The president who named a company after six stars overhead.

The names he threw out

Before "Subaru," the internal list reportedly included "Bando Taro," "Panther" and "Phoenix." Kita is said to have rejected them on a principle as much as a preference — that a Japanese car should carry a Japanese name — and reached instead for the everyday Japanese word for the Pleiades. The choice first landed not on the 360, but four years earlier, on the Subaru 1500 prototype (development code P-1) — the word was waiting in a workshop half a decade before it became the thing every owner now says out loud.

Two men named Kenji Kita

Here's the twist: the corpus this site was built from carried one Kenji Kita — born 1909, died 13 October 1999 at 90, sourced to an unattributed blog that placed him "working within the Nakajima Aircraft Company during the war." A direct read of a Japanese Wikipedia biography, citing a 1953 personnel directory and a same-day 1956 newspaper obituary, describes a different man entirely: born 1893 in Hiroshima, a career banker at the Industrial Bank of Japan from 1916 until 1945, then a pulp-company auditor, who became FHI's first president in June 1953 and died in office in July 1956 — at 62, not 90, and 43 years before the other account's date. Both men held the identical job, the identical 1953 starting point, the identical naming credit. We can't tell you which biography is Kita and which is a mistake that calcified into fact — so both stay on the record, side by side, rather than one quietly erasing the other.

The man behind the name is still nearly missing

Whichever version is correct, almost nothing else about him survives outside that one contested biography — no diaries, no interviews, no named subordinates recalling him. And no rights-clear portrait of him has turned up despite dedicated searches under both his name and its Japanese spelling. A man who named a company that outlived him by decades, and the company can't even agree with itself on when he died.