their products.
As to whether you should buy a Tokai 335 instead of an Aria, I have no opinion.
That turned out longer than I intended -- sorry.
