AFAIK - The city is not a compact car - rather, it's a sub-compact car, which is a size category that is below compact cars.
The city as well as the civic up to the 6th generation are all considered sub-compact cars. The civic moved one notch higher with the 7th gen [2001 onwards prosmatec] - The next sizes are medium cars, such as the Accord up to 2008 - the 2008 model and above managed to increase the size just enough to be considered full a full size car -
Side note: most best selling full sized car brands hail from Germany and America rather than Japan