Founder, Nakajima Aircraft Company · 1884–1949
Chikuhei Nakajima
A former Imperial Japanese Navy officer and early licensed aviator who founded the aircraft manufacturer whose postwar dissolution and reorganization eventually produced Fuji Heavy Industries — the company that launched the Subaru brand nine years after his death. Not an automotive figure himself; the actual origin story SubaruFacts exists to preserve.
“The aviator and cabinet minister whose dissolved aircraft company became, a decade after his death, the corporate ancestor of a car brand named for the stars.”
Aviator before politician
Born 1 January 1884 in Nitta District, Gunma Prefecture, to a farming family. He graduated the Imperial Japanese Naval Engineering School's 15th class in 1907, was promoted to ensign in 1908, and piloted Japan's first airship on 27 October 1911. He trained at a flight school established by Glenn Curtiss in the United States, reportedly becoming the third Japanese national to receive a pilot's license through that program. In 1917 he resigned his Navy lieutenancy and founded an aircraft manufacturer in his hometown of Ōta, Gunma — initially a partnership with fellow engineer Seibei Kawanishi. The partnership split in 1919, and the firm continued on its own as the Nakajima Aircraft Company, which grew into one of Japan's two largest aircraft manufacturers by World War II.
A parallel career in government
Nakajima was elected to the Diet's Lower House in 1930 and served as Railway Minister from June 1937 to January 1939 under Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe. In the short-lived Higashikuni cabinet formed immediately after Japan's surrender (17 August–9 October 1945), he briefly held cabinet posts as Minister of Munitions and then Minister of Commerce and Industry.
Dissolution, arrest, and a car company he never saw
After Japan's surrender, occupation policy banned aircraft production outright and forced Nakajima Aircraft to close. Nakajima was arrested along with other former government officials and held at Sugamo Prison, then released on parole in 1947 before any war-crimes trial proceeded against him personally. He died 29 October 1949 in Mitaka, Tokyo, of an intracranial hemorrhage, and is buried at Tama Cemetery in Fuchū, Tokyo — four years before Fuji Heavy Industries was even formed from his company's successor firms, and nine years before FHI introduced the Subaru brand with the 1958 Subaru 360. Market scope: this entire biography is Japan-only and entirely pre-automotive.