First president and CEO, Fuji Heavy Industries · 1909–1999
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. His own pre-FHI career remains one of this project's thinnest-sourced biographical gaps.
“The president who named a car company after a star cluster — and whose own life before that moment is almost entirely undocumented.”
A thin pre-FHI record
Born 1909 in Kanagawa Prefecture. His career before Fuji Heavy Industries is poorly documented even after dedicated follow-up research: the original secondary retrospective describes a career "intertwined with Japan's industrial boom in heavy industries" without naming any employer, and a Japanese-language search-tool synthesis adds only that he "worked within the Nakajima Aircraft Company during World War II" before helping form FHI from Nakajima's remnants — plausible given FHI's direct Nakajima lineage, but with no specific role, department, or rank ever named for him. A targeted Japanese-language search for his pre-1953 career returned no results. This remains the single most important open biographical gap for Kita.
Naming Subaru before Subaru existed
Kita led the formation of FHI on 15 July 1953 and served as its first president and CEO — reportedly from 1953 to 1956, per one Japanese-language search synthesis not corroborated in the original English-language sourcing. He is credited with personally choosing "Subaru" for the new automobile brand launched with the 1958 Subaru 360, after rejecting internally submitted proposals including "Bando Taro," "Panther," and "Phoenix." A richer version of the story, via search-tool synthesis of Subaru's own corporate community materials, holds that the name "Subaru" was first applied four years earlier to the Subaru 1500 prototype (development code P-1) — meaning the name predates the brand it eventually named by roughly half a decade. A direct fetch of the primary Subaru source repeated this failed (HTTP 404) on multiple attempts, so this richer naming story is recorded via search-tool synthesis only, not a verified direct read.
Six stars, five (or six) companies
"Subaru" (すばる) names the Pleiades open star cluster in Taurus, visible to the naked eye as six or seven stars but resolving to roughly 250 blue-white stars through a telescope — known in Japanese by the alternate name 六連星 (mutsuraboshi, "six linked stars"). The six-star logo is commonly explained, by this same synthesis and independently by the original secondary source, as also representing the companies that merged to form FHI. A second, partially independent thread states explicitly "six companies," which somewhat strengthens that reading against Wikipedia's own named list of five merging companies — but because the primary Subaru source could not be directly verified, this remains an open conflict rather than a resolved fact. See the related story on this exact conflict rather than treating it as settled here.
Death, and an uninvestigated proximity
Kita died 13 October 1999, aged 90 — approximately six weeks before FHI's first press mentions of the incoming General Motors alliance, an interesting but so-far uninvestigated proximity in timing. No rights-clear portrait photo of Kita has been found; repeated Wikimedia Commons searches, with and without a "Subaru" qualifier, returned no relevant results.