Naming story
The president who named a car company after six stars he could see with his own eyes.
FHI's founding president Kenji Kita is credited with personally choosing "Subaru" — Japan's name for the Pleiades star cluster — for the automobile brand launched with the 1958 360, after rejecting other proposed names. His own pre-FHI career remains almost entirely undocumented even after dedicated follow-up research, and the exact reasoning behind the six-star logo is a related but separate, still-unresolved thread (see the "An aircraft company built your Outback" story for that discrepancy in full).
Rejected names, one chosen
Kita reportedly rejected internally submitted proposals including "Bando Taro," "Panther," and "Phoenix" before choosing "Subaru" — insisting, per a secondary retrospective rather than an FHI primary document, that "a Japanese car should have a Japanese name."
A name possibly older than the brand
A richer version of the naming story, reached only via search-tool synthesis of Subaru's own corporate community materials and not a verified direct read, holds that "Subaru" was first applied four years earlier to the Subaru 1500 prototype (development code P-1) — meaning the name may predate the brand it eventually named by roughly half a decade.
A near-blank biography and one uninvestigated proximity
Kita's career before FHI is poorly documented: the best sourcing available says only that he "worked within the Nakajima Aircraft Company during World War II," with no role, department, or rank ever named. He died 13 October 1999 — 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 despite repeated Wikimedia Commons searches.