First president and CEO, Fuji Heavy Industries · Disputed — either 1909–1999 or 1893–1956 (see below)
Kenji Kita
Led the formation of Fuji Heavy Industries in 1953 and is credited with personally choosing the name "Subaru" — Japan's name for the Pleiades star cluster — for the automobile brand FHI launched in 1958. A 2026 follow-up pass found that his own life story is more than thinly sourced — it's genuinely contested between two irreconcilable biographies.
“The president who named a car company after a star cluster — and who, depending which source you trust, either died in 1999 at 90 or in 1956 at 62.”
Two biographies, one job title
This project's original corpus carried one Kenji Kita: born 1909 in Kanagawa Prefecture, career described only as "intertwined with Japan's industrial boom in heavy industries," and — per a Japanese-language search synthesis — having "worked within the Nakajima Aircraft Company during World War II" before helping form FHI from Nakajima's remnants. That account traces to an unattributed English-language blog. A 2026-07-24 pass directly fetched a Japanese Wikipedia biographical stub, titled 北謙治, that names the same job and the same 1953 starting point but describes a different life entirely: born 22 August 1893 in Hiroshima City; a 1916 graduate of Tokyo Imperial University's Department of Economics; a career banker at the Industrial Bank of Japan (日本興業銀行) from 1916 until his 1945 retirement; a subsequent standing auditor at Sanyo Pulp; appointed FHI president in June 1953; died in office 25 July 1956, aged 62, of a cerebral hemorrhage. This version cites two named archival sources — a 1953 personnel directory (人事興信録) and a same-day 1956 Yomiuri Shimbun obituary — a materially stronger citation basis than the blog. Wikidata's own entry for Kita independently carries the 1893/1956 dates, though it notes they were imported from this same Wikipedia article rather than separately verified.
Why both stay on the record
The 1953-presidency start date matches across every source regardless of which birth/death pair is used, which is exactly why this is treated as a genuine dispute about one man rather than two different people who happened to hold the same job. The Wikipedia stub's sourcing — a contemporaneous personnel directory plus a same-day obituary — is a fundamentally stronger kind of evidence than the blog's unattributed narrative, and it more likely reflects a real person's real life. But no one on this project has personally examined either underlying archival document, and neither account's original author is known. Per this project's disputed-claim convention, both versions are preserved side by side rather than one silently overwriting the other. If the banker biography holds, it also resolves the old "worked at Nakajima Aircraft" claim about Kita's pre-FHI career as the weaker of two competing stories, not a settled answer either way — his actual pre-FHI life was banking, not aviation.
Naming Subaru before Subaru existed
Whichever biography is correct, the naming story itself now rests on firmer ground: a direct fetch of the Japanese Wikipedia article on the Subaru 1500 states, in its own words, that Kita "likened the five former Nakajima-Aircraft-lineage companies and the Fuji Heavy Industries formed by their union to the six-linked-star (六連星, mutsuraboshi) Pleiades cluster, and personally named it 'Subaru'" — after rejecting internally submitted proposals including "Bando Taro," "Panther," and "Phoenix." The name was first applied to the Subaru 1500 prototype (development code P-1), four years before the 360 carried it to market. A second, independently-worded source (GAZOO.com's corporate-history column) reaches the identical "five predecessors plus FHI itself equal six" conclusion — the strongest reading yet of the six-star logo, though still not an FHI primary statement.
The man behind the name is still nearly missing
Under either account, almost nothing else about him survives outside these contested biographical sketches — no diaries, no interviews, no named subordinates. No rights-clear portrait photo of Kita has been found; repeated Wikimedia Commons searches under both his name and its Japanese spelling (北謙治) returned no relevant results, and Wikidata's own image property for him is unset.