Thanks, Kevin! While it's entirely possible that these are from Japan and/or 1960s, the mark is different from any of those I've found via that link and the other links it points to (though thx for posting it), so I'm still not sure. The quality of these figurines seems to be better than the other Japanese repros I'm finding...gold is thick and isn't wearing or fading, porcelain and glaze look & feel of good quality with no crazing, and the bottom marks are all slightly different indicative of being hand painted and not printed fakes. The figures themselves don't have some of the crude styling details found in a lot of the low end repro pieces.
I know I've seen that A with the crossed swords over it on various porcelain marks websites but suddenly I'm at a loss for finding most of them...