Shooting for the stars is in our name.
The origin of the Subaru name and logo dates back to the 1950s, when Kenji Kita was the first president of Subaru Corporation, formerly known as Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. Mr. Kita was passionate about one thing: producing passenger cars. And so, in 1954, we did just that. We produced our first passenger prototype, the P-1.
Mr. Kita was adamant that, "Japanese cars should have Japanese names." After several name proposals, Mr. Kita named it "Subaru," a beautiful Japanese name taken from the name of the star cluster in the Taurus constellation. Only six of its stars are visible to the naked eye, but about 250 bluish stars can be seen by telescope. In the West, that same cluster is called Pleiades. In China, Mao. In Japan, Subaru, which means to govern, gather together, or unite. In Japan, it also goes by the name Mutsuraboshi, translating to "Six Stars", which often appears in very old Japanese documents such as the Kojiki and Manyoshu, and literature such as Makura-no-soshi. It's clear that this constellation was well-loved in Japan in ancient times. Fittingly enough, Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd. was formed by the merger of six companies. From that moment on, the new corporation adopted the "Subaru" cluster of stars as the official logo for its line of cars.
