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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.

In 1945 the company that would become Subaru wasn't allowed to build anything. Nakajima Aircraft had spent the war making military planes; the occupation broke it apart. What reassembled in 1953 put a constellation on the hood of its first car — and the count behind that constellation turned out to be a small arithmetic trick, not a mystery.

Fuji Heavy Industries had a car and no name for it. Its president, Kenji Kita, looked at the proposals on the table — "Panther," "Phoenix" — and threw them out in favor of the cluster of stars overhead: Subaru, the Pleiades. It's the rare corporate-naming story with a clear author. It's also, it turns out, a story where two sources can't agree who that author actually was.