Corporate origin
An aircraft company built your Outback.
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.
The plane-maker that wasn't allowed to make planes
Nakajima Aircraft Company built military aircraft through the Second World War. Japan's surrender ended that overnight — occupation policy dissolved the company into a scatter of successor firms forbidden from aviation. Several of them found their way back together in 1953 as Fuji Heavy Industries, and in 1958 that survivor did the one thing its ancestor never could in peacetime: it built a car, the Subaru 360, and gave the whole enterprise a new name. The lineage runs backwards from every Subaru on the road — not a car company that later dabbled in planes, but a grounded plane-maker that had to become something else to survive.
Count the stars
"Subaru" is the Japanese name for the Pleiades, the star cluster you can pick out with the naked eye — and the six-star badge is usually explained as the companies that merged to make Fuji Heavy Industries. The arithmetic looked wrong for years: five named companies founded FHI in 1953, not six. Two independent Japanese-language corporate histories finally close the gap the same way — company president Kenji Kita reportedly likened the five predecessor firms *and* Fuji Heavy Industries itself, the union they'd formed, to the six-star cluster. Five parents plus the child they made together, not six equal partners. It's a strongly-supported reading now, from two sources that didn't copy each other — just not yet a sentence FHI itself ever put on paper.
New partners, same constellation
General Motors bought a minority stake in Fuji Heavy Industries around 1999 and sold it by 2005. Toyota stepped into the empty chair, became the strategic-alliance partner, and remains the largest outside shareholder today. In 2017 the parent company finally stopped hiding behind an industrial name and took the badge's own: Fuji Heavy Industries became Subaru Corporation. The car had named the company that made it.